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.
CS: As a ready-made list, that’s not so bad.
JR: No, it was a great list.
CS: Where are your headquarters?
JR: Petoskey, Mich.
CS: What is your primary merchandise?
JR: Specialty foods, food gifts, primarily preserved fruits and condiments.
CS: What are your main sales channels, and what percentage of sales does each represent?
JR: One-third through branded retail stores, one-third catalog and the Web, and one-third wholesale. We have four company-owned stores and three licensed stores. We also have a cafe that features our products. All of those are in Michigan.
CS: You said you grew up in the food business. Were your parents involved in that?
JR: My dad, yes. I grew up in bunch of family-owned grocery stores in Detroit. You could say my father loved the fruit peddler part of the business the most. And my mom was just an Indiana farm girl who loved to garden and wild food forage, and pick berries and all of that. I’m kind of a natural hybrid of them.
CS: Does a lot of the food still come from the wild?
JR: We still buy wild blackberries, wild elderberries and wild thimbleberries from people, but as the company has grown, it’s a smaller and smaller percentage of the total. It might be something we love to do and we’re proud of it, but it’s a much smaller percentage than it once was. Most of the products we now make are made from the cultivated fruits that Michigan is famous for -- cherries, red haven peaches, early-glow strawberries, blue crop blueberries. All of the things that the western side of Michigan, one of the premier microclimates in the world, is known for. That’s what we feature primarily.
CS: What was your biggest challenge in the first few years?
JR: Probably the biggest challenge in those days was convincing people that Michigan made specialty foods that rivaled the best in the world. Back in those days, specialty foods were imported. If it wasn’t from Paris, Germany, England or Italy, it wasn’t good. So we were one of the first American specialty food companies. People didn’t realize that American-made, locally made specialty foods could be wonderful and were worth the price.
CS: How did you deal with it?
JR: We faced it head-on. We set up a sample table in our stores to show people how good these things were.
CS: What’s the biggest business mistake you ever made, and how did you deal with it?
JR: Oh, there have been so many. Overall I’d say the biggest mistakes you make are when things are good, right? And our company became too dependent on a small number of very large customers. And sometimes you think, well, I shouldn’t be selling too much to any one customer. But you don’t always think, I shouldn’t be selling to too many customers who are all in the same industry or similar industries or in the same geographic area. Because things can happen and they do. We had a situation like that, many years ago, where we were dependent on a small number of very large customers in similar industries and geographic regions. And when they got in trouble, we got in trouble. And we survived by dramatically cutting expenses so we could survive without them and rebuild.
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.
CS: What are some key points to your success?
JR: Our close relationships with farmers. Our intimate knowledge of our fruit growing region and our regional advantages. We really have authenticity; we don’t have to fake it. We really do what we say we’re doing. We have a passion for flavor. That flavor is authentic, and we come by it honestly. We have a lot of people who work for us who share that inspiration. Another great advantage we have is because we’re small and we sell so much of our stuff directly to our catalog customers and in our own retail stores, we have direct relationships with our customers and that keeps us in touch with their perceptions and their priorities and their interests and their tastes. I think we’ve been pioneers and innovators in our field. So we try to do things first and leave it to others to try and imitate us. In general, being small, we do the opposite of what bigger companies do. The strategy of many large food companies is to put as little real food as possible into the jar. We put as much wonderful fruit as possible into the jar and we assume that our customers will perceive the value.
CS: Have you had any mentors in this business or business in general?
JR: Probably not in the formal sense. Living up here in a small town, not in an urban area, you’re somewhat isolated up here. But I’ve long admired Chuck Williams [Williams-Sonoma founder] as the consummate merchant of not only specialty foods, but tabletop and cookware. But my area is specialty foods, and I admire him as a individual with impeccable tastes who really focused on his customers.
Locally, there’s a guy none of your readers would know named Jerry Olson. He was a Travers City, Mich-based retailer who I respected immensely. He’s gone now, but Jerry raised his own herd of buffalo; he was a visionary and operated his own small scale cannery in the back of his store. He basically went his own way, loved what he was doing. I spent a lot of time talking with him. He was a real inspiration.
