With Love and Quiches (17 page)

While nothing ever happens at Love and Quiches without its bit of drama, the events surrounding the building of this new freezer were over the top even by our standards! It may sound unusual, but this type of construction involves building from the inside out. The entire racking system is put up first, and it is this system that supports the outside walls and roof. Essentially, the racking system holds up the entire building. The roof and compressors are the last to be built and installed.

Well, during the construction period, in the middle of the night, we received a frantic call from Jimmy the Baker inquiring—or more like howling—“Are you trying to scare me to death!” Something had gone terribly wrong, and the entire infrastructure, the racking system, had toppled over upon itself just like a set of dominos! Just imagine the sound and the fury of all that metal collapsing in a heap. After the initial shock, the refrigeration construction company jumped into action, and the project was completed with only a six-week delay. It seems
that a collapsing freezer is a rite of passage, once per facility, for Love and Quiches. (And as you’ll recall from the story about my childhood home burning down, refrigeration disasters have always played a dramatic role in my life.)

Over the next few years, we built other additions outside our Freeport facility to make more room inside: blast freezers and both flour and sugar silos with capacity for tens of thousands of pounds of those ingredients. We use a
lot
of sugar and flour, so we refill our silos very often. Almost fifteen years later, I still find myself amazed when I drive up in the morning and see the huge tanker trucks pumping the stuff in! The fact that we have silos at all is not something that I would
ever
have imagined. Not me, not here, not ever.

There was a time, back in the nineties, when I used to see trucks on the highway or lined up in front of our building as symbols—that is, symbolic of the relentless and never-ending responsibility, feeling as if my whole life was passing before my eyes. Now I just see them as trucks.

Most of what we did in the nineties paved the way for what we faced and what we did in the first decade of the new century. We were growing, but we operated with the wrong business model for what we ultimately hoped to achieve. We just didn’t know it at the time.

One of the most important decisions we made in that decade was to give up our trucks and move to common carriers for transport and distributors to sell our products for us. It took great courage because our direct delivery business represented several million dollars of our volume. But we had come to realize that that wasn’t where our real future lay.

We decided it would be more profitable to devote our energies to developing distributors in the tri-state area to service our 450 local customers, who by then consisted of restaurants, hotels, cafés, colleges, employee feeding, and all the other usual suspects. Direct
delivery for us meant having to maintain the customer service staff and warehouse crew—not to mention drivers, trucks, and parking tickets (for details, see the next paragraph)—to make at least 450 phone calls weekly, print hundreds of invoices, pack hundreds of orders mostly under $75, and have them delivered daily, with every account clamoring for morning delivery.

(If you did business in the city, you inevitably got a lot of parking tickets. In fact, we got so many that we qualified to have our own rep within the traffic violations department. An employee went up there once a month, by appointment, to plead the tickets and settle up at a discount. Very civilized, but we were glad it was over when we took our trucks off the road!)

And then to collect! We always knew there were plenty of fly-by-nights in the business, and we took that as part of our costs, but we diligently worked to keep bad debt to a minimum. Nevertheless, it was often quite aggravating. Our accounts receivable clerk’s husband worked at the time for a debt collection agency. He was our formidable enforcer; this was, after all, New York, a very tough town.

Our local direct delivery business had been kept separate from the rest of the company; it had its own operating budget, sort of a business within the business. But we were fast segueing into a national presence as we expanded our reach and sought more multiunit customers. The local business was profitable and well managed, despite its difficulties, but it was taking way too many of our resources, and we needed to move away from it. Our focus moved outward.

During this era, Elaine retired, and we recruited some talented and highly computer-literate young people to take over the various functions she had managed. We also hired a PR firm exclusively aligned with the foodservice industry, and it was during this period that we designed and launched our first website, with their help. It featured a lot of pink stripes, but soon we upgraded the site to beige with green diamonds and lots of swirling slices, berries, and walnuts. This is also when, after
ten or more years, we finally gave up trying to persuade the industry to recognize “Susan’s Sweet Talk” as a trade name for our desserts, gave it up, and formally renamed the company “Love and Quiches Desserts.”

Another project was our first gatefold brochure, a six-sided affair with a deep pocket in which to tuck sell sheets. This was major. We hired both a top New York City commercial photographer and a food stylist, rented freezers, and sent tons of products to his studio, along with countless cartons of props. Each morning a mob of us would descend upon his place: marketing and R&D personnel, me, and representatives from our PR firm, plus—I am chagrined to admit—a ubiquitous box of greasy donuts to sustain us.

What we thought would be a three-day project took almost a month, with each shot requiring a painstakingly slow process. By the time each slice or whole cake was fussed with and dressed up, not a crumb out of place, and the plates, props, and background had been selected, we were exhausted. But we loved every minute of it. One day Abby, our R&D chef, and I were dispatched to Macy’s to pick up a certain sized plate since
nothing
among the myriad props we had brought satisfied the photographer for a particular shot! We found the perfect candidate, but it was only available as a set. We had no choice but to slip the display plate into my bag and quickly walk it out the door. Among our many other company roles, we were now thieves; my heart still skips a beat when I think of it.

We took dozens upon dozens of shots, including individual slice shots that did double duty by being printed as table tents. Our PR firm also worked closely with us on the copywriting. All in all, it was a fantastic experience and the brochures were gorgeous.

