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February 09, 1990 - Image 25

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1990-02-09

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

Will Mandel Make
A Mint?

Jacqueline Ridley and Gail Jacob of Ridley's Muffins: "The muffins just took over."

,

weighs six ounces, all of the
muffins should. Legally, the
product must be manufac-
tured in a commercial kit-
chen. King also recommends
liability insurance, just in
case someone bites into a
muffin, breaks a tooth and
decides to sue.
When Motor City Muffins
was just getting off the
ground, Bonin and Sherman
rented space in a pizza shop.
As orders grew, they used the
kitchen at Congregation Beth
Shalom in Oak Park.
It's not just finding the
right product and a place to
make it — it's getting that
product to the public and get-
ting the stores and the con-
sumer to sample, purchase
and buy again. That means
sales, marketing and
distribution. Motor City Muf-
fins literally started
marketing door-to-door.
"The key is perseverance,"
Bonin says. "You make it
again, sell it again. Con-
sistency — stay with what
you're doing and don't give up
on yourself or your goals."
When she first started,
Ridley says she faced a lot of
rejection, "walking in off the
street with my little bag of
goodies. Retailers want to
know what will the product
do for them. Can you do it bet-
ter than somebody esle? Bet-
ter display delivery, service?"
Most small retailers are
willing to give the beginner a
break. R.I.K.'s Total Cuisine
Center in Bloomfield Town-
ship handles both Motor City
Muffins and Ridley's.
"How do I know if it's a
great product?", says R.I.K:s
partner Ken Fink. "It's more
of an art than a science." Fink

says he has to feel that the
product is high quality, tastes
good, will appeal to his
clientele, not compete with
their own baked goods and
that the wholesaler will stand
behind the goods.
The key to success, however,
is mass production and
distribution — being able to
turn out the product and get
it to the stores, day in, day
out.
First, there's a matter of
scale. Ridley says that when
women interested in starting
up a business ask how she
does it, she tells them she and
her partner work in 40-pound
batches of muffin batter.
Recipes that work for two
dozen won't necessarily work
for 20 or 200 dozen.
Motor City Muffins also
had to work up recipes that
could be manufactured in
bulk. Otherwise, the baking
process is inefficient.
Ray Lahvic says that for a
small operation like Ridley's
or Motor City Muffins to real-
ly succeed with a one-item
line, it must produce and sell
in volume and land large ac-
counts like supermarkets.
Motor City Muffins has
broken that barrier and is
distributing through Great
Scott! and Shopping Center
markets.
Initially, Ridley hadn't in-
tended to enter the wholesale
baking business, but she
found herself drawn into it
while working in husband
Mark's comedy club in
Berkley.
"I was getting rave reviews
from the customers," Ridley
says. "I was wholesaling
them right out of the
restaurant."

Encouraged by her success,
Ridley began working from a
catering kitchen, selling her
breads door-to-door. But suc-
cess can be overwhelming.
Her first big order, she recalls,
was 120 tea breads for gift
baskets. Filling that order
was like a comedy of errors. "I
panicked. I had to do them
fast and the recipes weren't
ready. The oven was erratic. It
was like a scene from 'The
Lucy Show' or something."
Burning midnight oil, Ridley
managed to deliver the
breads on time.
When Ridley's baking
business began to reach
capacity, she started looking
for help. Her cousin, Gail, an
artist, stepped in to handle
sales and marketing. More
than one year ago, they decid-
ed the market needed an oat-
bran muffin. "We just started
working on recipes," Ridley
says. "We wanted a muffin
that tasted good and was also
healthy."
It was a smart move for
their fledgling operation.
"The muffins just took over,"
Jacob says. "There's a faster
turnover than the breads.
Less seasonal. Muffins do
great all the time."
Last year, Ridley and Jacob
were faced with a tough deci-
sion — stay wholesale or open
a retail shop. Offered a good
deal on a former muffin fran-
chise storefront in Troy, they
decided to take the chance.
"We were scared," Ridley
says.
"I can't think of a bigger
risk that I've taken in my
life," Jacob adds.
Both Ridley and Jacob say
they didn't realize what they
were getting into when they

