With Love and Quiches

by Susan Axelrod

  We also started offering pre-cut cakes at this time for an additional fifty cents per cake. This was long before we had automatic cutting equipment like we do today, yet we managed, in Rube Goldberg fashion, to create some cutting tools that were quite effective. Using rods with handles and attaching pizza-cutting rollers spaced inches apart, we could cut our sheet cakes and brownies into twenty, thirty, or any other number of portions as needed. We also bought from a local company a rather ingenious device for pre-cutting round cakes into wedges; with it, we could pre-slice a cake in thirty seconds flat or faster.

  Hitting the Road

  In the late seventies we also made a sale or two to our first few out-of-town distributors. So, while hitting the road, I often chose to fly to my appointments. These were our first few forays outward, and they were dry runs for what came later. It was still only me selling, with Elaine helping, so I didn’t venture too far afield; New Jersey, Philadelphia, Delaware, and Connecticut were about as far as I went, but I had learned about the world of distributors from the meat and produce outfit that serviced Bamberger’s for us. I thought to myself: “Why not?” These distributors might be servicing five hundred customers, so they offered a lot more potential than my one-at-a-time search for new customers. Finding them was easy; by now I read the trade papers. We won our first few distributor customers this way.

  Okay, new plan. We set our sights higher. I had been in business for less than six years, but our growth would soon begin to form two distinct areas: local on our own trucks and out of town through a growing distributor business. The local activity eventually grew to be a business within what was rapidly becoming our real business until we moved to distributors exclusively.

  It was when we started exhibiting in some additional local trade shows that we first came to the attention of a few more distributors in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) than the first few I had originally gotten. For us this was a big leap from operating exclusively within the confines of the New York metro area.

  We still didn’t have much experience with distributors, but it occurred to us that the distributor sales force was, in a way, an extension of our own sales force, and it could help us increase our sales more quickly than we could do on our own. This was quite a revelation. We came to terms pretty quickly with the fact that we had to sell our products to the distributors at a discount in order for the products to land with the end user at a reasonable price. A whole new world opened to us! So I packed up my samples and hit the road with more of a plan. This time I was selling to the distributors, both farther north and south, and making sales calls with their sales forces to their best customers.

  Until the mid-1990s, when we gave up our trucks altogether, we could never snag the more prominent distributors in our own back-yard—they thought we were competing with them. They held this belief even though we were selling our quiches and desserts at the same prices, or higher, than they would have done. We could never convince them otherwise. So it became easier to sell our cakes through a distributor in North Carolina—and, now, even Russia—than it was in New York, a very vexing problem that took a very long time to cure. Par for the course; nothing comes without its challenges.

  As we started to have some success with our handful of new distributors, we widened our circle a bit, and approached distributors operating as far north as Boston, all the way down to the Carolinas, and places in between, like Maryland and Atlantic City. “We” still meant “me,” and some of the planes I flew on were very tiny and very rickety indeed.

  Rubbing Shoulders

  I suspected that word of mouth and advertising in a minor way in the small local papers was not enough. As was usually the case, we had no idea how we should go about promoting the company, and we had no spare cash to do any real advertising. It didn’t even occur to us to consider advertising in the trade publications on a very small level, which is where we should have looked in the first place. Mine was a business-to-business enterprise, but I didn’t know what that was yet.

  Nonetheless, in addition to our silly little ads with the funny one-liners that ran in the local papers, we did manage to attract some other media attention. I made an appearance once or twice on Channel 12 News, the local Long Island cable news station; they also aired a small two-minute piece they had filmed at our plant. Many of our products received favorable mention in various restaurant reviews, and we tried to capitalize on that wherever we could, although most restaurants wanted their customers to think their desserts were “house made.”

  One day I got a call from Barbara Rader, the chief restaurant critic for Newsday (the most prominent newspaper on Long Island). She was writing an article about prepared foods and asked if she could stop by. She had been a news journalist for most of her career, and admittedly she knew very little about food at the time. Hers was something like my story: I knew food but nothing about business; she knew nothing about food but could write! This was the beginning of our decades-long beautiful friendship. Irwin and I got to dine out with our new critic friend and her spouse, Tom Punch, at least once, sometimes twice, a week since eating out was now her full-time job, with Newsday picking up the tab. It actually was work, as we had to try to order almost everything on the menu without the restaurant realizing it was being reviewed, and many of the restaurants were not very good at all. We suffered through almost as many bad meals as good ones. This was still among my first brushes with networking, and I was enjoying myself.

  Love and Quiches was also drawing the attention of some of the giants in our industry. During the course of my long career, I have been privileged to be invited to tour some of the largest state-of-theart manufacturing facilities in the country. One such visit stands out because it came along so early in the game. One day a call came in to the Oceanside facility from Quaker Oats. They were considering adding quiche to their product line, and they wanted to discuss any mutual synergies that might exist. We couldn’t imagine what they really wanted. They couldn’t want to buy us—we were still so tiny there was nothing to buy!

