We’re Here To Help You!

Q.  I’ve been reading a lot about start ups in major news outlets.  How can you help me?

This is what we do.

We help with all the steps required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and state governments in taking a recipe from the kitchen to a commercial venue. We're one of the few companies who are as excited about helping people with the process of getting a food product off the ground as much as the customer.

Our services include everything that is necessary to take a recipe from The Kitchen to the Marketplace, including FDA approval.  It’s one of the things that we’ve based our whole business approach on. 

We believe that this is the most important thing that’s happening in the food business in a long time.  The foodies, chefs and anyone passionate about their own creations are now ready to take the leap into the great unknown.

In her most recent blog on SmartBlog, Janet Forgrieve wrote:

Today, U.S. specialty food and beverage manufacturers market an average of 41 different products and last year the industry did a record $88.3 billion in retail and foodservice sales, according to the association. Sales dipped in 2009, as the recession hit, but they came back strong in the ensuing years, as foodies who had been used to fine dining started cooking at home more, said spokeswoman Louis Kramer.

At the same time, people who were losing jobs or otherwise downsizing were also reassessing their lives, dusting off old dreams and creating entrepreneurial food businesses, many of which are on display in the new-product hall at the show. Despite their brief histories, many of the newest ventures already have deals that put their products on retail shelves and restaurant tables.

And that, Ladies and Gentleman, is what we’re specializing in…”dusting off old dreams and creating entrepreneurial food businesses.”

We hope you choose us to help you go from Your Kitchen to the Marketplace.  Our dream is to help you fulfill your dream.

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

Makin’ Bacon–Part III A Maple Variation

Q.  I really enjoyed your blogs on makin’ bacon.  I like different flavored bacons, such as maple.  Can you tell me how to do this?

Absolutely. 

This recipe is not etched in stone and there are more things that you can do.  So, just for one example (mainly because you asked!), here is a way to make maple infused bacon.

Ingredients:

• 6 pounds of fresh pork belly. 
• Ask your butcher to cut it into two 3 pound slabs
• 1/2 gallon water
• 6 ounces of Kosher or pickling salt
• 4 ounces maple sugar, which consists of:
• (1/2 ounce maple syrup and 4 ounces of sugar)
• 2 ounces liquid smoke (because I’m not really smoking it)

Curing Method:

1. Mix the water, sugar, salt and liquid smoke in a medium sized mixing bowl
2. Place the pork belly in a gallon zip-log bag or a plastic container with a lid.  Pour as much brine over the meat as will fit in the bag/container.  In a container, you may have to weigh the pork belly down in order for the brine to completely cover the meat.
3. Place in the refrigerator for 72-96 hours.
4. If you’ve put it in a zip lock bag as pictured here, be sure to flip it every day to make sure the pork is fully cured.

See Part II for the smoking directions.

There are many other variations, you can do and I plan on making a spicy bacon one day by adding pepper mash to the curing process.  And for this recipe, just for example, I subtracted the amount of salt, because I thought it was too salty the first couple of times around.  You can make it sweeter by adding more sugar, smokier by adding more liquid smoke, saltier by adding more salt, etc. 

Please check out my webpage at FoodProductLaunch.com.  I’ve always wanted to help people in their quest to get going when it comes to launching and developing recipes for sauces, salsas, dressings and condiments and go from Your Kitchen to the Marketplace. 

Let us help you!

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

Makin’ the Bacon–Part II Smokin’

Q.  You mentioned in your last blog about you having an idea to make bacon.  How exactly do you go about doing that?

In Part I we wet-cured the bacon using a brine and now we’re going to smoke the bacon…indoors.  I’m using Wright’s liquid smoke to get the smoky flavor, but you could also put hickory chips and water in the bottom of the  roasting pan to achieve the same effect.  Liquid smoke is an all natural product made from hickory, applewood or mesquite wood that is burned inside a chamber. As the smoke rises it is captured in a condenser and it cools. The cooled smoke forms water droplets (condensation). These droplets are then collected and filtered twice.  I use hickory in this recipe, mainly because I bought a gallon jug of it from Gordon Food Service (GFS).

Here is the step by step process to smoke the bacon.  