What do you get when you
mix equal parts of business
savvy and a love for baked
goods, add a dash of ex-
perimentation and then sim-
mer over a successful 16-year
career as a clothing ac-
cessories representative?
You get Evie Madison and
her fledgling cookie company.
Madison is indeed taking
her mandel bread recipe — ac-
tually, an adaptation of her
grandmother's recipe — and
trying to make a mint.
Madison's operation, which
started up in Detroit last
July, also turns out a variety
of short breads.
Madison's business literally
took root by word of mouth.
She had a built-in marketing
and distribution network for
her baked goods without
realizing it, until cookie
orders started to come to her.
She had been setting out
mandel bread and short bread
in her• Chicago Apparel
Center showroom during
market week. Then, the
former cooking instructor
started to get phone calls
from other reps in the
building. Madison's
customers had been talking
not about her accessory lines,
but her baked goods.
The calls weren't limited to
Chicago. "I started getting
calls from New York, Dallas,
Atlanta . . . anywhere there
was an apparel center where
my customers were likely to
go. And that's how it got
started."
Her start, Madison admits,
was serendipitous. She had
been thinking about getting
out of the accessories
business and possibly moving
back to her native Detroit,
but never thought cookies
would be her ticket home.
"If I had thought about it,
I would never have had the
guts to do it. It was something
that just happened. I'm 53
years old. Maybe I'm nuts to
be starting over."
Or maybe crazy like a fox.
Swept along by an apparent
pent-up demand, Madison
was turning out 200 to 300
pounds of cookies a month
from her Chicago home and
shipping the cookies around
the country, doing only per-
sonal orders because that's all
the capacity she could handle.
Eventually, the baking
sidelight reached a turning
point for Madison. She decid-
ed to return to Detroit and try
wholesaling full time, along
with her friend and now com-
pany business manager,
Phyllis Canvasser.
Since her return, Madison
says the business "has just

taken off." She is wholesaling
not only in Detroit but in San
Francisco, Indianapolis and
recently — Chicago, where
Marshall Field department
stores took a large order.
Madison says it wasn't dif-
ficult to get the major depart-
ment store chain to bite,
which she finds ironic. As a
women's accessories rep, it
took her three years to get
some of her lines into Field's
— not nearly that long for the
cookies. She says that's due in
part to her old line of work.
"Because of the connections
I had before from repping, I
have people all over the coun-
try now. I didn't realize, until
I really got into it, that I had
a whole network of people all
over the country."
Madison says her retailing
contacts are serving as a
replacement for food brokers,
who normally act as in-
termediaries between a
wholesaler and a retailer.
"Everyone told me you had
to have brokers," she says.
"They have the contacts. One
broker here got me into
places I didn't even know
about. But it didn't go beyond
the initial order. With a new
product they don't have the
time to do follow-up. And
what matters are the re-
orders."
Another reason Madison
can tackle the national
market is ,that her product
has a long shelf life and can
survive being shipped. She
puts an eight-week guarantee
on each package.
So far, success has come
rapidly for Madison's cookies.
She says that after being in
business four months, she
had reached the break-even
point, with sales running at
about $4,000 a month. "That
surprised me. I didn't expect
that to happen for at least a
year."
Aside from the fact that
Madison thinks her product is
top quality and tastes good,
she believes it's selling well
because she has found a
market niche.
Madison intends to con-
tinue to wholesale, though
she feels more profit exists in
retail because it's easier to do,
has less overhead and she
hasn't yet exhausted her net-
work of contacts.
As for the future, Madison
has big plans for her com-
pany. She wants to add pro-
duct lines and continue ex-
pansion in Detroit and na-
tionwide. One of her im-
mediate goals: to get into
Hudson's. "After all," she
says, "it's in my back yard." ❑
— A.C.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

25

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