found myself getting up at 5:30 every morning to go in and break eggs for that day’s production, something I did for years, and one day I looked back and estimated that the hands that are typing these words now have conservatively broken 800,000 eggs in their lifetime.
Things they don’t teach you in grad school..
But I wasn’t the only one in our family breaking eggs. My then-girlfriend-now wife Jill, whose signature on that $2,500 Discover credit card loan launched our company, was pregnant with our first child, our son Christian. On her days off from her job working at the cosmetic counter at Neiman Marcus, she would join us in our kitchen and break eggs as well.
As Jill’s due date drew closer we found ourselves in our OB-GYN’s office and he informed us that Christian was breached and that as a result he’d have to be delivered by Caesarian section. We were thus able to pick a date and time in which Christian would be born. We subsequently picked a Monday, which the doctor thought was great; then he suggested a time: 11:00 a.m.
I asked if we could make it later that day, as I had a truck coming that morning that I’d have to load. Thus, we scheduled the appointment for 1:00 p.m., and our eldest son was brought into this world about 45 minutes after 1:00 p.m.
The mustard order went out as well that day.
At this point I was six years into my entrepreneurial adventure, still not making money, certainly not enough to raise a family and live on, still piling up debt. Jack and I did not even know each other yet; in fact, we would not even meet for another five years, but it was at this time that his entrepreneurial adventure was beginning, and he was enduring similar experiences with Garden Fresh.
Like me and my marinades, Jack too started with blenders in the back of his Clubhouse Bar-B-Q restaurant on a little red Formica table.
“It would take me about 20 minutes to make six pints, which I thought was pretty good,” Jack recalls. (Today six pints of Garden Fresh Salsa roll off our assembly lines every nine seconds.)
It wasn’t long, though, before he sensed that he had something special on his hands. “People started coming from 20 miles away just for this salsa. We couldn’t believe it.”
As the crowds grew and as more stores in the surrounding area started carrying Jack’s salsa he and his wife Annette eventually walled off part of the Clubhouse Bar-B-Q’s dining room and converted that to salsa production. They soon realized, though, that their restaurant did not have the cooler capacity to handle their new production levels.
So they rented an 8-by-20-foot walk-in cooler and located it in the back alley of the Clubhouse Bar-B-Q even though doing so violated the local zoning ordinances. Annette soon found herself running outside into the often muddy alley to get their raw materials, then at the end of the production session running finished product back out to it.
It was at about this time that Fox2 News did a story on Jack. “It didn’t even dawn on me that we weren’t exactly up to code,” Jack recalls. “That didn’t happen until the city manager showed up the next day.”
Together, though, he and the city manager did find a 3,000-square-foot vacant former video store, with the notion that Jack and Annette would convert the space to salsa production. Before they could, however, they had to petition the city to change the zoning from commercial to industrial.
Jack remembers the city council meeting in which he tried to do just that: “Some of the council members were against the zoning change, saying that the highest and best use for this space was still commercial, not industrial. So I told them I’d set up a card table just inside the front entrance, that I’d call it a ‘store,’ and promised to sell a pint of salsa to any member of the public who walked in for $2.50.” This was good enough for the council, and the zoning change was approved.
Although we were located 15 miles apart and were not to meet each other for another five years, both my American Connoisseur Gourmet Foods/The Mucky Duck Mustard Company and Jack and Annette’s Garden Fresh Gourmet were both now operating out of 3,000-square-foot production facilities.
As I was getting up at 5:30 a.m. to go in and break eggs for that day’s production, Annette would arrive at the former video store an hour earlier than that to move all the packaging materials from the production floor out to the parking lot, just so they’d have the room to produce Garden Fresh Salsa.
When it rained or snowed, which happens often in Detroit, Annette would run out to the lot and cover everything with tarps.
This was after she’d label the salsa cups the previous evening, at home, by hand. She says, “I’d do about three cases of empty containers, and that would get us through the next day’s production.”
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