The holidays are rapidly approaching and for many food entrepreneurs, this can be a prime time to rack up sales. In this podcast we talk with Eric Rupart from Nutkrack about how he’s using his 40+ years in the food industry to help him plan for his company’s very first holiday sales season.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jennifer: Eric, thank you so much for joining us today.

Eric: Oh, thanks for having us.

Jennifer: Very excited to talk to you about your company but also to be talking about what you are doing to get ready for the holidays. Before anybody shoots daggers and arrows at me, I realize that at least up here in the Pacific Northwest the trees are just starting to change, but for entrepreneurs it’s really important to be forward thinking when it comes to the holidays.

Jennifer: Before we get to that though, can you tell us a little bit about your company and how it got its start, a bit about you as well. I had done some reading before we were talking today and I read that all of this started from a mistake, so I want to know if that’s true.

Eric: It is true. I have a well deserved reputation for making lots of mistakes. I just try to make them new and different each time. It’s not like I set out to make them, I just seem to make them a lot. As chefs are wont to do, 13 or 14 years ago I had, I think it was seven or eight different pots going and I wanted to make candied pecans in the same way that I had always made them for a salad for a dinner that I was having that night. At about an hour and a halfish of pecans in a, boiling them in a simple syrup as I always had, and got distracted as I’m also wont to do and scooped the pecans, thinking they were something else, and put them into another pot and then instantly realized what I had done. I think I might have said bad words and then scooped them out and put them on a sheet pan and just thought, “Well, I’ll get rid of them when they cool down and I’m cleaning up.”

Eric: Finished up all the prep and about an hour or so later was looking at the pan and noticed they look good. They didn’t look like what I thought they’d look like and they looked good so I nibbled on one. I think a lot of chefs will tell you this, that food always tastes better when somebody else makes it.

Jennifer: Yes.

Eric: It’s so true. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. When I nibbled on the pecan I didn’t know what to expect and I thought, “That’s actually really good. That’s really good,” because we can be pretty objective about the food that we make. It’s kind of our responsibility as professional chefs to know when something is going to be very appealing. “Oh wow, that’s got a lot going for it there.”

Eric: I kept cleaning up and it made quite a mess. About an hour later, hour and a half later, I was wrapping everything up and I got to that pan and they were gone. That pound and a half of pecans were gone. I knew or at least I thought I knew that I was the only person in the building at the time and I remember snacking on them a little bit. I ate the whole pound and a half. I don’t do stuff like that. It sort of struck me as, “Wow, they were that good? All right.”

Eric: A week or so later I got around to trying to recreate them and did, added a little bit of ingredient and tried to track better the technique that I was using. They turned out really well and I shared them. This holds true to this day, several thousand pounds later that I’ve made, I’ve been a chef for, I wasn’t a chef in 1979 but I started my food career in 1979. I’d like to think that I’ve made a lot of really good food along the way.