What goes up… must come down? Noooooooooooooo!
Episode 4 - Background leading up to my foodie career and The MONETIZATION CHEF
In Episode 3, I shared about how the purchase of a food processing center by the University of Idaho, swung open the door to my food empire.
(PS This was all pre-Cottage Food laws!)
We launched our first product, Idaho Redneck BarbieQ Sauce… a huge hit with Idaho gift retailers, and our 2002 holiday booth at the Palouse Mall.
With this email episode, we continue the story of our rise to explosive growth… and to a dark chapter in the lives of Sandy and Mal.
Our retail website, TastesofIdaho.com (launched in 2004, sold in 2019, and sold again 2021, is now gutted with spammy crap) attracted a massive following and dominated the search engines for our best keywords.
We bought dozens of other Idaho products at wholesale to retail off the website, along with our own lines. And, made-to-order shippable gift baskets were our big ticket bread and butter.
Over the coming years, we came out with so many new items it was hard to keep up.
And of course, at some point “Lewis-Clark” was no longer a suitable moniker, so we rebranded. With the new name, we re-launched Sandy as Idaho Gifts Wholesale, complementing our Tastes of Idaho retail branding and website.
Line extension and expansion beyond BBQ sauce was our next growth strategy. First up, a couple spicy-pepper catsups in 5-ounce woozy bottles. Winner.
Then, a line of six mustards - including best-sellers huckleberry and habanero. They sold ok at Christmas, but were otherwise a dog. Could not justify cost of holding the inventory. Line down.
We started a line (actually three lines) of huckleberry jams and syrups. “Idaho Redneck Hucklaberry (misspelling on purpose) Toe Jam” became a top three seller, and we still send 20-30 cases of 10-oz jars annually to a roadside produce stand near Riggins, Idaho.
We found a granola maker in Spangle, Washington who sold only bulk, in 25-lb boxes to grocery stores.
After developing a relationship, we sent him sugar-infused huckleberries from another producer, plus standup zip pouches for packaging. He put together a steady supply of 8-oz huckleberry-almond granola, which we labeled and sold, briskly.
Rave customer reviews. Also a top-five seller, hard to keep in stock. For a while.
Unfortunately, the producer making sugar-infused huckleberries quit making them. (7000 pound minimum with the co-packer, and wild huckleberry crops are notoriously fickle.) No substitute product at that time. We tried some other berry/fruit options but got little sales traction. Line down.
We located a quality personal-care producer near Twin Falls, Idaho, who would private-label a wide range of fun stuff for us. New lines included lotions, lip balms, massage oils, and soaps—mostly in huckleberry and Idaho potato motifs.
The “spud soaps” were really cool. The proprietor owned rare molds in the shape of a real potato. The sage scent spud was off-white, and you had to pick it up and smell to be sure it was not a real potato. We inserted the spud soaps into individual mini-burlap string-tie bags we imported from India, like 5,000 at a time. A top-five seller for years.
PS Finding a way to get labels printed and ironed on to the burlap bags is a story all by itself!
Over time, we became close friends with soap-maker Duane and his wife Nancy. But out of the blue, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was gone in two weeks. Nancy was not interested in making soap by herself, so another major line disappeared. We never found anyone else in Idaho to private-label personal care products for us, especially at that quality and variety. Lines down.
Lines come and go in this business. Good idea to stay flexible with your food aspirations.
We tried a number of other interesting things.
We purchased huckleberry taffy in bulk, and repackaged it into 10-oz bags. Sold REALLY well for years, year-round (and we added a holiday label, did very well for the season.)
(Any one could probably restart that business again, including offering custom label with multiple flavors, and do very well. Conference goodie bags. Wedding favors. Etc.)
We also bought 25-pound bags of a 16-bean mix from a restaurant supply store, re-packaging them into one-pound bags as “Idaho Redneck Bubble Bath Soup.”
Label on one side had a big, burly bearded guy sitting in a tub, with soapy bubbles floating behind him. The other side of the package offered a hearty soup recipe using the bag of beans. Lots of laughs, and a steady seller, with little work.
Have you ever seen that overpriced line of “Endangered Species” chocolate bars, with gorgeous photos of rare critters on the wrappers?
I had to respond. We started a line of “Endangered Feces” chocolate poo-poo products in windowed paper bags. Things like Elk Duds, Moose Drops, and Bear Scat (with missing tourists in the ingredients list) became a small, but steady source of income.
Always looking for competitive advantage, we experimented with some glass packaging too. Have you ever seen those maple syrup bottles that look like baby apple cider jugs? As small as 50 mil (1.75 oz) and 250 mil (8.5 oz), and up to gallon size!
