Bales Marketplace plans new offerings to make your life easier and tastier!

Providing great food seems to run in the Miller family. Mark Miller is the president of Signature Northwest, the company that owns the Bales Thriftway stores. His brother Barry has worked in the restaurant business since he began waiting tables in college, where he studied culinary arts and management. He began as an intern at Pacific Coast Restaurants in 2003, and continued with them after they were bought by Seattle-based Reestaurants Unlimited in 2007. The combined company's local holdings include Hentry's Tavern, Newport Bay, and Stanford's.

Now he's bringing all that experience back home to the deli and prepared food department at Bales Thriftway. "We have been providing some great food from our deli. One of my goals is to make the product more consistent over time and among our locations. If you come in for Bales' own potato salad, we want you to get the same great flavor every time," he says. He'll be compiling recipes and menu books for use among the deli cooks at the Cedar Mill and Farmington locations.

"We sell a lot of sandwiches, made from our own baked-from-scratch breads. They will be bigger, with six ounces of fresh-sliced Boar's Head meat, and our own flavored spreads, like roasted garlic and shallot mayo, and cream cheese and cranberry mint spread," he says. And yes, you can still get a half-sandwich if your appetite's not that big!

They have discontinued the Chinese food. Instead, they'll be serving lunches based on daily themes including Mexican, Italian, fresh-from-the-smoker barbecue sandwiches, and premium house-made hot dogs. They will also be serving two house-made soups daily along with Bales' own chicken chili. You can get your soup in one of their bread bowls, or take home a container of soup and some bread bowls for a hearty family meal.

He'll be working with the meat department to offer a greater variety of house-made sausages, and with the other store departments to implement these changes.

"We want people to know that Bales is the store where they can get extraordinary food products from around the world, and also get their staple items at regular prices," he notes. For example, he's featuring a fancy Italian honey near the bakery, but shoppers also know that they can get Western Family brands over on aisle six.

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