For years, Lili Courtney had been making her own marinade-dressings, tangy oil-and-vinegar mixtures she served at home and in her leisure cooking classes at Kitchen Warehouse in Alexandria. But when the facility’s director, food entrepreneur Mimi Kirzner, suggested Courtney sell the marinade-dressings on site, it planted an idea she had never considered: to launch her own line of bottled condiments.
After more than a year investigating how to convert a favorite recipe into a sellable product, Courtney introduced her Delightful Palate line in October. The dressings, which come in Balsamic Garlic Honey, Stone Fruit Nectar and Wild Mayhaw Berry, can be used on salads and cooked grains or for infusing meats and vegetables.
“When I started, I had no idea how to get something like this done,” says Courtney. “I just jumped in and started asking questions.”
Courtney is part of a growing class of food entrepreneurs—individuals who have a unique recipe or idea they think might have mass appeal. But while home cooks have been throwing their personal concepts at the wall for decades, they’re now finding more resources to help them along the way. Here in South Louisiana, entrepreneurs are finding an established food incubator and another on the way, versatile manufacturers and a thriving chef and food science community.
Courtney began her process by consulting briefly with Edible Enterprises, a food product incubator in Norco that has helped grow brands like condiment lines Louisiana Sisters and Omi’s Gourmet Foods and the hibiscus-based drink Bissap Breeze. Nearly 20 tenants are currently housed in the facility, which includes government-approved commercial kitchen space. For reasonable fees, food entrepreneurs can learn how to bring their products to scale.
With Edible Enterprises’ help, Courtney connected with contract chef and food scientist Ehab “Happy” Abdelbaki. The two worked extensively to convert her small-batch, home-based recipe into a commercial good. There is a real art to translating the flavors a home chef uses routinely into ingredients required to produce a shelf-stable product, says Courtney.
“We would just keep adding and tasting over and over again to make sure it stayed true to the original formula,” Courtney says.
Delightful Palate products are manufactured in Pollack, La., at Spring Hill Jelly, which also produces a line of preserves, jams and jellies sold in many Baton Rouge independent grocery stores. Courtney says she began working with Spring Hill Jelly while sourcing mayhaw fruit for her Wild Mayhaw Berry flavor.
Another food incubator, similar to Edible Enterprises, is being developed at the LSU AgCenter, where it will be able to draw from resources there, including the Department of Food Science. Edible Enterprises’ former marketing chief, Gaye Morrison Sandoz, is leading the project.
“It normally takes five or six years from inception of an idea to really seeing a profit for a small food business,” Sandoz says. “The AgCenter food incubator will be able to shorten this time considerably, offering resources, contacts and marketing assistance.”
Sandoz says the new Baton Rouge-based food incubator will begin its first phase, an educational program, in the next few months.
While personal recipes are the genesis of scores of culinary enterprises, Louisiana food entrepreneurs are also pioneering kitchen tools and gadgets. Michelle Schroeder, a married mother of two in Baton Rouge, was cooking tacos in the fall of 2011 when an idea hit.
“I was thinking about what to do with the grease. It’s an issue every time I brown ground meat,” she says. “My husband hates it when I pour it down the drain, but you have to let it cool before you toss it out, or it’ll melt your trash bag.”
Schroeder envisioned a colander with an attachable bottom that could contain hot grease until it was cool enough to dispose. She began researching how to fabricate and mass produce such a product, stumbling upon the Manufacturing Extension Partnership of Louisiana (MEPOL), a statewide program sponsored by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Schroder arrived at the MEPOL office with a crude mock-up fashioned from household items and met with consultants about her idea. Several months later, she had trademarked a lightweight, heat-resistant plastic colander with a removable pan at the bottom. The colander even features an improved coffee pot-style handle that Schroeder hopes cooks will find easier to use than the typical handle.
She found a Grand Coteau company, Noble Plastics, to mass-produce the item. About 2,000 apple-green “Easy Greasy” colanders will be available this month through Schroeder’s website, easy-greasy.com, and in select stores in the Southeast.