Rarely seen in the Western US, but very easy to spot filled with maple syrup in eastern Canada and northeastern United States. These were beyond cute (but cost 3-4x our normal bottles.)
We found a company — Dominion & Grimm, the big kahuna serving the US and Canada maple syrup industries — that imported these bottle styles, called “Gallone”, from Italy. D&G imported then into North America, arriving first at their main distribution center in Montreal, Quebec. Another warehouse is located in Vermont.
With some negotiation, we imported these cuties from their Canadian warehouse by the pallet load.
They came by rail from Quebec to the Alberta province, just north of the Idaho panhandle. Then, south by truck, across the US border with the help of an import-export broker, to Lewiston, Idaho. There, we broke down the pallet and brought our babies home in a van.
This was a pricey gamble. But In spite of the wholesale and retail prices we had to charge, these mini-jugs were a huge hit. The gift industry opens its arms for all things unique and cute. Sizes were 250 ml (8.5 oz) and 100 ml (3.5 oz)
We put barbeque sauce and huckleberry syrup in them
We tried the 50ml jugs, but they were a nightmare to fill (and label), so we retired that size. (But, GOD, they were adorable!) The easier-to-fill 250 ml bottled syrup and sauce were hard to keep in stock, and made us a ton of money.
Here comes the hard times…
About 2006, I started to notice Sandy struggling with memory issues.
If she was headed to the store, and there was more than one item I asked her to pick up, she had to stop me, start over, and write ‘em all down. With me voicing each item slowly. And even then, if I asked for just a can of ‘cream of chicken’ soup, she was more likely to bring home ‘cream of mushroom.’
I tried talking to her about it, but if you’ve been there with a loved one, you know that she would just get angry, and blame me, telling me I was the one with the lousy memory, or worse.
As long as she was traveling safely and taking care of her rep clients, I hoped things would be OK. It took a couple years.
Up to this point, wholesale sales were skyrocketing exponentially. Cash flow was a concern due to our stockpiles of ingredient and finished goods inventories. But our credit score was sweet. Inventories increased, new products came online, and we enjoyed bigger and bigger production runs.
One cash flow issue was that Sandy’s rep commissions came in an average of two months after the sale… plus she occasionally got stiffed. So we had to keep an eye on that.
I was talking to bankers about funding our own processing kitchen. We wanted to end the 5+ hour trips, each-way, to the University of Idaho Food Tech Center in Caldwell. Each run was three days. A day down, picking up any remaining ingredients; a day in the kitchen processing, and a day home (exhausted) with heavy product to unload.
We thought things were rosy, the outlook financially golden. We just had to hold the vision.
But two big economic realities began rearing their ugly heads.
1) Ecommerce sales over the internet were exploding, and anyone with online access could access the world’s largest gift store 14 inches from their nose. While our online retail sales were also growing along with that trend, most of our volume (i.e. dollars) came from selling wholesale to independent retailers. Gift stores started dropping like flies.
For example, when we first started there were three “Made in Idaho” stores in southern Idaho. The last one, in Boise, closed due to a rent increase along with declining sales, at about this time.
(Of our Top 10 list of wholesale clients, only one was left within a couple years.)
2) Exacerbating the problem, we were heading into the 2007-08 RECESSION, affecting pocketbooks and discretionary spending. Gift spending often goes first.
Plans for our own commercial kitchen went on the back burner. We were making lots of late payments, sales slowed, and our credit score was tanking.
Then the hammer REALLY came down.
It was late 2007, and Sandy was coming back from a sales route to the Spokane, Sandpoint, Coeur d’Alene areas along the Washington/Idaho border.
(We kept in close daily contact during her sales trips.)
My phone rang, it was her, voice panicked.
“Mal, I don’t know where I am!” She was crying.
I gently talked her down a bit. Turns out she was at a convenience store on US Highway 95, south from Coeur d’Alene toward Moscow, a trip she’d made AT LEAST a hundred times. But said she did not recognize ANYTHING.
She finally understood. She was ready to listen.
In the next Newsletter episode, I will share how Sandy and I stayed in the food business, but what we had to give up, what direction(s) we had to pivot, and what happened with Sandy’s health.
Scary times in this household.
Count your blessings, fellow foodies. And if you’ve been there with a loved one (or a tanking business), I am sooooo sorry. I feel ya.
And even at that, the worst is yet to come.
Next episode (5) in a week or so?
Mal Dell
The MONETIZATION CHEF
”Cooking Up Profits for Foodies!”