With Love and Quiches (9 page)

Irwin and I knocked on the door of the building and met my soon-to-be new landlord. He invited us in, and I was immediately struck by the vastness of the space before me. This building was five thousand square feet, but coming from our tiny shop, it might as well have been a hundred thousand. The rent that went along with the giant building—$1,200 a month—seemed a princely sum for us in 1976, but we felt we could swing it. By this point we were doing over $300,000 a year in volume, and expansion to a bigger facility was mandatory. But could we afford to outfit such a cavernous space?

Within a week we’d decided to go for it, and we signed the lease for the Oceanside facility for five years with the right of renewal. For this move, I needed some working capital, and I managed to secure a $200,000 loan from a bank that my father, albeit grudgingly, introduced me to. Love and Quiches wasn’t yet considered bankable. My father also grudgingly put up securities as collateral, which was the
only
way I could secure the loan. He wasn’t very happy about that, and neither was I.

We were, at this juncture, still a do-it-yourself organization with extremely limited resources, so we designed the shop floor ourselves with some advice from our equipment suppliers. My father-in-law, a retired plumbing contractor, did the plumbing work, and we used local electricians, carpenters, handymen, and other assorted characters to do the other necessary remodeling. We had a few mini-disasters, including one that involved a handyman named Willie and bright, raspberry-colored paint all over our sidewalks and window glass. (“I told you, I
cain’t paint
!” was Willie’s defense.) Finally, up went our great big Love and Quiches sign, and we were almost ready to move in.

In Oceanside, we could handle real equipment. The secondhand bakery equipment supplier whom we had met when we bought our first pie
press for the garage sold us a Middleby Marshall rotary oven. It was a reconditioned twenty-four-pan gas oven with six shelves that rotated like a Ferris wheel so that the product was constantly moving through the heat. (Later, we added a second rotary oven with an eighteen-pan capacity.) The installation of our first Middleby Marshall was a major case of taking my company to the next level for me, but it was business as usual for Jimmy the Baker; he was used to real machinery.

My mentor Marvin Paige introduced me to another equipment supplier—a guy named Jack Harris, who became a mentor to me himself—who sold me a very large storage freezer for the baking side of our new workspace. Shortly after, he sold me another freezer—this one for the packing side—that made the previous one look tiny. It was about eighteen feet by twenty-four feet, almost the size of our first shop! This holding freezer enabled the staff to operate more efficiently by providing them with a place to store longer runs and to stage orders for shipping each morning. We were still delivering directly to our restaurant accounts, which meant we had a lot of very tiny orders to pack daily—two of this, one of that, and one of the other thing. (Yes, we were still selling eaches, not cases. The thought of cases hadn’t yet occurred to me. Still clueless!)

We bought plenty more racks, more mixers—some holding 180 quarts!—and more pans. Finally, we were ready for a
real
education in the industry. I had a feeling that
this
facility would be my proving ground, and I was right.

Our years in Oceanside gave us time to grow both as a company and as an organization. We were rounding out the company with a growing number of support staff as the company began to take on more shape. With Jimmy the Baker to help, our product line was still growing. He was training our young recruits in mixing, baking, and cake decoration (or “deco” in bakery manufacturing parlance).

At first the front office was run by my friend who had moved with us from the first small shop across from the firehouse. After she announced that she had not intended to be working so hard and was leaving, she was followed by a more experienced head bookkeeper, Mildred, who stayed with us for the rest of our time in Oceanside. She was an old-fashioned bookkeeper who was ardently committed to her manual ledger and had no use for the encroaching wave of computerization. We also hired a customer service rep who called our customers weekly, sometimes daily, for their orders. All of our invoicing was still done by hand, but at least we wrote them out on printed triplicate forms. This was an important baby step for us, one among many others that had begun to add up. We also started to do a bit of almost embarrassingly rudimentary advertising in local newspapers to attract more walk-in retail customers, and we set up a tiny area in the front office as a retail counter.

