Foodies Gone Wild

When Charlie Ferguson was growing up in Beech Grove, Ind., he would help his dad, a connoisseur of spicy food, to plant and tend a backyard crop of chili peppers. So began a lifelong love affair with hot peppers. As an adult, Ferguson found commercial salsa either too salty or not spicy enough for his discerning palate, and he started making his own. By the time he married Glenda Klingensmith eight years ago and moved to her farm in Noblesville, Ind., Ferguson, now 52, was hooked on homemade salsa--so much so that he started planting jalapenos, habaneros, red chilis, Anaheims and sweet banana peppers. "Glenda goes, 'What are we going to do with all these peppers?'" recalls Ferguson. His response: make salsa--lots and lots of it. "We wound up making 140 quarts of it every summer, and we couldn't make enough of it," says Ferguson. "Finally, one day my attorney friend just called me over to the side and said, 'Charlie, I'm not trying to be nice to you--you need to be marketing this stuff. It's that good.'"

Within a year of taking their friend's advice, the couple had christened C&G Salsa. Their journey from kitchen to supermarket aisle has paid off handsomely. Crazy Charlie's Salsa--hot, medium and mild--is now in 87 Kroger stores in Indiana and Illinois. Charlie, a 27-year veteran of General Motors, is planning to retire in three years and devote all his energies to C&G.

Few products in the supermarket started out as the private stock of folks like the Fergusons. New foods are more likely to be designed and market-tested by corporate scientists, who could just as easily be making new pharmaceutical products. The Fergusons represent a growing flock of middle-aged foodies who are convinced that their homespun concoctions could be big sellers at the cash register. Of course, no one says it's going to be easy. But if you want to sell your favorite food to the public, there are lots of lessons to learn from the challenges faced by those like the Fergusons who have built thriving businesses around the tasty treats they have made at home.

For many, the road to the market is bumpier than expected. Consider the case of Joan Allen, 51, a free-lance television producer in Baltimore, Md., who decided to sell her popular dense, mousselike brownies after her job opportunities were severely curtailed during the post-9/11 recession. Faced with creating her brownie large-batch formula, she quickly discovered that she didn't have the slightest clue about how to work with commercial-grade liquid eggs. After that, two arrangements for using commercial kitchens eventually fell apart before she entered into her current agreement with Louise's Bakery in Baltimore. But probably her biggest mistake was not to have an attorney from the get-go. Allen had no idea that the name she attempted to trademark for her business--Chocolate Goddess Brownies & Sweets, a paean to the persona Allen adopts to give chocolate demonstrations--was already taken. Now she has an attorney who has helped her apply to use the name Silver Goddess Brownies & Sweets to operate her business, launched a month ago, in Maryland.