England down through the Carolinas, with occasional tentative forays further into the Southeast.
We kept growing in the New York metro area, too. We obtained our first co-packing contract, producing the original Lindy’s Cheesecake for the group who held the license to market it as well as the recipe. We continued to produce for them for many years until they wanted the cheesecakes to be finished with various fresh fruits on top, which we could not do. We have always been a frozen food manufacturer, and fresh fruit simply does not freeze well. We were unhappy to have to walk away from this piece of business, but we learned, just as with the mincemeat pies for the athletic club, things change, and sometimes if the fit is not correct, you need to stop and walk away.
We started doing business with one of our longest-running accounts. Sandy Beall, the founder of Ruby Tuesday, had just opened his first gourmet shop and café on Hilton Head Island, and he was visiting New York with his wife to hunt for menu ideas. He spotted our quiches in Zabar’s on the Upper West Side; they looked good, and so he gave us a call. We have been servicing Ruby Tuesday with various products for more than thirty years, from the time when there was only one, then seven, then a hundred, and now more than eight hundred Ruby Tuesday units! (Sandy recently retired as chairman and CEO of Ruby Tuesday, but we still keep in touch.)
Then came the biggest game changer of all. To our great surprise, we received a phone call from a very large restaurant chain with better than four hundred locations requesting a sample of a seafood quiche for a new brunch menu they were developing. I assume they found us because we were still just about the only company producing quiche at the time, certainly the only one with “quiche” in its name. We sent them the quiche sample, but we also threw in a ringer: our spectacular Pecan Brownie Pie, the same pie we had developed for Jacqueline Kennedy’s dinner party. They called within minutes of receiving the samples, raving about the brownie pie and insisting that they simply had to have it for a six-week special. This may have been the very firstlimited-time offer, a marketing ploy that has become a standard in the restaurant industry. They said they planned on serving the pie warm, accompanied by ice cream and chocolate sauce. Then they asked how quickly we could produce six thousand cases. Six thousand cases! Our largest order to date had been maybe three or four hundred cases. And they wanted six pies per case, not our usual four—which meant an extra twelve-thousand pies!
After less than a second’s hesitation—once we got up off the floor, having fallen off our chairs in disbelief—I said, “When do you need them?” “In six weeks,” they replied. “No problem.”
How we produced such a large order so quickly, with hardly a problem, while conducting all of our regular business in our small plant—which still had only our twenty-four- and eighteen-pan ovens, which translates to a mere eighty-pie capacity (two per bun pan)—was truly a testament to Jimmy the Baker’s time management skills and supreme talents as a baker! Of course we baked all through the weekends for those few weeks. We were still, at that time, only a five-day operation, so that extra capacity on Saturday and Sunday was crucial. If I remember correctly, we also had our two original Blodgett convection ovens from the Bonne Femme days; we had hooked them up when we moved to Oceanside, just in case. Well, “just in case” was upon us. But in the end, it paid off: the Pecan Brownie Pie dessert special was such a spectacular success that the restaurant chain immediately put it on their regular dessert menu, where it remained for twenty-five-plus years!
As the seventies drew to a close, Love and Quiches flew past the million-dollar mark, and our volume between 1978 and 1980—a pivotal period—doubled and then some. We started to see that
We kept growing in the New York metro area, too. We obtained our first co-packing contract, producing the original Lindy’s Cheesecake for the group who held the license to market it as well as the recipe. We continued to produce for them for many years until they wanted the cheesecakes to be finished with various fresh fruits on top, which we could not do. We have always been a frozen food manufacturer, and fresh fruit simply does not freeze well. We were unhappy to have to walk away from this piece of business, but we learned, just as with the mincemeat pies for the athletic club, things change, and sometimes if the fit is not correct, you need to stop and walk away.
We started doing business with one of our longest-running accounts. Sandy Beall, the founder of Ruby Tuesday, had just opened his first gourmet shop and café on Hilton Head Island, and he was visiting New York with his wife to hunt for menu ideas. He spotted our quiches in Zabar’s on the Upper West Side; they looked good, and so he gave us a call. We have been servicing Ruby Tuesday with various products for more than thirty years, from the time when there was only one, then seven, then a hundred, and now more than eight hundred Ruby Tuesday units! (Sandy recently retired as chairman and CEO of Ruby Tuesday, but we still keep in touch.)
Then came the biggest game changer of all. To our great surprise, we received a phone call from a very large restaurant chain with better than four hundred locations requesting a sample of a seafood quiche for a new brunch menu they were developing. I assume they found us because we were still just about the only company producing quiche at the time, certainly the only one with “quiche” in its name. We sent them the quiche sample, but we also threw in a ringer: our spectacular Pecan Brownie Pie, the same pie we had developed for Jacqueline Kennedy’s dinner party. They called within minutes of receiving the samples, raving about the brownie pie and insisting that they simply had to have it for a six-week special. This may have been the very firstlimited-time offer, a marketing ploy that has become a standard in the restaurant industry. They said they planned on serving the pie warm, accompanied by ice cream and chocolate sauce. Then they asked how quickly we could produce six thousand cases. Six thousand cases! Our largest order to date had been maybe three or four hundred cases. And they wanted six pies per case, not our usual four—which meant an extra twelve-thousand pies!
After less than a second’s hesitation—once we got up off the floor, having fallen off our chairs in disbelief—I said, “When do you need them?” “In six weeks,” they replied. “No problem.”
How we produced such a large order so quickly, with hardly a problem, while conducting all of our regular business in our small plant—which still had only our twenty-four- and eighteen-pan ovens, which translates to a mere eighty-pie capacity (two per bun pan)—was truly a testament to Jimmy the Baker’s time management skills and supreme talents as a baker! Of course we baked all through the weekends for those few weeks. We were still, at that time, only a five-day operation, so that extra capacity on Saturday and Sunday was crucial. If I remember correctly, we also had our two original Blodgett convection ovens from the Bonne Femme days; we had hooked them up when we moved to Oceanside, just in case. Well, “just in case” was upon us. But in the end, it paid off: the Pecan Brownie Pie dessert special was such a spectacular success that the restaurant chain immediately put it on their regular dessert menu, where it remained for twenty-five-plus years!
As the seventies drew to a close, Love and Quiches flew past the million-dollar mark, and our volume between 1978 and 1980—a pivotal period—doubled and then some. We started to see that
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