still meant “me,” and some of the planes I flew on were very tiny and very rickety indeed.
Rubbing Shoulders
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 12News, 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 otherbrands 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
Rubbing Shoulders
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 12News, 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 otherbrands 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
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