Today we’d like to introduce you to Winston Gillies
Hi Winston, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
15 years ago I started making salsa every Sunday for my family to go along with the nachos we would make. This quickly became a tradition we called Nacho Sunday. First my kid’s friends would come over and join the party, then their parents and soon we would have a house full of people every week.
I never dreamed of creating a company and producing and selling our salsa to the general public. I was happy to make everything on a small scale and bring joy to those who would come and share a snack with us. Then one day, a friend of mine, he was from the Dominican Republic, decided to open a food truck business selling his pork, beef, and chicken empanadas. He would typically use his grandma’s garlic dipping sauce recipe as a condiment to go along with his product. His empanadas are out of this world good! His name is Chicho.
After finally getting his food truck off the ground, Chicho asked me if I could make a salsa that would go with his empanadas to replace the garlic dipping sauce he was accustomed to using. He wanted a salsa because the dipping sauce was oil based and was tough to make and messy to work with. Chicho gave me his grandma’s recipe and I went to work.
The salsa I created from the recipe was finally done. I named it after the original dipping sauce and our green salsa called Mojito was born and is currently one of our top sellers. Chicho asked me to make the salsa in bulk so that he could use it in his business as his own recipe and that’s when I got thinking about starting a salsa company of my own rather than selling the salsa recipe to Chicho.
The next step was coming up with a name for our company. My oldest son thought we should use my nickname from high school. My nickname, because of my first name Winston, is Smokes. So we decided to name the company Senor Smokes.
By this time I had developed a total of 6 salsa flavors including the one I reverse engineered for Chicho. We also decided to go with a Mexican theme and gave each flavor a Spanish name. Afterall, our salsa is considered a Mexican blended salsa, so that only made sense.
To get our branding done, I decided to sponsor a design contest on Design Hill, a place where freelance designers could bid on your project. I sponsored prize money for the contest and within a week I received 54 submissions. At the end of the contest, a designer from Malaysia submitted the winning design. by accident the character he created to represent Senor Smokes actually, as it turns out, looked just like me only with a black beard. I asked him to make the beard grey and Senor Smokes Salsa brand was brought to like. Next, I created the website and put together some ecommerce tools to help us manage orders and invoicing.
We started by walking in stores and dropping off a sample kit of our salsas. Once the store owners tried our product, they were ready to offer it to their customers. To kick of the relationship the new stores, we would bring their initial inventory and present it to their customers during what we called a sample Saturday. We typically sold 75% of the inventory we brought in the 3 hour session, restocked the store and moved on to another location. We are currently offered in 14 stores from Ogden to St. George.
During year one, I made all the salsa myself in my basement lab. We produced 4,000 jars to test the market and it’s response. From there, demand was outpacing my ability to produce so I ventured out to find a co-packer that could bolster our inventory and meet the demand for our products. Our goal has always been to grow under control while maintaining our product flavor and consistency. It hasn’t always been easy and we have had our issues with co-packers, but because we stuck t quality over cost savings and speed, we have succeeded in bringing our customers with us.
To add to our offering, we teamed up with Don Julio’s, a Utah based chip manufacturer. We selected Don Julio because of flavor and the fact that their products are gluten free like our salsas, quesos, and BBQ sauce (soon to come to market). We have shipped salsa, queso and chips to 35 of the 50 states in united States and we see strong interest all over the world for our products even though we aren’t ready to go international yet. 80% of business is return business with most of our customers taking advantage of improved pricing for subscription based purchases.
In the next few months we plan to be showcased on QVC and on the Donna Drake show and get into a few more distributor relationships that will increase visibility and get our products placed in another 56 stores in the intermountain west. To do that, we are strengthening our co-packing relationships to ensure we can produce enough product to meet demand over the next few months and years.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I think the thing that is most challenging is partnering with good suppliers and co-packers that have the same goals and who adopt the same principals as we do. You have to kiss a lot of toads to find prince charming and our lips are severely chapped.
Everything from ingredients to glass and lids has a direct bearing on our final product. If the glass dimensions are off a fraction of on inch, that effects label placement and quality.
If a co-packer decides to buy a different brand of tomatoes because they are cheaper, that can effect both consistency and flavor.
It’s difficult keeping everything perfectly aligned so that at the end of the day, we meet or exceed our customers expectations.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
It’s interesting, this is my fourth business that I have started from scratch. Usually you’ll find me in the middle of technology and software development professionals. In this case I think I use those abilities to benefit our company in several different ways.
First, perspective. We are approaching the food manufacturing industry with a whole new set of eyes. We don’t know what we don’t know and we’re are completely in to learning and improving as we go. We have had to pivot to new directions several times in our company’s journey to ensure we are navigating the road to success in a way that makes our organization better and stronger.
Because we are a small business, we run lean and can change course much faster than other larger companies. We are not interesting in making a quick buck, we are interested in building a brand a ultimately a legacy.
We focus on quality without excuses and want our customers to recognize the value we bring them.
We don’t just want to offer our products online or in stores, we consciously build both channels out simultaneously and feel that is the best strategy for us as a company.
The quality and consistency of our product is what sets us apart. While most salsa is either too chunky, to runny or limited in flavor, we delivery a product that stays on the chip and makes your taste buds dance. Because our salsas are so flavorful, they can be used in recipes to create a great mealtime experience. While lots of fresh salsas are delivered in plastic, we feel that glass is a better option because it won’t effect the flavor. We provide a gourmet level product at a very reasonable price.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
Simply put, without risk, success is severely limited. But risks taken without considering consequences or long term ramifications are a great way to tank your business. Every decision you make, even the small ones, impacts your product and business in some way. From buying ingredients because they’re on sale to changing your label type (ie vinyl versus paper) can effect the way your product is perceived or it’s ultimate quality.
We started the company with $8,000 that we put in for equipment and materials to get started. We took calculated risks on the development of our recipes. We decided to make the salsa in house because we wanted to verify what the market thought. We knew that we needed to make what people liked not what we thought they would like. We spent a lot of time determining what to do and how to approach the industry with limited knowledge and limited experience in the industry. But we didn’t take major risks to get where we are today. We took small calculated risks that helped us to determine who we are and what our product should be. If you add up all the small calculated risks, they pretty much add up to a couple of major risks, but since we broke the risk down into smaller ones, we have been able to manage our growth ins spite of a marked already saturated with so many brands and offerings. The risks we took have gotten us where we are today.
At the end of the day, define what your outcome or value is and stick to that as your product vision. If your vision is all over the map then it becomes an impossible target. With vision defined, then everything else, including risks taken, work to that end. That way risk becomes a normal approach to busines and less scary.
Pricing:
- Salsa (Any Flavor) – $7.99
- Queso (Any Flavor) – $10.99
- Chips (Any Flavor) – $4.99
- BBQ Sauce (Any Flavor) – $9.99
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.senorsmokes.com
- Instagram: senor_smokes
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/senorsmokes/
