The pretty packages at your grocery store make it look so easy. Don't be fooled: Getting your lovingly handcrafted local food product onto those shelves is a byzantine process that requires sweat, start-up capital, nerves of steel, and, of course, a delicious, original product. Jill Padua, a Narrowsburg resident who has spent over a decade in the Sullivan County food business, just took a crack at it. Last fall, she shuttered her successful catering business, Jill's Kitchen, in order to begin bottling her best-selling product: her unique sesame noodle sauce. The first bottles of Open Sesame sauce rolled off the conveyor belt on March 11. Already, Padua has plenty of advice for fledgling food entrepreneurs.
Watershed Post: Why sesame sauce?
Jill Padua: I had a restaurant from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. I made sesame noodles there, and when I opened my catering business in 2001, I was making it regularly, and it became my biggest-selling product. Everybody loved it. And this past year, when I was trying to decide where my life was going, I looked at my records of what we made in our commercial kitchen here over the past year, and we made over 300 gallons of the sauce. In one year.
WP: Going from an entire catering business to just one product is a big shift. Why'd you do it?
JP: A lot of my clients pushed me to do this. They said, "You should bottle this." In the fall, my son moved away, and it opened up a whole new train of thought for me. My business in this neck of the woods is very seasonal. We work like mad people for five months out of the year, and I still couldn't make enough money in the summertime to get me through the winter. Because my commercial kitchen is attached to my house, my liability insurance was $8,000 per year. That's plus renters' insurance. That's one of the reasons that I decided that I would absolutely go with a co-packer.
WP: How did you go looking for a co-packer?
JP: I got references from Cornell. They gave me the names of a few, and I went and looked at each facility and spoke with the director.
WP: And which one did you choose?
JP: Nelson Farms. It's about three hours away. The facility is clean, professional, and very helpful, and everybody there is wonderful to work with. At a co-packer, you can have them produce the product, or you can rent the facility to make your own. I have them make it. They are professionals. This is what they do.
WP: Was it hard to adapt your recipe for production?
JP: That took the longest, developing a self-stable product. That means having the correct pH so that it doesn't go bad on the shelf.
WP: How many batches did it take you to find the right recipe?
JP: They were very small batches, but i would say 40 to 50 batches, a cup or a couple of cups each. I tested it with a pH meter that I purchased. You want to get the flavor right and the pH right. I would test it here, and then I took it to Nelson Farms, to the head of product development. I took my recipe to her and she re-tested it there to make sure that the pH was correct, and then she sent sent the paperwork to Cornell. Then Cornell gives you a scheduled process. Any co-packer has to follow a scheduled process when they make your product, and they can't deviate. Since I have two different sauces, mild and spicy, I have two different scheduled processes. Each costs $45.
WP: What are some of the other costs you had to pay up-front?
JP: I have purchased product liablity insurance for $350. The co-packing facility costs 75 cents a bottle plus ingredients. That includes making the product, bottling it, and putting on the label. Then there's marketing costs, and the cost of label design. The label design would have cost about $2,500, but a friend did it, so it cost a lot less. Then there's the cost of the bottles, the caps, the shrink-wrapped seals. The UPC codes are $750 per code. I have two products, so there were two of them.
WP: That's a lot of money.
JP: It's not cheap. I sold the equipment from my commercical kitchen, I have some stock that I cashed in, and I've been using my credit cards. I'm not rich, but I've worked a lot of years in this business, and I need a better life, a balanced life, and I believe that this product will lead to that.
WP: What advice do you have for others who want to bring food products to retail stores?
JP: Research, research, research. Find a good co-packer, ideally one that does some distribution. Not all co-packers do. My co-packer purchased ten cases right off the get-go. If you're going to do just local, you don't need UPC codes, but if you're going to get into a big store, you have to have UPC codes. If you have a product you believe in, it's not a headache. Until you know the system, don't make yourself crazy. If you have something really unique, you have a better chance.
You can find Open Sesame on their website, via their listing in our local business directory, or on the shelf at local markets around New York and Pennsylvania.
Something fresh in your neighborhood? Let us know at editor@watershedpost.com.
Photo by Julia Reischel.