  We were invited to visit their plant in Tennessee, where they produced Aunt Jemima French Toast and Celeste Pizza, two other brands under the Quaker Oats umbrella. This plant was more than five hundred thousand square feet in size—massive in comparison to our five thousand square feet. The tour we had given them of our plant took ten minutes; this one took all day.

  I saw a few things during that tour that I still remember vividly, thirty-five years later. First, the Celeste Pizzas were moving down the line almost too quickly for the eye to focus on, but as a result, a good portion of the toppings being sprinkled onto the pizzas from above were literally bouncing off the conveyor and landing all over the floor. It was a lesson in diminishing returns because of the inordinate waste, and I suggested they slow down the line. After a few moments of hesitation, during which they contemplated the simple logic of my suggestion—out of the mouths of babes—they actually thanked me and said they would consider it.

  Second, along the never-ending sea of French toast moving down the grilling line, there were at least a hundred of what looked like store-bought spatulas, attached at twelve-inch intervals, moving periodically, and in unison, to flip the toasts so the other side could brown. When I asked about these spatulas, I was told they were indeed bought in a local hardware store—ingenious and highly effective! They also found a way to waste an unseemly amount of packaging by ripping open and discarding the outer boxes after they deemed any products underweight or otherwise imperfect. In this case, I kept silent.

  The last vivid recollection I have of that memorable plant tour was when I inquired as to their most effective quality control systems. Taste testing is a vital step for any size food manufacturing business, and great fun. But Quaker told me that primarily they eat a pizza every day! Of course, obviously, they perform the many additional quality and safety checks and parameters dictated by good manufacturing practices, but taste testing is way up there for all
of us.

  Quaker Oats never did add quiche to their line, but that visit was another great chapter of my “on the job” training in the vast foodservice industry that my accidental business landed me in and that I truly love.

  Reality Sets in

  I was always working. It was relentless. My business had taken over my life, and fighting it would just have made things that much harder. But at least when I finally dragged myself home at night, Bridget had dinner ready (one of her creations, much to my chagrin, was lamb chop soup!). In later years, after Love and Quiches was well established and until she retired, she was the Love and Quiches doyenne, a matriarchal symbol who came to the office with me once or twice a week for many years, claiming she was bored at home, to stamp out shells.

  Bridget was a very interesting character. Every year she took a trip with her church group—big-time trips. Years later, when Irwin and I were finally able to travel, there was hardly a place we visited that she hadn’t been to before us! China, Israel, South America, and lots of cruises where she brought back photos of herself at the captain’s table dressed in an evening gown, complete with elbow-length gloves.

  My work-dominated life and the crazy events that came with it was the new reality, and I accepted it. On one occasion, Irwin and I were in the city to enjoy a rare evening out on the town when I made the mistake of calling the plant from the restaurant to see how everything was going. I was told that the roof had fallen in. Thinking this was a manner of speaking, I immediately became upset, thinking of every imaginable catastrophe that they might be referring to. But as it turned out, the roof of our eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot freezer had actually collapsed! Something wonderful also happened, however: my employees had taken charge, calling in the necessary parties, and by the time Irwin and I got back, the repairs were already well under way. Everything was under control without me! Without realizing it at the time, this was an important milestone, part of the process of learning to let go … to trust.

  Trying to separate your personal and business lives simply doesn’t work—not at this level, not until you have developed an effective organization with clearly defined areas of responsibility. We were nowhere near that point yet. I was exhausted all the time, still finding compelling reasons to spend time on my hands and knees in the plant scrubbing something that I felt needed scrubbing, responsible for everybody, worrying about everything, but knowing deep inside that I was going to see it through and move on to the next level. Too much momentum had already been created; there could be no turning back.

  The 36,000 Pies

  We continued in our efforts to expand up and down the East Coast, with me serving as sole out-of-town salesperson, and I can report that it is really cold in Buffalo in the dead of winter. I was dancing as fast as I could, and little by little, we picked up even more small distributors from New England down through the Carolinas, with occasional tentative forays further into the Southeast.

  We kept growing in the New York metro area, too. We obtained our first co-packing contract, producing the original Lindy’s Cheesecake for the group who held the license to market it as well as the recipe. We continued to produce for them for many years until they wanted the cheesecakes to be finished with various fresh fruits on top, which we could not do. We have always been a frozen food manufacturer, and fresh fruit simply does not freeze well. We were unhappy to have to walk away from this piece of business, but we learned, just as with the mincemeat pies for the athletic club, things change, and sometimes if the fit is not correct, you need to stop and walk away.

