Small Business Builder: A Little Pepper Talk
— -- Craig Cornett is a “simple pepper man.” And he’s Frog Ranch Salsa’s most poorly kept marketing secret.
Cornett is president and cofounder of the Glouster, Ohio-based company, which started in 1994 with just one product, pickled peppers, made according to an old family recipe Cornett got from his Hungarian grandmother.
That first year, the company’s best customers were local stores and restaurants. Now the product is available through five large chains and numerous other outlets in some 25 states as well as mail-order distributors like the Salsa Express.
Today, Frog Ranch sells Medium and Hot Salsa, Garlic Hot Wax Peppers, Nacho-Sliced Jalapenos, and Hot Cherry Peppers “nestled in a locally produced crate made from our state tree, the Buckeye (can double as a CD holder),” plus the Frog Ranch Family Favorites Recipe Collection and the 100-percent cotton pocket T-shirt.
And from first-year sales of $30,000, the company expects to easily break the million-dollar sales mark this year, says Cornett.
Behind the Spice is Passion
What’s the secret of the condiment company’s success? Passion, says Cornett. Passion is the marketing principle he says he lives and breathes — passion for being part of a local and regional development push, for his product, for preserving the environment, and for developing the relationships that, he adds, are more important than profit.
Frog Ranch is located down the road from Ohio University in Athens, Cornett’s alma mater, and not far from the boyhood farm where Cornett grew up. The company got its start when he and company cofounder Christi Hewitt put out 10,000 pepper plants, cultivating them by hand.
The crop wasn’t especially successful, Cornett recalls, but “at the end of the year we wanted to celebrate. I found out there was no Ohio Chili Pepper Festival,” he says, so he applied for and received the rights to the name and held the first event, “which was basically a big keg party in a field.”
Last fall’s festival, by contrast, lasted three days and featured a Pepper Queen, a hot-pepper-eating contest, and a record-breaking chile ristra 300 feet long. The huge string of chile peppers will soon be canonized by Guinness as the world-record holder, Cornett says. The 2000 festival will be September 22-24 in Glouster.
Everything is Personal
The festival is part of a many-pronged marketing strategy that emanates from Cornett’s high-energy approach to everything he cares about. The company’s success, he believes, is inseparable from environmental responsibility, regional development, and personal connection.
For example, Frog Ranch, which is located in a depressed Appalachian coal-mining community, uses small Appalachian suppliers and contractors. Its products are “preservative free, all natural, minimally processed, and taste absolutely incredible.” Products are also packed in canning jars that customers reuse, says Cornett. And he deals only with distributors he considers “action oriented, integrity based, and principle centered.”
Everything at Frog Ranch is personal, including the marketing, whose success Cornett attributes to three factors:
1. The Quality. Frog Ranch Salsa is simply a great product, Cornett believes, and the resulting customer loyalty has led to many new avenues of distribution. The product is on the shelves at Kroger, Meijer, Big Bear, and Giant Eagle stores and will soon be available at selected Sam’s Clubs. Armed with letters and cassette tapes of customer requests for availability closer to home, Cornett approaches stores and (“partially due to my tenacity,” he admits) has never been turned down. The company also ships to customers, including a case a month to a woman in Texas who was driving 50 miles just to buy Frog Ranch Salsa.
2. The Label. Designed by local artist Kevin Morgan, a.k.a. “The Uptown Dog,” the product packaging is colorful, whimsical, and eye-catching. Cornett strives to make his products stand out on grocery-store shelves by using bright-colored lids, neck tags, and stickers proclaiming Frog Ranch Salsa a winner at the 1998 National Fiery Foods Show in Albuquerque. The label also appears on T-shirts, thousands of which are sold each year. Between the T-shirts and the avid customers who tout Frog Ranch Salsa to their friends, Cornett says, “we have several thousand salespeople out there we’ve never met.”
3. The Personal Touch. Growing his company, claims Cornett, is as natural as breathing: “It’s in my blood and on my shoes.” If a customer calls with a question or complaint, he says, “I stop whatever I’m doing. It’s the commitment to the personal relationship that has gotten us here.
“To this day, I am ‘the sales guy.’ I call myself ‘the simple pepper man,’” says Cornett, adding then when it comes to customers, distributors and employees, “These people are my friends.”
An editor since the age of 6, when she returned a love letter with corrections marked in red, Mary Campbell founded Zero Gravity in 1984 to provide writing, editing and marketing services. She is the marketing director for the online university, Magellan.edu.
Small Business Builder is published on Wednesdays.