With Love and Quiches Read online

  Advance Praise for With Love and Quiches

  “When Love and Quiches started in 1973, my restaurant, O’Neals’ Baloon, was the very first to serve Susan’s quiche. The rest is history, and I highly recommend reading her interesting story.”

  —MICHAEL O’NEAL, famed New York City restaurateur

  “Susan Axelrod cooks up a fun and fast-paced tell-all on building Love and Quiches from home-kitchen start-up to international powerhouse. A must-read for any aspiring entrepreneur who wonders whether passion alone can make up for what you didn’t learn in business school.”

  —JOHN KOMINICKI, author and former president and publisher of Long Island Business News

  “I remember buying Love and Quiches products back in the 1970s while Susan was still baking in her kitchen and delivering out of the trunk of her car. I recommend this book for any aspiring entrepreneur.”

  —BUZZ O’KEEFFE, proprietor of The River Café

  “Empowering. Every smart businesswoman should own a copy of With Love and Quiches.”

  —JEAN GATZ, keynote speaker and award-winning author of 10 Ways to Stand Out from the Crowd

  “Susan Axelrod has truly achieved the American dream of turning her passion into a thriving, multinational business success story, and her book brims with savvy dos and don’ts to help other aspiring entrepreneurs follow in her footsteps.”

  —NANCY KRUSE, contributing editor at Nation’s Restaurant News

  “Proof that the recipe for a successful business begins with two indispensable ingredients: passion and ingenuity. Axelrod’s journey is a delight and an inspiration.”

  —CARLA R. COOPER, CEO of Daymon Worldwide

  “Susan is the quintessential food-preneur: creative and passionate about what she is doing, though not hardheaded. This book is recommended reading for anyone who hopes to be the next Love and Quiches and open their own successful food business. Enjoy reading her story and take her insights to heart.”

  —KATHRINE GREGORY, founder and director of Mi Kitchen Es Su Kitchen®

  “In a book that is incredibly inspirational, well written, and engaging from beginning to end, Susan shows us that it is in fact possible to grow your passion into a booming business. While With Love & Quiches is undoubtedly a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs, a savvy business owner would certainly benefit from her insightful anecdotes and unwavering determination.”

  —BRIE DECHANCE, president of the National Association of Women Business Owners, Long Island chapter

  Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press

  Austin, Texas

  www.gbgpress.com

  Copyright 2014 Susan Axelrod

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

  Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group LLC

  For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact

  Greenleaf Book Group LLC at PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709, 512.891.6100.

  Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group LLC

  Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group LLC

  Cover images:

  Pie-chart: ˝iStockphoto.com/alexsl-Alex Slobodkin

  Cake slice: ˝John Montana photography/www.jmontana.com

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62634-072-5

  Ebook Edition

  To Irwin, my “stealth editor”

  Contents

  PROLOGUE: An Accidental Business

  Part I

  1: Finding the Passion (Early Days–1973)

  2: Getting Started (1973–1974)

  3: Becoming Love and Quiches (1974)

  4: The Transition (1975)

  5: The Mini-Factory (1976–1980)

  6: Freeport, Here We Come! (1980)

  7: Spreading Our Wings (1980–1989)

  8: Securing Our Position (1990–2000)

  Part II

  9: Adversity

  10: From Overstuffed to Lean and Mean

  11: The Next Level

  12: Company Culture

  13: Constant Learning

  14: Marketing and Branding

  15: You Can’t Taste a Cheesecake over the Internet

  16: A Global Perspective

  17: Family Matters

  18: A Look in the Mirror

  EPILOGUE: Where Will We Go from Here?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Coda

  RECIPES FOR SUCCESS: My Accidental Business Primer

  RECIPES FOR THE MIND: A Few Favorite Books

  RECIPES FOR THE SOUL: Travel Abroad

  RECIPES FROM THE HEART: A Few Favorite Recipes

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prologue

  An Accidental Business

  Life is a great big canvas, and you should

  throw on it all the paint you can.

  —Danny Kaye

  When I sold my first quiche in 1973, I had no idea that my fledgling operation would one day, decades later, be competing with the giants of the food industry. How could I have known? I was just a clueless Long Island housewife who made that first quiche in my kitchen almost on a whim. And yet here we are today: With no preparation for business ownership whatsoever, I was able to translate a passionate love of cooking and food into a multimillion-dollar family business that ships top-quality quiches and desserts to every corner of the country and now the globe.

  I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into—a recurring theme during the early years of my business life—but it is an eventful story. So I’ve decided to tell it. I’m going to take you on a journey from my kitchen, through my neighborhood, and to the global business that I have loved from day one.

  My business came out of nowhere, an accident that I was not ready for. And so, for years, I would refer to it as my “accidental business.” Everything I learned was in the line of fire, and I will share it all, both the pain and the glory, laced with plenty of advice that I only wish I could have had. If there was a “how to” manual, I never got it. I had neither role models nor advisors; nobody cautioned me about the hazards involved. Looking back across the decades, I’m glad I was so innocent about those hazards; otherwise, I might have lost my courage before I truly got started. Yet, once I did get started, I knew deep inside that I was going to do this thing, that I could do this thing.

