Success of Family Recipe Earns Entrepreneur One of Four New MSU Product Center Awards
3/3/08
Contact: Sara Long
517-432-1555, ext. 170
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Food and family always played big roles in Willie A. Brown’s life. Growing up, he worked at a cafeteria with his mother and six siblings. He figured that would be the end of his food career.
“I wanted to get out of it, to be honest,” Brown said.
Brown graduated college with a degree in marketing and spent over a decade working in sales, but the allure of food and working with tactile products proved too strong.
“I started missing foods again,” he said. “I wanted a tangible product that I could put on a shelf, and a customer could pick it up and say, ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it.’”
Brown used an old family recipe to make his first major food product.
“My mother was always making stuffing, called ‘dressing’ in Georgia, and I thought this might be a successful product here,” Brown said. “I decided to call Michigan’s largest retailer at the time, Meijer, and asked them if I could place the product in their stores. They decided to give it a try, and I’ve been selling it there ever since.”
So began BaBa’s HomeCooked Foods, named after his late grandfather.
“Once he passed away, I named it after him,” Brown said. “I’m always reminded of him when I say the name.”
Procuring a place for your product on Meijer’s shelves is much easier said than done. Brown’s accomplishments landed him one of the first Michigan State University (MSU) Product Center Awards, for Best Barrier Buster.
“I was very, very pleased,” Brown said about receiving the award.
To secure a spot in a Meijer grocery aisle, Brown had to meet numerous store-dictated criteria. After he had a product, the packaging had to be designed to meet Meijer’s quality standards: the product had to be protected, it had to be shrink-wrapped, and it had to be freezer-friendly.
Brown then had to obtain limited liability insurance and the final item, a Universal Product Code (UPC), better known as a bar code.
“I contacted the UPC company out of Ohio, and they supplied me with the UPC code,” Brown said. “It allows you to be able to sell your product around the country.”
Brown had the product placed in Meijer stores in about six months.
The staff of the MSU Product Center, a major resource for Brown as he established his business, believe it is important to recognize its more inventive clients.
“It was exciting to be able to recognize some of our more innovative and interesting clients,” said Chris Peterson, director of the MSU Product Center. “There have been some studies conducted, particularly in rural communities, that indicate that we (in Michigan) tend not to celebrate entrepreneurial success and lean toward being fairly critical on entrepreneurial failures. So, when several of our clients had reached a point where they really deserved recognition, it seemed particularly appropriate to recognize them with special awards.”
Brown said the MSU Product Center award motivates him to keep moving forward in the face of adversity.
“The award means a lot to me right now,” Brown said. “Anytime I run into an obstacle, I always look at that award, and it motivates me to know that it didn’t come easy. Whenever you run into a barrier in business or in life, you can’t give up. You have to keep pushing and being persistent.”
Brown thanks MSU and the Product Center for all of their assistance in helping him produce the product economically and ship it to Meijer.
Brown accepted the award from the MSU Product Center during the “Grow Your Business” conference held at the MSU Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center in East Lansing last year.
He and three other winners received the first batch of MSU Product Center Awards, which included awards for “Best Business Transition” and “Best Innovative Business Idea.”
According to Tom Kalchik, associate director of the MSU Product Center, the uniqueness of the products was a key factor in determining who won the awards. Special consideration was extended to value-added products, those that growers altered into unique products from their original form.
“For us, the key to value-added is differentiation,” Kalchik said. “How do you differentiate your product from everything else that’s available?”
The awards effectively showcased the diversity of the center’s clients, said MSU Product Center associate director Dianne Novak.
“We wanted to create awards that would really reflect the unique accomplishments of our customers,” Novak said.
Though Novak was part of the committee that chose the categories, a team of external parties not affiliated with the MSU Product Center selected the winners.
The MSU Product Center is a major recipient of funding from Project GREEEN (Generating Research and Extension to meet Economic and Environmental Needs). The center receives $250,000 in annual operating funds from the state’s plant agriculture initiative, along with additional value-added project monies that support a variety of projects, ranging from labeling and taste-testing to Web site design.
“On a lot of different levels, Project GREEEN is an important source of funding for us,” Peterson said.
Founded in 1997, Project GREEEN is a cooperative effort between plant-based commodities and businesses together with the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station, MSU Extension and the Michigan Department of Agriculture to advance Michigan’s economy through its plant-based agriculture.
To learn more about Michigan’s plant agriculture initiative at MSU, visit www.greeen.msu.edu.
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