My favorite driver story features a young man who was tall, very handsome, well muscled, and tattooed. Most of the time he wore a torn sleeveless T-shirt, even when it was cold outside. He was, at heart, a very gentle person in spite of his tough appearance. When he wasn’t making deliveries, I used to have him drive me around to my sales appointments in the city. He had this knack of maneuvering behind emergency vehicles and then speeding along when all the other traffic was stopped along the sides of the street. I would slide down in my seat with my hands covering my eyes, but I didn’t stop him from doing it because, I must admit, I was able to make more than twice as many stops as I did when driving myself around. I was able to make at least ten sales calls on the days when he drove me around, and he was also good company. One time we stopped for lunch at one of our customers’ establishments. Once we sat down, I noticed that half a dozen women from my neighborhood who knew me from my former life were seated nearby, and all of them were staring at me with this hunk with decidedly dropped jaws. All I did was smile and wave, happy to give them something to gossip about.
Then there was Jimmy (not the baker), another driver who used one of our trucks to go out on dates because he didn’t have a car of his own. He also used it to go upstate with his father to pick up a load of Christmas trees during the holidays—only he never asked permission.
On occasion we found ourselves bailing one or two of our drivers out of jail. Nothing too heavy, all minor stuff, but we were all part of the Love and Quiches family, and I felt responsible for them all! We always gave our employees the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, saying, jokingly, that you had to practically be a murderer to get fired from Love and Quiches. Of course, now we hold our employees to another standard, but in those days, we were all learning together and things were quite a bit more casual.
But what we still didn’t know could fill volumes. I remember so very clearly that workers were smoking on the production floor! I have never smoked, but almost all young people at that time did. It was cool to smoke, and I didn’t know enough at first to stop them. And we would keep the doors open on hot days, another great sin. This was obviously before stricter rules became the protocol. Yet we were getting regular unannounced audits from the New York State Department of Agriculture, and we always got good scores. It is hard to fathom how we could have been so ignorant of how things should have been done, given how we operate today. Now we spend as much time cleaning and sanitizing as we do producing, with the production areas all separated from outside areas with curtains, doors, and anterooms. I am grateful that my instincts finally took over, and I put a stop to what had been going on.
Our accounts now numbered more than 250, and we were holding on to them because our quality stayed high—in spite of everything just confessed—and our service, finally, had become quite good and reliable. Our reputation as a high-end supplier was growing.
Restaurant managers all over the city unselfishly shared their secrets, so a lot of them helped me grow the company by spreading the word about our products. I admit that I was beginning to have a lot of fun selling despite its grueling aspects. I was meeting tons of people and becoming an accepted member of the restaurant/supplier community. Our minimum order was only $50; needless to say, we had to make a lot of deliveries. Our only out-of-town account was still Bamberger’s, and it was serviced through our one and only distributor.
Our primary product line remained quiche, though the dessert line would surpass it in volume within a few years. To our foodservice customers, we offered quiches already baked, no longer frozen raw. We had quite a few sizes of quiche in at least fifteen varieties, from the usual broccoli, spinach, and Lorraine to asparagus, artichoke, and smoked salmon. Our dessert offerings grew with the addition of Black Forest Cake, German Chocolate Cake, Lemon Raspberry Cake, and other cake varieties. I now see that we had too many varieties in our lines given our setup at the time; we hadn’t yet learned about “product rationalization,” whereby products are analyzed by comparative sales and the slower movers are eliminated.
Our base of supermarket customers was growing, too. Shortly after the move to Oceanside, we managed to complete a sale to a group of markets called Mel Weitz’s Foodtown—about fifteen stores, our first supermarket sale since the Windmill. We were also selling our quiches to Waldbaum’s (now part of A&P), partly because Mrs. Waldbaum had been one of our customers from as far back as my garage days.
Sadly, though, I got a phone call from Ira Waldbaum himself one day to inform me that they were dropping our product line. He explained that retailing was a different animal, one that required extensive marketing dollars (which we did not have), and he apologized more than once during our conversation. (Actually, we didn’t care about losing the account that much. Our deliveries to their hectic warehouse were always an ordeal; our little trucks were dwarfed by the tractor trailers all lined up. Our drivers cheered when they heard the news!)
As we got settled into our new home, we felt secure in our growing number of customers. But very quickly I realized that I would really have to hit the road selling if we wanted to keep it up. It was becoming increasingly apparent that we weren’t the only ones out there. We had competition, and plenty of it.
Enter the Competition
Our core business was still comprised of restaurant accounts, so I spent most of my time selling in that arena. But I was not alone. By now several other companies had entered the scene, including companies dedicated to quiche and others that just sold desserts. There was Quiche and Tell, Food Gems, and Miss Grimble. (This last one is still around, I think, after several changes in ownership. The original owner was a woman named Sylvia Hirsch, and I clearly remember the scandalous story of how she sued her daughter for publishing some of their recipes in a cookbook without permission.) There was also Umanoff & Parsons and Country Epicure (sold early on to a Japanese croissant company Vie de France). There were others, but these are the ones with whom we constantly found ourselves going head to head while still in the local arena.