  We started doing business with one of our longest-running accounts. Sandy Beall, the founder of Ruby Tuesday, had just opened his first gourmet shop and café on Hilton Head Island, and he was visiting New York with his wife to hunt for menu ideas. He spotted our quiches in Zabar’s on the Upper West Side; they looked good, and so he gave us a call. We have been servicing Ruby Tuesday with various products for more than thirty years, from the time when there was only one, then seven, then a hundred, and now more than eight hundred Ruby Tuesday units! (Sandy recently retired as chairman and CEO of Ruby Tuesday, but we still keep in touch.)

  Then came the biggest game changer of all. To our great surprise, we received a phone call from a very large restaurant chain with better than four hundred locations requesting a sample of a seafood quiche for a new brunch menu they were developing. I assume they found us because we were still just about the only company producing quiche at the time, certainly the only one with “quiche” in its name. We sent them the quiche sample, but we also threw in a ringer: our spectacular Pecan Brownie Pie, the same pie we had developed for Jacqueline Kennedy’s dinner party. They called within minutes of receiving the samples, raving about the brownie pie and insisting that they simply had to have it for a six-week special. This may have been the very first limited-time offer, a marketing ploy that has become a standard in the restaurant industry. They said they planned on serving the pie warm, accompanied by ice cream and chocolate sauce. Then they asked how quickly we could produce six thousand cases. Six thousand cases! Our largest order to date had been maybe three or four hundred cases. And they wanted six pies per case, not our usual four—which meant an extra twelve-thousand pies!

  After less than a second’s hesitation—once we got up off the floor, having fallen off our chairs in disbelief—I said, “When do you need them?” “In six weeks,” they replied. “No problem.”

  How we produced such a large order so quickly, with hardly a problem, while conducting all of our regular business in our small plant—which still had only our twenty-four- and eighteen-pan ovens, which translates to a mere eighty-pie capacity (two per bun pan)—was truly a testament to Jimmy the Baker’s time management skills and supreme talents as a baker! Of course we baked all through the weekends for those few weeks. We were still, at that time, only a five-day operation, so that extra capacity on Saturday and Sunday was crucial. If I remember correctly, we also had our two original Blodgett convection ovens from the Bonne Femme days; we had hooked them up when we moved to Oceanside, just in case. Well, “just in case” was upon us. But in the end, it paid off: the Pecan Brownie Pie dessert special was such a spectacular success that the restaurant chain immediately put it on their regular dessert menu, where it remained for twenty-five-plus years!

  As the seventies drew to a close, Love and Quiches flew past the million-dollar mark, and our volume between 1978 and 1980—a pivotal period—doubled and then some. We started to see that yet another move was inevitable, this one even bolder than the others (and fortunately our last). I also knew, with certainty, that there would be no more “me,” that from now on it would be “us” and “we” for everything. I knew I did not want to go it alone anymore—nor could I. And so I asked Irwin to join the business officially.

  * * *

  * This number, like all others in the book referring to our volume growth, has not been adjusted for inflation, so our trajectory was actually a bit more dramatic than the numbers suggest.

  Chapter 6

  Freeport, Here We Come! (1980)

  Why not go out on a limb—isn’t that where the fruit is?

  —Frank Scully

  By 1980 we had developed from our accidental and tentative beginning into a business with a fairly extensive line of quiches and desserts, and we had secured our reputation as a high-end supplier. We had won some important national customers, and now we needed a place from which we could continue to grow. If we didn’t, we could be in danger of losing them. We laughed, recalling how we had considered renting out some of our five thousand square feet upon moving to our Oceanside facility in 1976; four years later, the walls were once again pressed to their limits. We had reached well over $2 million in volume, employed thirty-five people, were servicing four hundred customers, and were running six trucks daily that covered the tri-state area. I’d also finished paying back the $200,000 bank loan that my father had collateralized for me. A part of me was still constantly asking,
“Is this really happening?” even though I knew the answer very well.

  But even given this level of success, up to this point the development of Love and Quiches had been, as our first seven years amply demonstrated, somewhat haphazard, with chance playing a much larger role than it would have had I planned it out a little more thoughtfully. That could have cut both ways—although fortunately, it didn’t—but if the whole thing had gone down, we would have disappeared without too much disruption since our reach was still rather small. Of course, I was never going to let that happen, but from here on out the stakes would become much larger, and the consequences of any missteps more serious. Frankly, if I was not so confident of our current standing within the foodservice industry, I might have been embarrassed to admit to so many missteps and foibles up to this point. However, I have always had the ability to laugh at myself, and I’ve also been helped along by the knowledge that my audience is laughing with rather than at me. Building a business of our size is a very serious undertaking, and I needed to hold on to my sense of humor through it all. Otherwise, the tears could have easily taken over. And there were plenty of those.

  As the decade of the eighties began, I realized that we had once again reached a point in our growth where no manner of reorganizing with the tools at hand would work. The floorboards were literally crying uncle under the weight of our business, and so were we. That meant another move, this time a big one, with professional help in the planning, and we needed a lot of money to do it right. We could no longer operate as a homespun, do-it-yourself outfit.