Pepin advised Randolph to trim Oualie's beverage offerings from two to one -- much easier to interest the trade in a single drink. When Randolph said she wanted to market a mustard, Pepin told her to forget it; there are already too many out there. Pepin also suggested they put their conserves in 9-ounce jars as opposed to the standard 15-ounce jars the European competition used. Europeans eat more jam than Americans. The price per ounce would be the same, but Oualie's jar would cost less.
Meanwhile, Randolph enrolled in an entrepreneurship course at Boston University in the spring of 1987. She then angled for acceptance at a business incubator in Waltham, Mass., and in September got in. She knew the center, with eight nascent businesses under one roof, would be a fount of business knowledge. She also counted on getting a lot of free advice from its 10-member advisory board of accountants, lawyers, consultants, and other professionals. One of those people, a business strategist, now sits on Oualie's board.
In August, Randolph approached Odette Bery, the chef and owner of a well-known Boston restaurant. Bery had written a cookbook in 1986 that had caught Randolph's attention. Randolph also knew that Bery, one-quarter Indian, had lived and cooked in Africa and the Caribbean. She also was classically trained, having attended both the Cordon Bleu cooking school in London and Maxim's Academy in Paris before she turned 20. Randolph wanted Bery to help formulate Oualie's recipes.
Randolph went to the restaurant and for 20 minutes laid out the Oualie spiel, during which Bery -- impassive as a statue -- listened in total silence. As Randolph finished she thought to herself, "All is lost."
Bery leaned forward, finally speaking. "I think what you're doing is terribly exciting, and I'd like to be involved."
Bery, working as a paid consultant, has since formulated four of Oualie's first six recipes, at a total cost to the company of less than $3,000. She shares Randolph's conviction that Caribbean cuisine is on the cusp of acceptance. Randolph's knowledge of and feeling for food impresses her as well. "Octavia looks for what I call clean flavor. In her conserves the sugar is down to a minimum, and they have an exquisite flavor. She's not looking for quick shelf items. She's looking for quality shelf items."
Getting help in kind was easier than getting it in cash. Randolph figured she'd need somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 to start the business and get the first six products out the door. She was looking for no more than 10 knowledgeable private investors. "Good investors bring more than money," she says, "they bring wisdom." She was also determined to pay her consultants in dollars, not stock. "You don't want to end up with a million shareholders each owning a fraction of the company. That's a rotten way to create a company. Those people can give you a lot of grief down the road."
Randolph could afford -- barely -- to keep things so closely held. She had $75,000 of her own money. "I knew with that I could at least get going, write a business plan, produce samples, and say to people, 'Here, open your mouth and taste this.' " People then would open their wallets.
Not exactly.
As 1987 turned into 1988 -- the stock-market crash hardly a dimming memory for would-be investors -- the company was stuck in neutral. Randolph, as usual, was moving ahead in high gear. A spate of cold calls led her to a state-of-the-art food processing lab at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she talked scientists into mixing up a large test batch of mango-lime conserves, no charge. Oualie did sales tests of the conserves with 15 retailers comprising its target market in March 1988. "This," Randolph recalls, "was a sanity check, just to make sure we weren't on Mars."
Thirteen of the 15 retailers signed purchase orders on the spot, based on tasting just the one product. Some ordered the entire line. The 15th, Bloomingdale's, was interested but prohibited by company policy from writing a purchase order without finished product. Randolph figured maybe she wasn't on Mars when, during one sales pitch, a buyer ate an entire jar of jam.
Jack Kavanagh has spent the past 38 years in the food industry. He is currently general manager of Roberts & Associates, which, with 261 employees, is New England's third largest food broker, handling such hefty multinational clients as Motts, Guinness, and Quaker Oats. Roberts is a full-service broker, dealing with both distributors and retailers. When Octavia Randolph and Debra Pepin looked for someone with clout to help them break into the right distribution channels, Kavanagh's name came up.
Kavanagh sees people with new food ideas every week of the year, but when he met Randolph and Pepin in May 1988 he sat up and took notice. "The wheels started turning in my head."
What grabbed him was Oualie's drink, Caribe Crash. Beverages, he knew, had more risk and more opportunity for the entrepreneur than foods. This is because the market for them is so huge, yet so fragmented. A tiny niche could turn into a large gold mine. In industry jargon, beverages have more "velocity" than foods. The chips, the jams, the other fancy foods were nice, but it was the drink that would drive this company out of start-uphood.
The drink also stood alone. This was vital in the era of tight shelf space. Bring a distributor a new line of drinks, and you'll be shown the door. Conversely, one good drink can always be shoehorned into the cooler. Caribe Crash reminded Kavanagh of one such success story: Orangina, a stand-alone drink made by Pernod Ricard.
