With Love and Quiches (11 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.