Summary
Black-owned businesses based on family recipes, including Herbert and Sylvia Woods' restaurant and $6 mil canned food line - Includes a directory of helpful organizations
It takes planning and persistence to turn a family recipe into a successful business. Three Black companies that were able to succeed in the food industry are profiled, and tips for starting such a business are given. The products include Michele's Honey Creme Syrups, and Vib's Caribbean Heat hot sauce.See the full content of this document
Extract
Recipes for success.
It takes more than a little love to make a prized family recipe a winning business. But with pluck, planning and plenty of persistence, it can be profitable.
REMEMBER GRANDMA'S SECRET recipe for hot and spicy spaghetti sauce? Year after year, you would sit and watch her add "a dash of this" and "a pinch of that," wondering when she would realize that it was good enough to sell. But she never did. Michele Hoskins, owner of Michele Foods Inc. in Calumet City, Illinois, recalls watching her own grandmother serve up a family favorite that reaches back four generations and today has become the flagship product for her $5.5 million premium syrup manufacturing company. "When my grandmother was alive, we used to go to her house every Sunday for breakfast to eat her honey creme syrup over waffles and pancakes," says Hoskins, whose great-great-grandmother, a slave from Arkansas, developed the recipe in the late 1800s. "Selling everything but the children," Hoskins raised $100,000 in start-up capital to launch her business with Michele's Honey Creme Syrup in 1984. The company has since grown to include two additional syrups (Michele's Butter Pecan and Maple Creme Syrups), a $3.5 million food se...See the full content of this document
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