A Chat With Justin Rashid, founder and president, American Spoon Foods

© Profile of Success, Catalog Success magazine, October 2006

Catalog Success: When was the catalog established?
Justin Rashid: 1983. I started as a wild-food forager and purveyor. I grew up in the food business. I was supplying chefs, and one the chefs I supplied was a New York-based chef. He and I partnered to make the best fruit preserves in America. He gave me a recipe and I found the fruit. And we were young and dumb and we started a company when we were in our late 20s. We incorporated in 1982. The catalog got started when the foods we made were written about in the New York Times. That generated 4,000 requests for a catalog, and we didn’t have one. So that’s how we began, by answering the requests we got from the 1983 New York Times article.