What we did at that incredible photo shoot we partially do in-house now, including updating and printing brochures only as needed. We even do some of the photography. But by printing to order, we have eliminated all obsolete sell sheet inventory, which used to pile up quickly in our storage closets.

When we moved our retail store across the street to make space for our real test kitchen, we also took a lot of additional space in the same building for dry storage, meant to hold inventory such as corrugated packaging supplies, canned goods, label inventory, and such. We also created a sales office and an office for Irwin that he never used,
ever
, because it isolated him too much. In taking this space, we assumed that by buying larger quantities of supplies we would receive better prices, among other rationales. But we never considered the high cost of carrying so much excess inventory. This was space we absolutely did not need, and it was painfully brought home to us during the events of the next few years.

Just before the year 2000, we hired someone from one of our competitors, a man who had approached us to run the operations and production end of the business. He was an interesting guy—I’ll call him X—good looking, with a long, blond ponytail. He commuted from the West Coast weekly because he preferred to be with his family on the weekend. We rented a studio apartment for him, but all he wanted in the way of furnishings was a bridge table, one chair, a mattress, a TV, and a hot plate.

To our way of thinking, X was the answer to our prayers. We were wrong. We already suffered from too much inventory, but his approach to best servicing our customer base’s needs was to further build finished inventory to such an extreme amount that we found our four-hundred-pallet freezer completely inadequate to hold it all, which led us to take some public freezer storage from a third party for the only time in our forty-year history and to ship our orders from there. We built thousands of cases of product that then sat there waiting for the orders to come. The cost of carrying inventory in my industry is much higher than in many other manufacturing businesses: it takes a lot of energy to keep product frozen, and the shelf life clock starts ticking from day one. Material costs are quite
high, as well, for our upscale products. It seems so utterly obvious,
now
, that we needed to be much more mindful that our products were perishable. Not to do so in this case was a big mistake on our part, as we’d soon come to find out.

We piled on the inventory and overhead on the theory that if we had everything we could possibly need (and then some!) we could fulfill orders more quickly as they came in. We were choking ourselves with everything that we absolutely did not need, and for all the wrong reasons.

Still other events during this decade had a dramatic effect on the company. In early 1998, Jimmy the Baker—we will forever think of him by that name—started to complain about having constant headaches. He kept saying, “I think I need a new prescription for my glasses” and other things along the same line while trying to explain it to himself. He must have had a very high threshold for pain, because the sad punch line is that within ninety days he was gone, a victim of brain cancer.

We were devastated because
all
of us—over two hundred people at the time—loved and respected him. And it was a credit to his management skills that we never missed a beat after his passing. The very next day, his second- and third-in-command stepped up to the plate, and production continued as usual. Luckily, we had come a long way in developing our software systems by then; otherwise, many formulas for our very best products might have been lost when Jimmy died. The formula management modules in our software programs, by then, were well developed, so we had complete control of our recipes. That was hard won, because right up to the end Jimmy would
still
tend to cup his hand, hold it up, and tell us “about this much” or “about three handfuls” when we asked how much of a given ingredient was in a recipe. His well-trained heirs apparent helped us formalize it all, yet to this day we still recertify some of our original
recipes to make sure all the information is correct. Even so, our chefs constantly look at our most original recipes with a critical eye to see if they can be improved upon, along with our constant parade of new product introductions.

As early as our first days in Oceanside, when we had about a dozen employees, I knew that developing an orderly hierarchy was my next order of business.

In that mini-factory, we had taken our first rudimentary steps at building an organization by dividing management simply between the day crew and the night crew. This was developing an organization in plain vanilla. After that, we started to further divide areas of responsibility and function: the Deco Crew decorated, and the Packing Crew packed. At night there was a Mixing Crew and an Oven Crew. And so we evolved.

As our original Motley Crew began to move on, we started to promote others from within who showed talent, and then we started looking outside for operations managers just as we had for sales staff. Our organization began to take on a more formalized shape.

We also knew that developing a family spirit—an
esprit de corps—
would be a vital element in our future growth. There had been several attempts throughout the years to unionize our company, but our employees have never chosen to do so. I think it is because we have always treated them fairly and with respect, have always invited their input, and have always done as much as we could for them. We provide a good place to work, and we always give good people opportunities for moving up in the company.

As soon as we moved to our present home in Freeport in 1980, we started a tradition of celebrating the Christmas holidays with a fiesta right in the middle of the production area. We would push all of the equipment to the side; we brought in a caterer and a waitstaff; we hired
a disc jockey. All family members or significant others were welcome, and we all had a grand party on a Friday evening about a week before the actual holiday. Today, no outside food nor anybody who is not all suited up in a lab coat, complete with hair and beard nets—much less all dressed up for a party—is even allowed anywhere
near
the floor. But back then we even had a wedding for two of our employees on the production floor, just as elaborate as our annual party!

But the Christmas tradition ended abruptly and with a bang. The party’s allure was growing, and we had to set up gatekeepers, like bouncers at a disco, but each year the number of party crashers was growing. One year there was an altercation. We called the police, who were there in minutes—Freeport takes good care of its businesses—and
that was that!

From then on we held our yearly bash in June at a local park in Freeport, and they got better and better. The park offered excellent facilities that could be reserved for a private event if you remembered to call on January 2, when they would book on a first come, first served basis. Eventually it sort of became “our spot” for the first Saturday in June, with no danger of our being shut out.