Despite all the conferences I’ve been to and all the people I’ve gotten to know, in my heart of hearts, I have never been comfortable with small talk, and I find it somewhat difficult to talk to strangers. But that doesn’t alter the fact that networking is a crucial element in most businesses, and I have always done what I had to do. (As a result, by the way, I have met and forged relationships with people from all over the world, and I have found some true friendships in the equation.)
Another important chapter in my absorption into the industry centers came through the Roundtable for Women in Foodservice, which was formed with the help of a US Small Business Administration (SBA) loan in the mid-eighties in New York to serve as a resource for women from all areas of the trade: restaurant owners, chefs, nutritionists, food writers, and the like. I was invited to serve on the founding board of directors. We held monthly meetings and instructional seminars, traded job information, mentored younger women, and provided other services. During the next few years, chapters of the Roundtable opened in other metropolitan areas such as LA, Dallas, and Chicago. We held an annual luncheon during the NRA show in Chicago to attract members and attention—in other words, networking! This was, to my knowledge, the first broadly based organization formed to help advance women in my particular industry. The Women’s Foodservice Forum, which currently has twenty-two thousand members, would overrun us by the turn of the century (I am active in that organization, too), but the Roundtable was first to bring me together with many women whose passions, like mine, resided at the intersection of business and food.
We were still marching inexorably forward, but this was still long before everybody was walking around armed with laptops, cell phones, and BlackBerrys. Everything in sales moved along at a slower pace even as our computerization efforts speeded up. So it was at these shows that our relationships were forged, one by one. And now, today, we exhibit at shows worldwide.
Susan’s Sweet Talk
By the late 1980s, thanks to our relentless pursuit of new business, we were doing about $6 million in volume, soon to grow to $8 million and more as we crossed over into the early nineties. We took a lot of steps and made changes during the second half of the eighties to help prepare us for the next decade. Some of them were deliberate; others, as usual, just happened.
We had our bakery kosher-certified when it became apparent that all retail in-store bakery departments, all airlines, most hotel chains, and many other segments of the industry demanded it for all baked products. I remember the certification process was very trying and costly. We had to send out all of our pans—thousands by then—to be re-glazed, or else we would have had to replace them. All of the equipment had to be scrubbed down and sterilized. The most frightening process involved the ovens: we were required to raise the temperature above 1,000 degrees and run them at that temperature for more than eight hours! I asked, “How about 800 degrees for ten hours?” No deal. The rabbi said “No!” Somehow we got through it, but it took an army of mechanics to ensure that we didn’t destroy our ovens in the process.
(I recently read in the New York Times about the very same process being required in the White House for just one kosher event. In that instance, only one hour at 500 degrees did it. I guess the president has more influence and got a better deal.)
Becoming kosher-certified meant giving up our quiche Lorraine. It broke my heart at first, but since we were fast becoming more of a dessert company, I got over it for the greater good. As a matter of fact, desserts were gaining so much ground with us that by the early nineties, and as we grew nationally, the majority of our product development was in that arena. Sometimes at trade shows the same people would ask over and over again, “When did you people start making desserts?”
We decided that because the dessert segment of our product mix was growing by leaps and bounds, we needed a better name to connote our sweet goods. We knew that the name of a business is vitally important, so we thought about it carefully. We trademarked Susan’s Sweet Talk in the mid-eighties and described it as a division of our company, printing it as a subheading on all of our boxes, sell sheets, business cards, and the like. But while the ink was drying, we began to realize that the name Love and Quiches had achieved significant recognition throughout our industry, and that, try as we might, it would be a struggle to get anyone to connect “Susan’s Sweet Talk” with “Love and Quiches.”
Good R&D Is a Very Good Thing
Another major development was hiring our first director of research and development (R&D). Out of the blue one day in 1986, a local suburban housewife—just like I had been, but this one complete with a doctor husband and two children—marched in with a carrot cake in both hands and asked for a job. Abby had trained as a nutritionist while in college and had worked in hospitals in that capacity. For the prior few years she had been supplying a local country club with exquisite desserts that she was baking at home in her kitchen. She hadn’t bothered getting a license as I did when I first started; she was just doing it. Highly skilled product development is a vital component of a business such as ours, providing the ability to communicate on a level playing field with the executive chefs of our target markets. Abby was very talented, and because of her expertise we were able to work with all the restaurant chains in developing products tailored to meet their precise needs and requirements. This was a key factor in our growth.
When we first hired Abby, the office employee kitchen was doing double duty as the test kitchen, and she was doing double duty by also running our little retail shop in the front. It shortly became apparent that this was not going to work. As the organization grew, so did the number of our R&D projects, and we quickly found ourselves in desperate need of space for a real test kitchen. All eyes turned to the space occupied by our outlet store, at the front and across the hall from our offices. So we rented some space in the building directly across the street in our industrial park and fitted out a new retail outlet, which we hired someone to run. We didn’t lose any of our loyal regulars; all we had to do was point when they knocked on the office door in bewilderment.
