With Love and Quiches by Susan Axelrod Page A

my instincts finally took over, and I put a stop to what had been going on.
    Our accounts now numbered more than 250, and we were holding on to them because our quality stayed high—in spite of everything just confessed—and our service, finally , had become quite good and reliable. Our reputation as a high-end supplier was growing.
    Restaurant managers all over the city unselfishly shared their secrets, so a lot of them helped me grow the company by spreading the word about our products. I admit that I was beginning to have a lot of fun selling despite its grueling aspects. I was meeting tons of people and becoming an accepted member of the restaurant/supplier community. Our minimum order was only $50; needless to say, we had to make a lot of deliveries. Our only out-of-town account was still Bamberger’s, and it was serviced through our one and only distributor.
    Our primary product line remained quiche, though the dessert line would surpass it in volume within a few years. To our foodservice customers, we offered quiches already baked, no longer frozen raw. We had quite a few sizes of quiche in at least fifteen varieties, from the usual broccoli, spinach, and Lorraine to asparagus, artichoke, and smoked salmon. Our dessert offerings grew with the addition of Black Forest Cake, German Chocolate Cake, Lemon Raspberry Cake, and other cake varieties. I now see that we had too many varieties in our lines given our setup at the time; we hadn’t yet learned about “product rationalization,” whereby products are analyzed by comparative sales and the slower movers are eliminated.
    Our base of supermarket customers was growing, too. Shortly after the move to Oceanside, we managed to complete a sale to a group of markets called Mel Weitz’s Foodtown—about fifteen stores, our first supermarket sale since the Windmill. We were also selling our quiches to Waldbaum’s (now part of A&P), partly because Mrs. Waldbaum had been one of our customers from as far back as my garage days.
    Sadly, though, I got a phone call from Ira Waldbaum himself one day to inform me that they were dropping our product line. He explainedthat retailing was a different animal, one that required extensive marketing dollars (which we did not have), and he apologized more than once during our conversation. (Actually, we didn’t care about losing the account that much. Our deliveries to their hectic warehouse were always an ordeal; our little trucks were dwarfed by the tractor trailers all lined up. Our drivers cheered when they heard the news!)
    As we got settled into our new home, we felt secure in our growing number of customers. But very quickly I realized that I would really have to hit the road selling if we wanted to keep it up. It was becoming increasingly apparent that we weren’t the only ones out there. We had competition, and plenty of it.
Enter the Competition
    Our core business was still comprised of restaurant accounts, so I spent most of my time selling in that arena. But I was not alone. By now several other companies had entered the scene, including companies dedicated to quiche and others that just sold desserts. There was Quiche and Tell, Food Gems, and Miss Grimble. (This last one is still around, I think, after several changes in ownership. The original owner was a woman named Sylvia Hirsch, and I clearly remember the scandalous story of how she sued her daughter for publishing some of their recipes in a cookbook without permission.) There was also Umanoff & Parsons and Country Epicure (sold early on to a Japanese croissant company Vie de France). There were others, but these are the ones with whom we constantly found ourselves going head to head while still in the local arena.
    The original founder of Food Gems, a quiche company that has gone through ownership and name changes, used to actually follow our trucks. He would wait outside while our driver made the delivery, and then he would wave to the driver and laugh as he headed