The original founder of Food Gems, a quiche company that has gone through ownership and name changes, used to actually follow our trucks. He would wait outside while our driver made the delivery, and then he would wave to the driver and laugh as he headed inside with a sample in his hand. This went on for quite a while. Needless to say, our drivers weren’t too happy about this and explained to him exactly what they were likely to do if he didn’t stop following them. We received a letter shortly thereafter accusing us of “hooliganism” of all things! Nothing ever came of it; he finally stopped because our drivers were big guys, and I guess he weighed the risk/reward factor.
Competition from other dessert companies located all over the country also grew and kept us on our toes. This never changed, and the battle continues. It took a while, but I eventually learned from all of this that there is enough business to go around if you stay calm and focus on what you do best.
New York Stories
Deep down in my heart of hearts, this will always be a New York story, even though for most of its life Love and Quiches has been a national, and, ultimately, a global supplier of bakery products. After all, we honed our skills supplying quiches and desserts to many hundreds of foodservice establishments in the New York metro area.
At this juncture, we also joined a few industry organizations, including the New York State Restaurant Association and the Eastern Dairy Deli Association. Joining the former brought us quite a few steps ahead because I showed up at all of the meetings, even board meetings. (I wasn’t on the board; I simply didn’t know any better.) Even after I realized my mistake, they asked me to stay. As a result, I met many more restaurateurs, among them Vincent Sardi of the iconic Sardi’s, so well known for its star power if not for its food, and Stuart Levin, who owned Top of the Park atop the Gulf and Western Building, which is now the Trump International Hotel on Columbus Circle and houses my favorite haute cuisine restaurant, Jean Georges. Stuart Levin became another clo
se friend and mentor. Love and Quiches also exhibited for the first time in the New York State Restaurant Show in 1978. We were slowly making a name for ourselves with the New York power players within the foodservice industry.
One such player was the owner of Proof of the Pudding, which closed its doors owing me $700. About that same time he opened the very exclusive Palace restaurant in an exclusive apartment building on 59th Street overlooking the East River. There, well ahead of his time, he invented the hundreds-of-dollars-per-person dinner. He honored his debt to me with a due bill to the Palace, and Irwin and I enjoyed a spectacular meal on the house!
My best New York story is the “Taste of the Big Apple,” a major event held in Central Park in 1976 that was organized as a fundraising event by the New York State Restaurant Association. Nearly a hundred restaurants and suppliers set up booths, and, incredibly, hundreds of thousands of people showed up, many more than we had bargained for. The association sold script at the event entrance, with 25 percent of the revenue promised back to the vendors so we could cover our costs. We were to hand in our collected script at the end of the day.
We sold about five thousand slices of quiche before we ran out, and then we started selling our decorations: fruit, hunks of cheese, chopped chocolate, hard-boiled eggs, bowls filled with nuts, rolling pins, whisks, and the like, until our booth was completely denuded. The association had run out of script, yet one lady insisted that we sell her our very last apple for cash. We told her we absolutely could not; it was against the rules. Suddenly she hit Irwin on the head with her pocketbook, grabbed the apple, and ran! Although we were all really tired and out of patience, we chased her and took back the apple just on principle.
Molly Ivins, a prominent columnist and New York Times bureau chief at the time, wrote up the successful event, and to our surprise, we were mentioned among very good company. Love and Quiches was even singled out ahead of quite a few other popular venues, including Sardi’s, the Grand Central Oyster Bar, and Benihana. And we all made a mess of the park. Though hundreds of Hare Krishna volunteers had it cleaned by the very next morning, the city would never allow us to hold another festival.
Within the next year or so, as we continued along our journey, new areas of growth presented themselves. I was knocking on doors everywhere and not confining my efforts just to restaurants. I went to hospitals, universities, caterers, gourmet shops, and corporate feeders—the people who fed the employees within the gigantic skyscrapers. I even went to the UN, where I just called for an appointment and handled it no differently than I would a pub on Third Avenue, except for the intense security checks required just to enter the building, which included opening every sample cake box. (They eventually recognized me and would let me walk right in.) The UN had a lot of dining venues and did a lot of catering, as you can well imagine. They turned out to be a very good customer, both for our quiches and our desserts. I was never shy to knock on any door that was in my path, though it took a while to learn how to gear my sales pitch to the venue I was targeting.
Airline Stories
One of our biggest and most exciting areas of Love and Quiches’ growth was in the airline industry. JFK was on my route to and from Manhattan, and one day I decided to go in and knock on some doors. All those passengers had to eat—why not our quiches and desserts? I made my way to the hangars on the periphery of the airport and spotted a Marriott sign on one of the doors. Marriott used to be an in-flight food caterer that prepared meals to be served on planes, along with all the other things for which they are now known. They provided this service at La Guardia and Newark airports as well. At the time, airline catering was Marriott’s largest division, with facilities across the country. Once again, I made a sale. My original buyer at that facility, now an old friend, thinks that Marriott had actually started buying from us in a small way while Bonne Femme was still in my garage, but I think that story is apocryphal!