Purchasing responsibilities were shared by whoever was around and had some free time in the front office, since this function did not warrant a full-time position as of yet. We were still a fairly small business, but even so, we used quite a few suppliers. Under Jimmy’s tutelage, we always compared prices to keep them competitive. Jimmy the Baker was familiar with all the local distributors, so he compiled the list of needed supplies, and the rest of us pitched in to make sure he got what he wanted.

We bought another truck; this one was white with raspberry lettering instead of the other way around, because the hot pink on the
first truck had faded pretty quickly into a really dull color. Naturally another truck meant another driver—actually two because Don finally moved inside full time as the day manager, while Jimmy the Baker ran the night crew.

We had an endless supply of young people who wanted jobs, all of whom were friends and had grown up together in the neighborhood. They became our drivers, and soon we bought another and yet another truck. The new employees also became production workers, cake decorators, packers, cleaning crew, and all the other roles that evolved as we grew. We used to call them the “Motley Crew,” and I loved them all dearly. Many of them stayed with us for many years, growing up and into management positions before moving on.

You’ll recall my earlier comment that we tried our best to keep our sense of humor, but running our own trucks was, admittedly, a headache. Today we have strict inventory control and can account for every brownie, but back then, we had a few entrepreneurial drivers who would, on occasion, help themselves to a few cakes with the hope of selling them on their own. Luckily we had loyal customers who would call to let us know about this. One driver, still just a kid with a license, approached Marvin Paige, of all people, offering him our quiches at a great discount. Big mistake—end of job. Another time, two of our drivers had an accident—with each other! On the highway! When one of them called to inform us, we asked, thinking they were doing a route together, “Who was driving?” The sheepish response: “Both of us.”

My favorite driver story features a young man who was tall, very handsome, well muscled, and tattooed. Most of the time he wore a torn sleeveless T-shirt, even when it was cold outside. He was, at heart, a very gentle person in spite of his tough appearance. When he wasn’t making deliveries, I used to have him drive me around to my sales appointments in the city. He had this knack of maneuvering behind emergency vehicles and then speeding along when all the other traffic was stopped along the sides of the street. I would slide down in my
seat with my hands covering my eyes, but I didn’t stop him from doing it because, I must admit, I was able to make more than twice as many stops as I did when driving myself around. I was able to make at least ten sales calls on the days when
he
drove me around, and he was also good company. One time we stopped for lunch at one of our customers’ establishments. Once we sat down, I noticed that half a dozen women from my neighborhood who knew me from my former life were seated nearby, and all of them were staring at me with this hunk with decidedly dropped jaws. All I did was smile and wave, happy to give them something to gossip about.

Then there was Jimmy (not the baker), another driver who used one of our trucks to go out on dates because he didn’t have a car of his own. He also used it to go upstate with his father to pick up a load of Christmas trees during the holidays—only he never asked permission.

On occasion we found ourselves bailing one or two of our drivers out of jail. Nothing too heavy, all minor stuff, but we were all part of the Love and Quiches family, and I felt responsible for them all! We always gave our employees the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, saying, jokingly, that you had to practically be a murderer to get fired from Love and Quiches. Of course, now we hold our employees to another standard, but in those days, we were all learning together and things were quite a bit more casual.

But what we still didn’t know could fill volumes. I remember so very clearly that workers were
smoking
on the production floor! I have never smoked, but almost all young people at that time did. It was cool to smoke, and I didn’t know enough at first to stop them. And we would keep the doors open on hot days, another great sin. This was obviously before stricter rules became the protocol. Yet we were getting regular unannounced audits from the New York State Department of Agriculture, and we always got good scores. It is hard to fathom how we could have been so ignorant of how things should have been done, given how we operate today. Now we spend as much time cleaning and sanitizing as we do producing, with the production areas all separated from
outside areas with curtains, doors, and anterooms. I am grateful that 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 explained
that 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.

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.