  In many ways this story is a cautionary tale of what not to do when you want to start a new business. Yet here I am. I have done it. My company has become an integral and well-recognized member of the foodservice industry, serving almost every segment of the trade from hotels to airlines to multiunit chain restaurants to supermarket bakeries. We are now primarily a dessert manufacturer, and we ship our products worldwide.

  So why am I telling my story now? Well, recently there was a spectacular exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York called The Steins Collect, displaying the astonishing amount of art amassed by Gertrude Stein and her brothers during their years in Europe. The exhibit’s accompanying explanations were primarily focused on the Stein family and their glittering circle of compatriots, including Picasso and Matisse. One thing that Ms. Stein said resonated with me: “Somebody told me to write a book, so I wrote one.” Simple as that. I am not comparing myself to Gertrude Stein, but that is what happened to me. Our marketing department told me to tell my story, so I did.

  In Part I of this story, I’ll take you on the wild ride that was the early years of my business. You’ll see some of our biggest successes as we got off the ground—and witness some pretty hilarious mistakes. In the first chapters of Part II, we’ll pick the story up just after the even
ts of 9/11, when I nearly lost the business completely. It was in the subsequent rebound that I learned some of the greatest business lessons of my career. I’ll begin sharing those lessons in short chapters in the rest of Part II that offer insight and advice on topics ranging from company culture, to marketing and branding, to the trials and rewards of working with family. In other words, information that any small business owner can use.

  It has been an arduous journey, with hard truths and some brutal lessons. I was able to conquer them, and, for sure, I have never, ever been bored.

  Would I do it all over again? Oh yes, I would. In a heartbeat.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Finding the Passion (Early Days–1973)

  The best way to predict your future is to create it.

  —Patti LaBelle

  I was born in Bensonhurst, a Jewish and Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, where cooking aromas constantly wafted between the tightly packed houses. Throughout my childhood, the smell of delicious food seemed to follow me around. I was nurtured in a bustling kitchen and around a heavily laden dining table—food was the vital center of our household. Looking back to those days now, I have no doubt that these early culinary experiences planted the seed of passion that eventually grew into my accidental business.

  When I was three, we moved from Bensonhurst to Neponsit, an exclusive enclave within a beach community in the Rockaways. Our new home was a big, beautiful house right on the ocean, with a rolling lawn and a gate that opened right onto the beach. My mother used to say we lived in “Neponsit, Long Island,” because she thought that sounded fancier, but Neponsit actually lies on the Queens end of the island, near the Marine Parkway Bridge to Brooklyn, from where we came. I’ve remained an inveterate New Yorker throughout my life, always living very near or in the city.

  At the end of the day, you could say I was born with a silver-plated, but not quite sterling, spoon in my mouth—privileged, but not overly so. But after the move to Neponsit, we went from a comfortable existence to one that was much more upscale. For one, we had a cook, a butler, and a laundress.

  The cook, Evelina, was as wide as she was tall, only she wasn’t tall, and I always smile when I picture her. I can’t think about Evelina without remembering—and almost still tasting—the best Southern fried chicken I’ve ever had, bar none. She was also a superb baker, and once a week she baked never-to-be-forgotten bread, chewy yet tender. We used to devour thick slices of the loaves and the rolls, dripping in butter just as they came out of the oven. That bread could bring tears—it was that good.

  I never had to help in the kitchen, but I watched all the time. Evelina was constantly baking cookies, and there were always two or three bowls filled with them. My mother had a few specialties too; one of them was blintzes, lightly sweetened, cheese-filled crêpes that have always been a Jewish staple. I would closely watch her cook up the delicate crêpes and lay them out on towels all over the kitchen, ready to be filled, long before Julia Child’s books (and her crêpes) became my bible.

  My mother kept a kosher home, and most of the cooking in our house was quite simple—not too many sauces and nothing exotic. Ketchup was often the only condiment in the pantry. Even peanut butter was a bit too “out there.” Nevertheless, there was always a lot of very delicious food around—a Jewish tradition—and our extra refrigerator in the basement held the overflow of fruit and other goodies from the two refrigerators we had in the kitchen and pantry upstairs. Friday night dinners featuring two and sometimes three kinds of roasts weren’t thought of as anything special. And it was a family tradition that we would turn on the record player and practice ballroom dancing before dessert. My parents were great dancers, and my brother and I followed suit; we would practice the mambo, tango, the Lindy, and even the Charleston!

  In Bensonhurst, we had lived as one family with my mother’s oldest sister, and after our move to Neponsit, the sisters pined for each other. So within a year or two, my Uncle Phil, Aunt Mollie, and cousin Syril followed us across the Marine Parkway Bridge and built a house just two blocks away. We were once again living as one big family, only now we had to cut across the lawns of the two intervening houses to get back and forth, sort of like a grassy hallway between rooms.