1. Put your oven rack on the lowest level and heat your oven to 170 degrees.
2. Take the pork out of the zip-lock bag and pat it dry. 
3. If you prefer, liberally sprinkle the pork belly with pepper.  As pictured below.
4. Mix 2 ounces of liquid smoke with 8 ounces of water and pour it into the bottom of the roasting pan.
5. Place the pork bellies on a rack, with the pork skin up in the roasting pan.
6. Cover with a tent made with aluminum foil; this will give you a smoke effect.
7. Bake at 170 degrees for 8 hours.
8. Remove from the heat and it should look beautiful!  The reasons it’s more brown than pink that what you would see normally in your grocery store are twofold – it’s been cooked AND there are no nitrates.
9. Let the meat cool for a few hours then remove the skin. You can then sell the pigskin to the National Football League!

10.  The result? You have cooked bacon and you can eat it the way that it is.  Or you can slice it and cook it further, either baking or fry it up in a pan.

Please be sure to watch this space for Part III – in which I’ll give you alternatives to this process – in terms of flavor and smoking.

I like to think of FoodProductLaunch.com as the culmination of all my life-long food experiences, starting with working with my grandmother and mother canning fruits and vegetables when I was a youngster.  I want you to experience the same things that I have to go from Your Kitchen to the Marketplace. 

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

Makin’ Bacon! Part I – The Cure

Q.  You mentioned in your last blog about you having an idea to make bacon.  How exactly do you go about doing that?

As you may know from reading my blogs I’m into making my own homemade things that most people just purchase at the store.  I really enjoy making pickles, canning jalapeños, making jam and putting up vegetables.   I’ve been known to make my own sausage, jerk my own beef and recently I’ve made my own bacon. 

The reason I enjoy creating things in my own kitchen is because whatever I make turns out better than what I can buy in the store.  In the case of bacon, it was fairly simple and because it contained no additives, like sodium nitrate, it’s much healthier. 

Another thing that I don’t really like to do is reinvent the wheel, so I took two recipes and combined them – one for the brine to Cure the pork belly  and the other for the method of smoking the bacon in an oven as opposed to using a smoker.  Even then I couldn’t leave it just at that, so I modified the recipes, combined them and created my own. 

So without much further ado – here’s Part I of my methodology for makin’ bacon! 

Ingredients:

• 6 pounds of fresh pork belly. 
• Ask your butcher to cut it into two 3 pound slabs
• 1/2 gallon water
• 6 ounces of Kosher or pickling salt
• 4 ounces dark brown sugar
• (1/2 ounce molasses and 4 ounces of sugar)
• 2 ounces liquid smoke (because I’m not really smoking it)

Curing Method:

1. Mix the water, sugar, salt and liquid smoke in a medium sized mixing bowl
2. Place the pork belly in a gallon zip-log bag or a plastic container with a lid.  Pour as much brine over the meat as will fit in the bag/container.  In a container, you may have to weigh the pork belly down in order for the brine to completely cover the meat.
3. Place in the refrigerator for 72-96 hours.
4. If you’ve put it in a zip lock bag as pictured here, be sure to flip it every day to make sure the pork is fully cured.

Please be sure to watch this space for Part II – in which I’ll cover all the steps necessary to finish the process.

FoodProductLaunch.com has long been something that I’ve longed to do, which is to help as many of you as possible go from Your Kitchen to the Marketplace.  We take the scary out of the process!

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

On Flexibility

Q.  You seem to have many interests when it comes to the food business – from your product list alone, you’re producing sauces, jams, rubs and other things like chili.  What do you think is the most important thing to success for your clients?

Wow…that one is really a hard one. 

I think that we assume that our clients have a passion for what they’re doing and enough money to support them and their food habit.  If I had to choose one, it would be flexibility and an ability to adapt.

When I first started down this path after being a nerd in the area of systems engineering, I thought that just creating my own signature pasta sauce which is THE.BEST.EVAH was good enough.  I thought that the business would just come because the sauce was so good.  What I didn’t realize then that I do now is that I do not have a passion for retail sales. 

I’ve worked with people in the past who didn’t have that flexible approach to business and were what I would consider one trick ponies.   If I came up with an idea to do something, I’d get answers like, “we’re not going to expand our product line,” or “that’s too labor intensive to make a go of it,” or ‘”we’ve never done that before,” or some other excuse to not even give things a try. 

I always wanted to hear the answer of “Why Not?” 

I’ve found that if I had stuck to my first thought and wasn’t flexible enough to change that I would not have found success.  In changing the fundamental aspect of what I was doing I found a renewed passion.

My newfound plan of attack is to take the facility that I have my eye on for purchase and utilize it in many new ventures.  By using the facility in a flexible manner and taking a “Why Not?” approach, I think I can scratch as many of my personal itches as I want.