And as I mentioned, my parents. My father owned those family grocery stores with my uncle, but he loved his customers, suppliers and commerce in general. But even after he sold his stores, visiting farms, farmers’ markets, and peddling fruit was his hobby.
My mother was an Indiana farm girl, a real nature lover, an outdoors person. And at 86 she still keeps her own garden. She’s got 100 acres about 12 miles from here. She still picks wild berries and pickles her own vegetables and I guess I’m clearly most influenced by them.
CS: My grandfather owns a fairly large plot of land and when he’s able to he picks a lot of his own raspberries, blackberries and mulberries and we’ll occasionally end up with large containers of those. Although I’ve had to learn how to make raspberry pie just to use them up.
JR: You’re very lucky. Raspberry pie is one of the great luxuries of life. I wouldn’t complain! You’ve got to find something to do with them!
CS: What about the business appeals to you?
JR: Getting into this business was the solution to wanting to live a certain kind of life in a small town in a rural area. I value living in a small town here on Lake Michigan. I value being relatively independent. Watching the seasons, living with the seasons, which are pretty extreme up here. I value the long-term relationships we have with growers. And the fun part of the business of course is creating the new. Creating new products, new ways of featuring things in our stores. I’m a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, so I enjoy the variety of challenges I have, manufacturing, retailing, cataloging, communicating the story of what we do with our customers across the country. We say every taste tells a story, and it’s a real pleasure to feel that you’re thrilling customers and that the products you make bring enjoyment to their lives. So that’s the fun part of the business. It’s of course hard to be a very small independent business these days, but those are the rewards.
CS: So you grew up in Michigan?
JR: Yes, but I grew up in two extremes. I grew up in Motown in inner city Detroit. I spent every winter there for most of my life. But every summer we spent on that property my mother now owns in Wildwood, Mich., which is basically a ghost town. It’s an old lumber town in a valley 12 miles east of Petoskey. So it was two extremes: the inner city of Detroit and Wildwood, Mich., which is about as far away from anything as you can imagine.
CS: Sounds like quite the dichotomy.
JR: Yes, well the nice thing about it is that although it wasn’t a lake front cottage, to this day I can access about 30,000 acres of state land adjacent to my mother’s property. There are lots of trails and lots of room to hike and forage.
CS: What are your hobbies?
JR: Obviously, wild food foraging. Cross-country skiing, hiking. From June 1 through the first week of October, I swim almost every day in Lake Michigan. And I’m a voracious reader. The winters here are very conducive to reading.
CS: I guess it’s either reading or cross country skiing.
JR: Exactly!
CS: What are some of your favorite books?
JR: Oh gosh, well the one I’m reading right now is “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which I highly recommend. I think you’d find it really interesting. I think the author’s name is Michael Pollan, if I’m not mistaken.
CS: While you’re out foraging, what are some of your favorite wild foods?
JR: I started out picking berries, but I moved on as I got older. Now I love to forage for all kinds of wild mushrooms. In the autumn that’s probably my favorite thing. I’m a mycophagist, which is a person who likes to eat wild mushrooms, as opposed to a mycologist, who just studies all kinds of fungus. I just go for the edible varieties. It can be very dangerous, and you have to be very precise. I pick wild greens, wild vegetables and wild fruits as well.
CS: What goals do you have for the catalog and what steps will you take to achieve them?
JR: In terms of the catalog, we’re really interested in steady incremental growth. We’ve built our mailing list through our retail stores and the national recognition we’ve gotten by trying to produce spectacular products. People often come to us, thankfully, when they read about us. This past year, we were given the Gallo family vineyards gold medal for the best artisanal condiment. Things like that, recognition like that has been instrumental for us. You have to distinguish yourself. When we began there were just three American specialty food companies. And we’ll be 25 next year. We’re an old-timer in this business, but now it’s a crowded field. And there are only a handful that have really authentically wonderful products.