  My Aunt Mollie, like Evelina, spent all day in the kitchen cooking and baking, but she always rushed and had no patience for the rules. When making butter cookies, for example, she would never form even rolls and chill her dough to allow for nice, neat slicing; she would just break off pieces and press them onto the cookie sheet at random. So Aunt Mollie’s butter cookies always had crevices and thumbprints all over them when they came out of the oven, and because the thicknesses were so random, many of them featured dark little burns. But somehow Mollie’s Burnt Cookies, as we called them, were delicious anyway. I hung around Aunt Mollie’s kitchen a lot, as fascinated by her improvised methods as I was by Evelina’s careful culinary masterpieces.

  I had plenty of cooking to watch, and I was captivated by all of it. Everybody was always cooking. Eating out was only for special occasions (that went for most American families at the time, not just ours).

  When I was still quite small, before air travel became commonplace, we would travel by train once a year to Florida. We would take a Pullman compartment where the seats were made up into beds at night; very fancy, I thought. Once we got down South, there were orange groves as far as the eye could see, and the delicious fragrance of oranges permeated everything. We took all our meals in the dining car, where the tables were set with crisp linens and fine china; it was another time, another world. Though touted as Continental, the cooking was largely Southern, and it almost rivaled Evelina’s cuisine. Even at my young age, I knew this was all quite special.

  The Rockaways were a good place to be a kid. I grew up around a large group of neighborhood children from all walks of life, but we saw no differences among ourselves. We ran around in gangs, not cliques. We swam in the ocean until almost November, when our mothers would start screaming.

  Once we were all in high school, we would congregate on Friday nights in one of Far Rockaway’s two movie theaters—either the RKO Strand or the Columbia. Far Rockaway was a good half-hour bus ride from where we lived, and on the way home, the bus driver would wait at each stop until we had all run down the block and into our houses. We were safe, but he did it anyway. A different world.

  The Rockaways were so close to the city but a world away. Just across the Marine Parkway Bridge, in Brooklyn, were two nightclubs—Ben Maksik’s and The Elegante—that used to book the likes of Harry Bela-fonte and Frank Sinatra. At Ben Maksik’s, I once saw a grown woman crawl onto the stage to grab at Harry Belafonte’s bare feet before she could be stopped, a forerunner to later wild behavior at rock concerts. This club also booked Judy Garland for a two-week stint and, to our delight, rented my Aunt Mollie’s house for Ms. Garland’s family. I assume Liza Minnelli, still a young child, was part of that entourage. Sadly, it took less than one week for Ms. Garland to break her contract and total my aunt’s house. The nightclub agreed to pay for all the repairs and damage.

  Many of my friends would one day have their Sweet Sixteen and engagement parties in these two nightclubs. The best one was my friend Cynthia’s party at The Elegante, where the show starred the then-unknown Supremes, with Diana Ross singing her heart out. They took the house down, and the rest is history.

  My parents would take my brother and me, and sometimes my cousin Syril, nightclubbing on occasion, too.

  These and many other nightclubs in the city used to serve Chinese food exclusively. In the fifties, Chinese food always meant Cantonese cuisine: egg rolls, egg drop soup, spare ribs, egg foo young, chow mein—familiar Chinese “comfort food.” When my friends and I started dating, we would go in groups to various nightclubs, including the iconic Copacabana and the Latin Quarter in the city. They all served Chinese food and we ate a lot of it, as much as we did pizza. No sophisticated palates quite yet. This was all bef
ore disco took over.

  This was the environment in which I grew up—happy but insulated. I wanted for nothing, but I knew nothing of the world. And as preparation for real life, my sheltered childhood worked against me precisely because nothing was expected of me. I had no role models and nothing to strive for because everything had already been worked out. My parents had no aspirations whatsoever for me. I was merely a girl. Their expectation was that I would graduate from college, maybe teach for a few years, and then get married, have my family, and become a housewife. I don’t blame them for this, as this was the norm nearly sixty years ago. Did it ever cross their minds that I could start my own business? Not in a thousand years.

  Enter Irwin

  I first laid eyes on Irwin Axelrod when I was thirteen and he was sixteen. I stepped into the school cafeteria and saw him sitting there, hair slicked back but with one long curl hanging down his forehead, T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve near one shoulder, leather motorcycle jacket hanging off the other shoulder. I immediately knew he was the one. The only problem, as I soon found out, was that he had a stable of other girlfriends. To my chagrin, it took me a while to prevail; he had two other girlfriends and would only call me every third day. He would pick me up in his father’s plumbing truck, and my favorite date would be to go to Coney Island or to walk the boardwalk in Far Rockaway with all its concessions. I liked Irwin so much that I waited out all the competition and finally got what I wanted.

  Irwin was a rebel by nature, especially in school, but he always managed to get by through acing his final exams. But his work ethic was another matter. He’d gotten his working papers when he was fourteen, and he had a plum job at the movie theaters in Far Rockaway where all our friends hung out on Friday nights. It was the early fifties at the time (no computers), and his job was to take the train into the city with all the ticket stubs and bring them to the RKO offices in Rockefeller Center to be counted. He would sometimes be trusted to bring back the large cans of films to be shown that week, as well as the placards to be displayed out front with the coming attractions. He was also an usher. So we had undoubtedly crossed paths before we first met on that fateful day in the Far Rockaway High School lunchroom.