I want to make pickles of all kinds.  I want to pickle jalapeños and other hot peppers.  I have an idea to make bacon and sausages.  I want to have a street vendor license and sell take out Italian sausages with peppers and onions and my pasta sauce, and hot dogs Buffalo or Chicago style. 

I want to open up my facility to people who want to start their own food business, whether that’s baking pies and cakes and cupcakes or starting a catering business or creating sauces or selling sandwiches to go from a roach coach. 

I want my community to know that I am a force to be reckoned with when helping startups startup.

FoodProductLaunch.com is my grand idea and my great passion.  I want to help as many of you as possible go from Your Kitchen to the Marketplace.  We take the scary out of the process!

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

The Social Media Dilemma

Q.  I notice that you are on Facebook and Twitter.  Do you believe that engaging my customers through social media is important to my new business?

For those of us who didn’t grow up with an iPhone as a pacifier, this presents a big dilemma.  And that dilemma is whether we spend our precious time focusing on doing what we think is core to our business or generating traffic on sites like Facebook and Twitter. 

The goal of FoodProductLaunch.com is to get to as many foodies, food hobbiests, restauranteurs, executive chefs and restaurant owners as possible in order to gain a major market share of those people who want to take their product from The Kitchen to the Marketplace.  For me Community Management On-Line or Social Media Marketing is extremely important to what I want to do.  Therefore, it was not that much of a question.

If you think about it, in general it’s not that big of a dilemma.  It’s really a no-brainer.  You have to establish your brand and what’s a better way to do that than through an advertising campaign that if you handle it by yourself costs you little to no money?   Back in the day if you were a startup and you wanted to get your product out there (wherever out there was), you relied on word of mouth marketing through your friends and family.  Essentially, that’s what you could use Facebook for. You don’t have to be web-savvy, you just have to know how to use Facebook and twitter and be able to provide status updates.

But…and I like big buts and I cannot lie…There is more work to be done than if you are just blasting away without knowing what you’re doing.  You have to know what makes those sites work for you and what doesn’t.  You have to experiment and determine what kinds of updates, tweets, blog entries are driving traffic to your site and more importantly you have to determine whether this is bringing you business.  And if you don’t know what you’re doing you could be doing it all wrong. 

This graphic drives me nuts, because of the word like in quotes, and it represents the shameless way that people manipulate their friends and family into driving traffic to their Facebook.  I’m not a big fan of these kinds of campaigns.  I believe you have to take a personal approach and somehow telling people to like you is just wrong.  You want to get people to subscribe to your tweets and Facebook status without going all Sally Field on everyone.

My advice?  Strike a balance between what you love to do and what you have to do.  Go to the experts if you have questions and subscribe to blogs such as HootSuite, which has got a wealth of knowledge for newbies and Kommein, which is Deb Ng’s blog – she’s the lady who literally wrote the book on Community Management.

FoodProductLaunch.com is here for you when you’re ready to make the next step to go from Your Kitchen to the Marketplace.  We specialize in helping startups start up with their condiments, dressings, jams, salsas and sauces. 

We take the scary out of the process!

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

Restaurant Menu Nutritional Analysis Pilot Project

Q.  What does Obamacare have to do with the food industry?

The recently passed Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare has had a huge effect on our country in the short period of its existence.  Not only for healthcare, but also in how restaurants run their day to day operations. 

The naysayers people over at Forbes magazine had this to say about it:

The calorie label clause, buried deep within the ACA’s 10,000 pages, seems harmless enough at first glance. Each restaurant chain with over 20 locations is required to display the calorie content of each food and drink item it serves on signs and printed menus–with vending machine distributors subjected to the same rules.

With the obesity problems that we have in this country and the health care costs associated with it I think that there needs to be some things in place to help us consumers make wise decisions.

Part of our lives is going to the grocery store and buying our food.  In many cases, we study the labels and inspect the products and we make our choices depending on what is good or bad for us.

Well, this type of labeling, at least from a calorie perspective, is what the ACA is calling out for in restaurant chains of over 20 locations.  I’ll pull out my crystal ball and predict that this is going to become mandatory for restaurants of all sizes in the not too distant future.

What’s that got to do with FoodProductLaunch.com and helping people go from The Kitchen to the Marketplace?  Well, nothing really, except that as part of that process, I have the ability to perform nutritional analysis.  What I’d like to do is to offer that service to restaurant owners who would like to provide that information to their customers. 

