Try St. Louis, Buy St. Louis…Taste St. Louis

(My St. Louis Small Business Monthly article)

Few people more fervently take to heart the song lyric, ‘root, root, root for the home team’ than the St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball faithful.

Why shouldn’t those same proud St. Louisans also go to bat for other quality hometown products?

St. Louis is renown for possessing more than its fair share of top-rate restaurants.  So, good food is one item St. Louisans can easily appreciate.  But getting an individual food product into the mainstream is not always an easy task.

“You do have an edge if it’s a local product,” said Jim Alexander of the Alexander, Koetting, Poole & Buehrle food brokers.  “The buyer has pride in the city and state, and knows a local product helps the economy.  It’s difficult to get quick response, but once people have tried a good product, there’s no problem selling it.”

That’s precisely what one of Alexander’s clients, Reuben Anderson, learned a decade ago.

Working for McDonnell-Douglas at the time, Anderson yearned to try something on his own.  In 1982, after about a year of experimentation in his basement, Anderson started Andy’s Seasonings.  He left McDonnell-Douglas in 1985, having perfected his recipes for chicken and fish coatings, breadings and seasoned salt along the way.

Andy’s Seasonings can currently be found in 17 states.  Locally, one of its marketplaces is Dierberg’s, which itself is a good example of how a local entity can survive and thrive.  Dierberg’s markets, which began with the old Craig Road store in 1854, now has 14 sites in the St. Louis area.

“We buy a lot of local products,” Dierberg’s buyer Bernie Moran said.  “We have no official store policy on that, and we don’t necessarily go out of our way to find them.  They seem to come our way…like Maria & Sons pasta, Max German meats and the milk companies.

“People tend to buy products from here.  It sounds corny, but they want to help our community.  The big thing for us is the people are here to answer any problems right away.  Distribution is another plus.  We get our products right away, too.”

Leon Corbin carries that latter point to an extreme.  Owner of Ketrina, Ltd., Inc., Corbin even makes house calls to peddle his Corbin’s Classic original and Cajun marinades to fellow St. Louisans.    

One shouldn’t be surprised that Corbin goes the extra mile to find new homes for his products.  After all, he painstakingly spent 15 years developing it, and three to four more years refining both its taste and tenderizing qualities.

“I experimented for years and years,” Corbin said.  “One day, I knew I was close to it, and started changing one ingredient at a time.  Finally, one day I was doing a round steak on the grill, turned it over and it tore off the fork.  I thought maybe they gave me the wrong cut of meat.  But I tried another round steak with the same results.

“People started asking me about the recipe.  How much would I charge them for it?  I turned down a seven-figure offer.  I filled orders for four to six people, then two or three more.  It got to the point where I couldn’t keep up with the orders.  The demand was so much greater than I could possibly supply it!”

That’s when Arcobasso began manufacturing, packaging and delivering for the various clients Corbin had already lined up. 

Naturally, grocery stores are the prime outlet through which food items can be sold.  Another outlet for Corbin is the Winery of the Little Hills Garden Restaurant in St. Charles.

“I ran into him one day, and he said he had a new marinade,” Winery owner Martha Kooyumjian said.  “I tried it because we have a lot of grilled foods.  It’s a great product—‘Corbin’s Classic’ marinated chicken breast and Cajun charbroiled hamburgers are Winery menu items.  We also sell it in our gift shop.”

National Supermarkets, purchasers of both Corbin and Anderson products, is interested in buying and reselling local items.  National teams with KMOX Radio for an annual autumn Holiday Harvest promotion held in Kiener Plaza, featuring only local products.  National also prints a special two-page Governor’s Sale circular, listing all its store items which are produced in St. Louis and Metro East.

“We don’t have a policy on local goods, but if it’s a St. Louis manufactured product, we definitely have a preference for it,” said Ron Jezierski, National’s director of grocery business. 

“Economy-wise, it helps the manufacturer grow, and creates jobs.  If it’s locally manufactured and all else is right, we lean toward it.  That’s why the majority of foods manufactured in St. Louis are in our stores.”

When a product is offered to National, it is assigned to one of 10 or 11 category managers (formerly known as buyers) with whom an appointment is made if there is any initial interest.  Once National becomes more familiar with the product, a determination is made before a panel.  Quality, price and the needs of the consumer on a daily basis are considered before a decision is made.

All the buying outlets are pretty much in agreement that no one who has spent a good deal of time developing a product should feel hesitant about approaching them.

“We’re always open to new products,” Moran said, “and everyone should look to purchase local products.  We’re always pushing ‘Buy U.S.A.’ Why not 'Buy St. Louis?'”

Peanut Butter Passion

    (published in the Baton Rouge Advocate...back in the early 1980s)

Over 700 phobias are known to mankind, and Arachibutyrophobia is one of them.  Yes, there really is a fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.

Yet, it is quite obvious that this fear is hardly of consequence.  In the United States, 117 companies produce peanut butter, and approximately 630 million pounds of the tan spread were consumed in 1979 alone.  That is roughly 50 ounces per person!  

Peanut butter is packaged in everything from six-ounce snack jars to colossal five-pound plastic pails.  It easily outsells all the jams, jellies and preserves combined, making peanut butter the 14^th most purchased supermarket item.

