How did I get started?

 

Q.  I often wonder how people get started in any business, and I’d like to ask you…How did you get started?

Well, that’s an interesting question and it’s been a long circuitous career route for me.  I should give credit where credit is due.  My mom and my grandmother got me onto the canning thing when I was a kid.  My grandmother was a farm girl and after she married my grandfather and moved to the big city, Buffalo NY, she always had a garden.

When I was growing up, we were lucky enough to live across the street from my grandparents (I’m the young lad sitting in the in the grass on the left). One of my chores was to help with things like planting, weeding and harvesting.  

And canning.

Every year at O Dark Thirty on July 5th, my mother would pile her 6 kids in the car (a 1965 Rambler Classic) and take us to the local u-pick farm to pick strawberries.  Our one trip to McDonalds during the year was on that day for lunch.  Then we would go home and make strawberry jam.  All of us kids had a chore - even the little ones.

Later that year toward the end of each of growing season, my mom or grandmother would buy a bushel or two of tomatoes and cucumbers we would put up pickles and can the tomatoes.  During the following months of the year we would eat all of those food products until the next harvest.  This was after I helped plant the garden and harvest the fresh stuff that would grow in Grandma’s organic garden.

So fast forward a bunch of years later.  I’ve been making pasta sauce for a long time from a recipe my mom got from her mom.  I’ve modified it a little bit and people really like it.  I enjoy sharing it with people.  The first time I sent it long distance, I had gotten a gift from a friend from a steak company in Nebraska.  And as luck would have it, that day I made a big batch of pasta sauce. I still had the Styrofoam box and the dry ice from the meat shipment, so I froze some sauce and mailed it off to him in Arizona.

It cost me about $100. 

Then I said to myself (and the whole neighborhood because I am quite loud)…”Sheesh…I have my grandmother’s canning equipment..Dagnabbit…WHY DON’T I JUST CAN THIS STUFF??!!”

Only I didn’t say sheesh or dagnabbit.

From that day on I would make about 7 gallons of sauce a few times a year, can it and send it to my family and friends as gifts.

That’s how it all began for me.  One thing just led to the next.  I realized that I had a great product and I naturally progressed to the next step of trying to discover how to get my pasta sauce manufactured on a larger scale, and in a way that I could sell it to the public…

That’s how I got here, and that is why I want to help you.

TJ Gallivan

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