I’m launching a Pilot Project for Restaurant Menu Nutritional Analysis.  I’m going to work with one or two restaurants (local and distant) who want to have their menu analyzed for nutritional labeling.

This will be a FREE project.  It will cost the chosen restaurant nothing at all.  The only cost would be time! 

Criteria:

1. Willingness to participate – I’m looking for someone who would be committed to this project.
2. Vision – I’m looking for a restaurant owner who sees the value of providing their customers with the nutritional information related to their menu items.
3. Location Location Location – I’d prefer a local restaurant to start (Sarasota area) and would expand it to other locales if necessary.
4. Trust – you will have to trust that I am doing this just for the analysis.  I don’t ever want to run my own restaurant, so stealing your recipes is not on my agenda.
5. Data Analysis – At the end of the program, I would like feedback on whether or not this was a valuable exercise.

Have I mentioned that this would not cost you anything?

The benefit to you as the restaurant owner is that, like Subway, you could offer your customers healthy programs and know EXACTLY what is in the offering.  You could tailor your menu for those healthy items and promote them to your health minded clients.  You could make that part of your advertising campaign to bring in more customers.

If you are interested in participating in this project, please email me at foodproductlaunch@gmail.com with the subject line “Pilot Project.”  Let me know some information about your restaurant and yourself and how you meet the above criteria.

Thanks for your interest in the project. 

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

More on Living Happy

Q. Doing what you love..being happy…and then we had that big apocalyptic moon…all of these things are great and all, but what’s that got to do with launching my product?

Yeah, it seems like I got off track a little and maybe you can indulge me just a bit longer on these personal things as I think of a dear friend who has pancreatic cancer. 

Paul Bowles in The Sheltering Sky wrote, “But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

We view each day as just another one of our seemingly limitless days and we feel we always have time to do the things we love. We believe that after we’ve started doing the things that we love, then we’ll really be happy. There’s still time to take that skydiving class.  There’s still time to take up ballroom dancing.  There’s still time to get that recipe out to TJ at FoodProductLaunch.com so I can get on with the next phase of my life.  The one I’ve been wanting to live.  The life of making/producing/selling my own creation to Make You Feel My Love. 

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  I’ve been where you are right now.  I’ve waited.  I’ve procrastinated.  I’ve put it off to another one of my limited days.  It took me years to get my a$$ in gear and start. 

What I am telling you is that if you’re thinking of doing something different with your life, if you’re thinking of radically changing the thing you do, if you’re thinking of how much happier you’d be doing that thing, then the time to do that is now. 

If that thing that you want to do is to get your creation to the marketplace and you’re ready right now then let’s go! 

FoodProductLaunch.com specializes in helping people with all the steps required in taking their recipes from the Kitchen to the Marketplace, helping to make you happy by making others happy!

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

Doing What Makes You Happy

Q.    I love to cook, I’ve got some great creations and I’m about ready to start my own food biz.  Do you believe in the adage, “do what you love and the money will follow?”

I’ll have to answer with the words, that depends, and a quote - “I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing,” author Penelope Trunk observed a few years ago.  I agree with Penelope about sex, writing and cooking!  There’s not much of a chance that I’d be able to make much of a living in any of those fields except for cooking.  Therefore, I stick with something that I’m skilled at and that I love. 

You’ll be happier starting off doing something that you love than starting off with something that is horrible and you’re only doing it for the money.  So, it depends on if you’re willing to do something you love and work at making sure that whatever it is that you do does not become a drudgery.  Also, you’ll have to check your ego at the door. So, when you first start out with whatever food product (sauces, salsas, dressings or condiments) you’re going to produce, be prepared to have people try it and then call your baby ugly.  If you can take that, then you’ll be great. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not good with criticism, especially when someone calls my baby ugly. 

In the case of starting your own business based on sauces, salsas, dressings and condiments, then make sure that you’re working with someone who shares your passion for cooking and knows the ins and outs of how to help you go from your kitchen to the marketplace.  I’ve been there before and I’ve worked with people who didn’t really care about my creations.  It was a job/drudgery to them.

I love to help people.  I love cooking.  I love perfecting a process.  I love seeing a finished product.  So, for me, this is what I have a passion for and I believe the money will follow.  So far, so good.  And I’m happy. So, clap along if you feel like that’s what you want to do.  