This was the beginning of a new area of growth for the company, and we continue to supply many major domestic and international airlines with our products. Now the strength of the entire organization is behind such sales, but back then it was limited to those airports that we could get to with our own trucks.
One airline we started selling to was People Express, a start-up that originated the first New York–to-Boston or -Washington shuttle. We sold them our first single-portion individually wrapped products, as a matter of fact. The products were fruit and veggie loaves, and included such varieties as Zucchini Bread, Banana Bread, and Carrot Bread, all of which we sliced and wrapped in cellophane. True to form, we did not yet possess the equipment to do this when we first made the sale—yet another example of the cart before the horse—but we fixed that situation pretty quickly. We had to; our first orders were already in-house! All we needed was a bread slicer and a small wrapping machine, readily available with so many equipment suppliers in our area. We went on to supply the various New York/Boston/Washington shuttles with these prewrapped slices for very many years, until they stopped giving them away to the passengers.
In those days we supplied many airlines that no longer exist—Eastern Airlines, Ozark Airlines, Pan American, and Braniff among them. The executive chefs of these airlines were extremely sophisticated, having worked in the best restaurants and hotels worldwide. (Two of these chefs became my mentors as well.) Within a year of entering the airline sector, we had our first airline distributor—a special breed that exclusively supplied airline-catering kitchens nationwide—to distribute our People Express products to Washington and Boston so that they would be available on the return flights to New York. This opened the possibility of expanding our airline customers across the country.
Best of all, passengers on these various flights seemed to love our product. At one point, Swiss Air accused us of using sugar in our quiche crust without listing it on the label, citing the fact that it tasted too good. It took some work to convince them otherwise. We have an entire archive of airline fan mail that we’ve collected over the decades, and these letters, many of them handwritten (this was pre-Internet, remember), never cease to bring a smile to my face.
Past the Million-Dollar Mark
By 1978 we had grown to more than $1 million in volume.* We were now servicing about 275 restaurants, and I finally got my first help with sales, a tennis friend, Elaine, from the days when I still had time for tennis.
Our new freezer trucks were a good source of advertising for us because they were all over the place all week long; plenty of restaurants called us after noticing them while our drivers were making deliveries. Once, by sheer serendipity, we made the cover of one of the trade magazines (see photo). We kept our drivers even busier once Elaine started working—first two days a week, then three, then full time. She scanned the trade and local papers for leads, made cold calls on the phone, fed me leads, and also went out on sales calls.
We also began to hire, one at a time, a rogues’ gallery of salespeople who quite simply could not sell. Among them were a former fish salesman, a muffin salesman, and even some people who had worked for our competitors, all without success. I guess that is why they no longer worked for our competitors! We obviously had not yet honed our hiring skills.
Many of our decisions were still shot from the hip, but one by one we started to correct them, learning what not to do when running a business. Above all, we tried not to take the missteps too seriously and not to allow ourselves to be discouraged.
On the plus side, we continued to pick up some of the larger food-service accounts in the city, including one of the most prominent athletic clubs. One particular club had a tradition of supplying its members with larger-than-life twelve-inch double-crust mincemeat pies during the holiday season. The pies were specially packaged and mailed all over the country as gifts. The club had reached the point where it could no longer bake the pies in-house—it needed about fourteen thousand every year—and we were happy to take on the job. Each top crust was rolled by hand and decorated with a �
�flying foot” logo stamped out in pastry. The customer gave us the mold of its flying foot for safekeeping since it was the only one in existence. Like clockwork, every year we’d lose it and would be panic-stricken until the precious mold was located in our shop. We eventually gave up this athletic club as a customer due to the lack of fit: all those mincemeat pies had to be delivered fresh, but we were a frozen food supplier, so every December we wrestled with a logistical nightmare. Our lesson here was that if the fit isn’t there, walk away. (I do believe we still have that flying foot someplace.)
Ever learning, we started offering products with price points at more than one level, enabling us to reach more potential customers. To accomplish this, we employed a simple strategy: use the same top-quality cake layers and frosting, but with varying amounts or types of decorations, less elaborate garnishes, a varied number of layers, and so on. In this way we could offer a simpler or less weighty cake, for example, to caterers and institutions that sold desserts as part of a buffet rather than by the slice at à la carte prices. It also resulted in extremely effective and seamless line extensions for our products.
Jimmy the Baker had his hands full, so the product development still fell on me for the most part. But I was rapidly losing my moxie in that department. My talents were more for cooking than for baking, so the process was rather painful, although I managed to come up with some good ideas and recipes that Jimmy then either vetoed or perfected. I was quite bogged down by it all, but I managed to pull off what needed doing, as usual.
With Love and Quiches Page 7