Word: engrams
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When they first stumbled on the concept in 2005, Luber and Engram knew little about business and less about manufacturing. But as food lovers and avid cooks, they were tired of tossing out stale spices in jars that were half full--there's only so much nutmeg you can use in a year. By 2007, The Seasoned Palate (TSP) was shipping its first packages. A year later, the culinary entrepreneurs' Smart Spice brand is about to land in all 273 Whole Foods stores in the U.S. "This is the most innovative thing since the spice grinder," says Perry Abbenante, chief...
Neither of these spice gals had any prior industry experience. Before meeting Engram, Luber had been an art historian and a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Engram was a longtime editor at the Baltimore Sun. The pair met through a friend and got to talking about spices. "We started thinking about why they go stale," says Luber, "and about other categories that had exploded over the past 10 years, like tea, olive oil, vinegar and cereal." Sensing an opportunity, Luber and Engram began gathering advice on how to build a spice company...
...additives or fillers low-end discounters rely on. They're hoping that style will help: the company's other line, TSP Spices, comes in sleek decorative 12-packet tins topped with colorful labels. And consumers like their story. "People sometimes joke that we're the Spice Girls," says Engram, "but that's a stretch, so I came up with the CardaMoms. Cardamom is the queen of spices, and we're always carting around our kids to things...
...spice market is worth about $1 billion at retail and is dominated by McCormick, which is also based in Baltimore. TSP has four full-time employees to McCormick's 8,000, so no one is mistaking Luber and Engram as a threat to the titan, whose annual global sales are $3 billion. TSP is hoping for sales on the order of $2 million to $2.5 million in 2008. "It's as if they're the elephant and we're the fly," says Engram...
...operate at a volume high enough to distribute nationally, Luber and Engram contract out most of their operations, from spice importing, labeling and packing to sales and distribution. They have yet to pay themselves a salary. Of the more than $1 million invested in TSP so far, about $500,000 has come from outside investors, the rest from the founders' pockets...