Although peanut butter is near the top of America’s favorite food list, it is but a rookie to the diet.  After all, unlike sap used in maple syrup, peanut butter does not merely flow from trees.  It took a long time in reaching the sandwich spread.

It all started with the peanut, Arachis hypogaea L.  Recent scientific research has pinpointed a small region in eastern Bolivia as the likely birth of the peanut, way back in 2100 B.C. 

However, the more modern strain is traced to Peru, where archaeologists have discovered jars of peanuts and remnants of peanut-shaped pottery from 750 B.C.  Sixteenth century Spanish explorers seeking gold in Peru, found these peanuts instead.  They took this ‘gold mine’ back to their kingdom, and later traded peanuts to Africans for spices and elephant tusks.  Africans fell in love with their ‘goobers,’ which were believed to have souls. 

In parts of Africa where gold was plentiful, local craftsmen hammered the gold into nuggets then shaped them into the form of peanuts.  These peanut nuggets later became the gifts of tribal chiefs to warriors at great festivals and feasts.

Naturally, when Negro slaves were brought to the New World, peanuts were transported as well.  Peanuts had finally reached American shores.

As the popularity of the peanut grew after the Civil War, Dr. George Washington Carver and others began experimenting with it in order to find other uses. 

  Lo and behold, in 1890, a little-known St. Louis physician discovered peanut butter by tossing a handful of peanuts into a grinder.

Although South Americans had produced a peanut paste mixed with honey and cocoa several centuries earlier, the St. Louis doctor is credited with creating the first widely-used peanut butter.

Soon peanut butter was recommended to invalids because of its high protein value and low carbohydrate content.  But it was seldom eaten at first due to limited quantity from a scarcity of manufacturing equipment, and an inflated market price.

Today, one of the foremost reasons for peanut butter’s wide use is its relative low cost among not only protein foods, but all foods.  It still costs only eight cents for the two tablespoons commonly used to make a sandwich.

An important decision facing the sandwich maker is, of course, whether to use smooth or chunky.  The latter variety simply combines small bits of roasted peanuts into its contents.  Industry figures point to a 3-to-1 choice for smooth over its counterpart.

The late Senator Hubert Humphrey was content on lunching on his own creation—toast literally drowned in peanut butter and topped with bologna, cheddar cheese, lettuce, mayonnaise, and ketchup.

“Give me smooth or crunchy,” Humphrey said.  “I’m not fussy.  I just love peanut butter!”

Another Senator, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, is a skin-diving enthusiast as well as a peanut butter enthusiast.  His claim to fame, other than politics, was eating peanut butter snacks 50 feet under water.

While touring an undersea lab off the Grand Bahama Islands, Weicker claimed, “It was nice and quiet down there, the company was fine, and for breakfast I had peanut butter and mayonnaise on a cracker.  It was just heaven!”

Peanut butter started to gain popularity around 1900.  Peanut roasters, blanchers and grinders were placed on the market for home use.  A few years later, peanut butter was commercially made and sold by the pound.  Grocers used to ladle it out of tubs, and by 1910, the first packaged brand name peanut butter appeared in colorful metal pails—now collectors’ items.

 

Prior to the 1920s, the entire content of peanut butter was peanuts and a bit of salt.  A new development was then introduced—stabilizers—which prevented the separation inside the jar.

When the Peanut Butter Manufacturers Association was organized around 1940, improvements were made in methods of roasting, peanut grading, spreadability, extending the product’s shelf life and lessening the chance of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.

 

In recent years, there has been somewhat of a revival of the pre-1920s product.  Most health food stores sell this item, which contains 100% peanuts and a layer of oil on the top.  By the mid-1970s, a few companies had developed countertop grinders for home use.

Peanut butter has been a popular staple in this country because of its pleasing flavor, easy use in cooking and refusal to spoil.

Political analyst William F. Buckley, Jr., once listed his life values and placed peanut butter No. 5 behind God, his family, his country and Johann Sebastian Bach.

If you think peanut butter is ‘for the birds,’ you are right.  According to experiments at the Georgia Test Station, all birds love peanut butter, whether insect eaters or seed eaters.

Of the 300,000 tons of seed consumed annually by birds, 100 million pounds is peanut butter.  Naturally, they also prefer a bit of additive to render it less sticky.  What bird likes to have peanut butter stuck to the roof of its beak?

Whether feeding a child or a flock of birds, there is little question about peanut butter nutrition.  The scrumptious spread is 26 percent protein—a percentage higher than milk, cheese, eggs or fish sticks.  In fact, peanut butter contains more protein for the money than any food except dry beans, and also delivers 11 of the 13 mineral elements essential to the human diet.

The high nutritional value of peanut butter has been especially appealing to athletes.  Mile runner Dick Buerkle, names peanut butter as a major factor in the new indoor record of 3 minutes and 54.9 seconds he set in 1978.

 

Golfer Al Geiberger is known as “the peanut butter kid.”  He credits peanut butter as the stimulus in capturing well over $1 million in prize money over the past two decades.

“It’s my secret weapon,” announces Geiberger as he chomps on a peanut butter sandwich while preparing for the final holes of a round!