For a counter argument, check out Rob Asghar’s article in Forbes magazine, five reasons to ignore the advice!

FoodProductLaunch.com specializes in helping people with all the steps required in taking their recipes from the Kitchen to the Marketplace.

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.

I Lost My Hat!

If you know stuff about me you may know that I am a big fan of hats, especially what are commonly referred to as baseball hats.  Maybe it’s because I don’t have much hair left and need to protect my noggin from the effects of the hot Florida sun or maybe it’s that I like to make statements about my allegiances.   Or maybe it’s because I love my dog, Gunner, so much that I like to give him expensive chew toys that smell a lot like me. 

Anyway…like most who have an affinity for their fashion accessories, I do become attached to certain hats and they for one reason or another become a favorite.  There are a number of factors that play into a hat becoming a top hat in the rotation:

1. Comfort – it must be comfortable.  That’s first and foremost.  To paraphrase OJ’s Dream Team lawyers, “If it don’t fit, it ain’t sh**.”
2. Style – it has to have some sort of style.  To me, that means color, logo or team, embroidery, and size of the cap itself.  None of us want to look like Fred McGriff in that famous informercial of a bunch of years ago.
3. Appropriateness – it has to be appropriate for the occasion.  I like the woolen fitted baseball caps a lot, but it is too hot to wear to a spring training game. 
4. Coordinated – it has to be coordinated with whatever you are wearing.  I like green hats, especially the well-worn cotton ones, but putting a green hat on with a red shirt makes me look like Christmas.  It just doesn’t work.

So, what does all this have to do with FoodProductLaunch.com.  Well, everything and nothing at all. 

The hat in question was a Nike Featherlight, not the most expensive hat I’ve ever had and definitely not the least expensive.  As far as the above criteria go, I would give it a 10 for comfort – they don’t call it featherlight for nothing, a 7 for style – it’s actually kind of fugly, a 9.5 for appropriateness - I was wearing it on a cruise and needed something exactly like this hat, and a 10 for coordinated - because it matched everything that I wore or would be wearing on a tropical vacation.

What made this particular cap so special? 

See those vents in the cap?  One day a few years ago, I decided to take a few knick-nacky pins that I had lying around the house and pin them to the vents on either side of the hat.  There were about 6 or 7 small pins including: a Norge pin that I had gotten in Norway (there’s a joke there having do with plumber’s crack), a Buffalo pin, an insignia pin for the unit my father served in during WWII - the 14th Armored Division (AD) - and last, but certainly not least, a service pin that I had gotten from a three letter acronym agency I had worked at for over 20 years. 

I have not worked there for a long time and I’ve had recurring dreams that I am stuck inside that Agency’s more than four walls and I cannot get out because I no longer have an identification badge.  How I get in, I never know, and in my dream it’s like the Hotel California.

I was on a cruise to Mexico with my wife and my sister and my brother-in-law a little bit of time ago and I took to wearing that hat every day. As luck would have it I had taken the 14th AD insignia pin off the hat and had given it to my sister that morning at breakfast.   The only pin with any other real significance left on the hat was the 20 year service pin, which I was very proud of.

We got off the ship and went into town (town is a loose term meaning a place consisting of only tourist traps) and had a nice time avoiding all the people trying to sell us stuff.  (Where is that sarcasm font?)  On the way back, we hopped into a cab and were left off at the docks where our cruise ship was.  The cab then vanished amidst all the other yellow colored sedans.

On the way to the ship, I realized that in my search for my cruise card to get back on the ship, I had not only lost it, but I had lost my hat.

My hat!  My f***ing hat with all my cool f***ing pins.  Dagnabbit.

I was so mad.  I was spitting fire and smoke was coming out of my ears.  I ranted all the way in to the ship.  I was snapping at my wife and my sister, but not my brother-in-law because he’s still a weightlifter. 

After I calmed down about 3 weeks later, I realized that there was a reason that I lost THAT hat.  It was meant to be lost.  It was supposed to be gone.  It had tangible evidence of my former life.  One that I am no longer even loosely affiliated it with.  I am a foodie.  I’m an entrepreneur.  I like to help people get through the process of going from Kitchen to Market.  I’m not that three letter agency guy anymore and I never will be again. 

Maybe it took me losing that hat to realize that important fact.

TJ Gallivan

© foodproductlaunch.com 2014 All Rights Reserved.  We encourage you to repost this blog in its entirety.  If you choose to use portions of it…give credit where credit is due.