Now we had a real test kitchen, which we fitted out with all the necessary equipment. We even installed a seven-pan rotary gas oven for Abby to use so that what was developed in the test kitchen would more closely resemble what could be done on the production floor. This whole process is called commercialization, a term I didn’t yet know existed, one of the primary functions that linked our R&D and the operations department.
A few years later we recruited Mary, yet another pastry chef, who had been an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Mary had infinite patience. She would try a recipe dozens of times, just changing one ingredient at a time by the tiniest measure until it was perfect. She once worked on a simple zucchini bread recipe for months, having us taste over and over, then over once again, what we thought each time was the same thing. We could never tell the difference, but she could and did, before we could transfer the recipe to the back of the house for production.
Little by little, lesson by lesson, Love and Quiches was coming into its own. We were better able to vet the opportunities coming our way because we now had some people on board who could, from experience, work out the logistics for production, oven time, labor hours, throughput, and so on. It gave us our first knowledge of the “constraints” (bottlenecks) that all manufacturers face, and by which many have been sadly defeated. Although we were not quite state of the art at this juncture, we were moving in the right direction. With more experience, we learned to read the industry with better results and to watch our competitors with a more practiced eye.
With our new status as more of a known quantity, we were approached by two industry giants to undertake R&D projects, which greatly added to our learning curve. The giants in the industry often turn to small companies like mine because we are flexible enough and have the expertise and time to work on R&D projects such as these. In other words, we understood baking and knew
what we were doing. Consequently, we were very well remunerated for materials and our time and expertise.
One such project was from General Foods, before they merged with Kraft and while they still owned Entenmann’s bakery. This was a “fresh refrigerated single serve dessert” project that General Foods planned to test in about thirty supermarkets in the Midwest. The project took months, but the formulas were too labor intensive, and the project ultimately went nowhere. Still, we learned a lot, and we met many important people way up the chain in our industry. Since this was General Foods, we were drowning in the required record keeping, and we were glad when it was over. (Fast forward to today: our record keeping is just as stringent, maybe more so.)
Because of this R&D project, we got to tour the Entenmann’s plant, now largely closed, farther out on Long Island. I’ll never forget some of the things I saw. For example, they had a brand-new high-tech line that sent the boxes down a conveyor belt facing in the wrong direction; they stationed someone at the end of the line just to rotate them manually. They also swept nuts off the floor beneath another line and then sterilized and re-toasted them for reuse! (Please remember this was twenty-five years ago, and I suspect, or rather I hope, this could never happen today.) Racks, pans, and supplies were all over the place. By the end of the tour, we were thinking that even we were better run than Entenmann’s, although of course their volume dwarfed ours.
The other R&D project came from Rich Foods (still a private, family-run business), and it involved making ice cream cakes with a type of ice cream that didn’t easily melt, could be distributed through normal frozen food channels, and did not need the special panel environment normally required to transport ice cream. And although this project, too, never moved forward, it was a lot of fun despite the unusually hot summer.
It was during the eighties that we developed relationships with several fledgling national chains, businesses that grew from just a few stores at the outset to hundreds and, in some cases, more than a thousand units. One was a chain that featured chicken; the opportunity came our way because one of the executives’ wives was so fond of our brownies that she used to regularly drive down all the way from Connecticut just to get them. Another was an Italian pizza chain, whose executives told me to feel free to share this story. The family matriarch had been baking all of their cheesecakes in the original pizza parlor in Brooklyn for all twenty or so stores that they had at the time. As they developed their expansion plans, however, they knew this couldn’t last. Getting the cheesecake recipe out of Mama was worse than dealing with Jimmy the Baker! She put her three sons, who were running the business, and Love and Quiches through hell until we finally received her blessing. We have been baking their cheesecakes ever since.
Then we had an opportunity to do a second product for the chain that had given us such a tremendous boost when they bought our Pecan Brownie Pie, knocking us out of the ballpark and into our next phase of growth. This story didn’t have such a happy ending, though. The second product was a lovely frozen lemon mousse that we packed and shipped in four-pound tubs. The dessert was to be scooped and served with a berry sauce. None of the servers wanted to bother scooping the mousse and garnishing it, however; to them, it was too much trouble. Since the item was a special and did not appear on the printed menu, it needed server enthusiasm to push it. It failed rather spectacularly. The company asked us to take it back, all $90,000 worth, and we did in order to preserve the relationship. We made the Salvation Army very happy that month!
Throughout the eighties we were setting the stage for the nineties. Our distributor business was becoming more distinct from our local business, but our focus was on building our multiunit chain account and airline business. And soon—export! Love and Quiches continued to grow and was poised to enter yet another new phase in its busy life.
