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

CS: What is your current biggest business challenge and how do you plan to resolve it?
JR: Our biggest challenge is the high cost of our ingredients. We buy the finest fruits anywhere. And we make everything here in Petoskey. We buy the finest American ingredients and make everything here and almost all of our inputs are local or regional. The prices are very high, and the prices go up with energy costs as everything else does. That’s our biggest challenge, that our model is based on delivering an incredible value in terms of flavor, and we deliver that value with a very high content of wonderful ingredients. They’re not inexpensive. The way we’re coping with it is to form close, mutually dependent relationships with the best growers who’ve sold to us directly for many many years. And they offer us more stable prices for the long term relationship. We do that with our highest volume fruits.