Chapter 8
Securing Our Position (1990–2000)
Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work at it until it’s done, and done right.
—Walt Disney
The 1990s brought dramatic changes to Love and Quiches. Many events of that decade reinforced the fact we were still, so many years after our beginning, an accidental business. We continued to make a few too many costly mistakes, but we had progressed enough to recognize them much more quickly and to use them to gain strength as we righted them. We were definitely making progress on the top line, but it’s the bottom line, of course, that counts.
Love and Quiches was not just waiting for things to happen to us; we were, by now, constantly planning our growth, and we landed our first big export client as a direct result of our decision to exhibit at the NRA yearly trade show. One year an entourage from an international company—one that has thousands of restaurants worldwide, including in the Middle East—happened by our booth. They looked at our display of products, asked a few questions, and then moved on down the aisle. (The last thing on their minds, as they told me later, was desserts.) So, when they phoned just days later, we were astounded, and our astonishment grew as, within weeks, we were supplying them with cheese-cakes and chocolate cakes. This unexpected and wonderful opportunity changed our image of ourselves and what we could become. If they hadn’t turned into our aisle that day, I would perhaps be telling quite a different story. But when opportunity knocked, we opened the door and let it in. And in this case, the partnership has continued for twenty years.
Although this might sound as if we were getting in way over our heads, it was a logical next step for the company. Most freight, whether hard goods or frozen foodstuffs like our products, moves around the world via container ship. Located as we were on the East Coast near so many major ports, we were in an ideal position to enter the export market. We could easily contract for frozen containers, which our freight forwarders drop at our loading dock and then haul away when they are loaded and sealed (to measure temperature all throughout the voyage and to assure that no tampering has taken place). Then the containers are loaded onto vast container ships and plugged in to the ship’s electrical system to keep the contents frozen until they arrive at customs at their final destination. This is a costly process, so our international customers only order full containers to help spread the cost across as much product as possible. But the integrity of the product is no different from what it would be if we were merely delivering it from Freeport, Long Island, to New Jersey.
Thanks to Love and Quiches’ positive reputation in the industry, invitations to tour major facilities continued to pour in. One such tour that comes to mind was of the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, where they produce everything from Spam to the finest prosciutto. The Hormel plant was so large that it took more than five hours to complete the tour. It was a marvel of efficiency: the animals coming in at one end and dozens of perfect products coming out the other—a vertical operation, nose to tail, and even the slaughtering done right there (the smell permeated the area for literally miles). Seeing—and smelling—that place was something I won’t ever forget.
Why did we get all these invitations to tour gigantic facilities? Probably it was because the food industry giants were inviting us to a dance to see if we were interested in being acquired. We’d accept the invitations to tour, always interested in hearing what the giants had to say, but we remained a private company through it all. The giants move very slowly and cautiously; they are the tortoise to our hare. Love and Quiches was thriving on its nimbleness and quick response time, so a sale would dull our competitive edge. Our field is very R&D intensive, and to satisfy our customer base, we knew we had to be extremely flexible and constantly aware of that base’s needs. As we fought our way forward independently, we watched as many of our competitors were acquired. Typically, the absorbed upscale brand either disappeared or the quality of its products became secondary.
Another phenomenon that swallowed dozens of our competitors was a gathering of dessert brands under one umbrella by venture capital groups with a mind to overrunning the Sara Lees of the world. They, too
, were quite wrong; to be in the dessert business requires knowledge of the baking business, and these groups didn’t have that knowledge. The majority of these experiments failed, and the companies—including, sadly, some very fine ones—have at this point mostly disappeared.
During this very busy decade, the business also segued into a family enterprise; both Andrew and Joan joined the firm in the ’90s. I will discuss this in more detail in chapter 17, “Family Matters.”
Stretching the Walls
The early nineties brought new energy to the business as the second generation brought their ideas forward. We quickly grew to $8 million in volume, and then to $12 million, and then way beyond that.
The building we occupied began to feel very small, and we started looking for ways to expand without moving. We found ourselves in the same position as with our prior smaller facilities, only now our inefficiencies had a much greater impact.
We were desperate for more space, so our next project was to design and build a five-thousand-square-foot holding freezer outside the building. (The old freezer had the same footprint but was inside, taking up valuable space.) This new freezer has a thirty-foot ceiling and four hundred pallet positions, and it is connected to the building through what we dubbed the “patio,” an enclosed area with a loading dock for staging our orders. Because of its size and capacity, except for one ill-advised and short-lived period yet to come, we have never had to contract for outside freezer storage, which is quite costly.
The space the old freezer had occupied, which was next to the production floor with its very thick and insulated walls, was converted into manufacturing space that always remained quite cool. We literally doubled our production area overnight, now with both a baking area and a separate deco and packaging room.
With Love and Quiches Page 11