That’s a bit dramatic, no?

But , for me, it is the truth. On May 2, 2020, the Saint Brian’s BBQ domain will expire, putting a final punctuation mark on that endeavor.

I thought I would have more mixed feelings about it, but I’m surprisingly OK with letting this chapter come to an end. I thought I would write a little about it here to kind of summarize the whole thing.

How it began

I hate throwing myself birthday parties. I really do. I always felt weird about the concept that I was a) throwing myself a party to celebrate myself, and b) essentially asking people to bring me stuff for no other reason than because I survived another orbit around Sol, when what I really wanted to do was simply hang out with the people I care about.

I started calling it “Saint Brian’s Feast Day” and using it as an excuse to make barbecue in the middle of January. I wouldn’t tell people it was my birthday, and I would get to cook for my friends and family.

And I would make a bunch of barbecue sauce. People loved the barbecue sauce. They said I should bottle it and sell it.

So I figured…why not? I gave it a shot. This was January, 2014.

Falling Down

I went to Google and YouTube University and starting learning as much as I could about Consumer Packaged Goods. I needed to learn how to bottle the stuff safely, how to ensure it was shelf stable, what needed to be on the label, how much I should charge…so, so many things.

I attended a class that the Penn State Extension Service ran about how to run a food manufacturing business and I learned some dismal news: Philadelphia does not have cottage laws.

(Cottage laws are what allow your Aunt Sally and Grandpa Joe to make their jams and jellies in their kitchens and sell them at farmers markets at the like.)

This meant, because of Philadelphia’s seeming hatred of small business (go figure, Comcast’s HQ is here) that I would need to rent kitchen space at a commercial kitchen to make my sauce. It seemed like a non-starter, so I left the class before it was over, thinking that my dream of starting a BBQ sauce business was done.

This was March, 2014.

Enter Cool Dog

Every year at that time, my wife, Joanne, and I hosted her family’s Saint Patrick’s Day party (her family is 100% Irish, and her grandmother, the wonderful and indomitable “Hurricane” Dody, held duel citizenship in the US and Ireland).

I was mentioning this to her uncle, Ira Gutman (yeah, not Irish…married to Joanne’s Aunt Bern) who owned a restaurant called Cool Dog Cafe in Cherry Hill, NJ. He immediately offered up his kitchen as a place to make the sauce so that I would be compliant with state manufacturing regulations. Bonus: I would not be making the sauce in Philly, so I didn’t have to deal with the L&I and Health Departments there, I would be under Camden County and NJ state jurisdiction.

Saint Brian’s BBQ was back on.

An Unexpected Boon

Fast forward a few months: I was attending farmers markets in the area on weekends, and was getting pretty great response from the public. They loved my sauce, even people who generally didn’t like barbecue sauce.

Another one of Joanne’s uncles, John, sent a link to me one night: Whole Foods was opening up a new store in Cherry Hill, and they were the test store for a new concept, The Hatchery. This would be a business incubator where local businesses that fell into Whole Foods’ manufacturing requirements could, if accepted, be allowed to rent space by the front registers for $5 for 4 hours to sell direct to their customers.

I was inspired by Tessie Mae’s story of how they got their salad dressing into Whole Foods and then blew up into this “big” condiment manufacturer (big by my standards), so I jumped on this immediately. It required an application, and an application video. And as, when it comes to this kind of thing, I don’t do things in small measures, I had my friend Fred help me make this ridiculous video:

He truly is a good friend to stand in front of a leaf blower on high with me while my wife dumps jars of spaghetti sauce in front of it.

Good thing that I got accepted.

This was August, 2014.

Tragedy

Things were moving along at a great rate. I was selling hundreds of dollars of sauce each month, and the local grocery buyer at Whole Foods had just offered to put Saint Brian’s on the shelf.

Then I found a lump on my beloved Labrador Owen’s neck.

His lymph nodes were swollen. The vet biopsied them.

He had lymphoma. It’s incurable in dogs.

Our only choices were palliative care, which would give us max 6 weeks with him, or chemo, which could get us another 6 months to a year. We chose chemo. We weren’t ready to say goodbye to him yet.

I put Saint Brian’s on hold. I didn’t have the time or the emotional bandwidth to deal with everything, and my wife and our little buddy, our fur-kid, needed everything I had.

I won’t go into the whole emotional roller coaster that we had with that particular journey here; other than to say that we have wonderful friends and family who supported us in so many ways during this heart breaking time in our lives.

We lost Owen in February, 2015. It was the singularly worst day of my life.

He would have been 14 two days ago. I miss him every day.

Back At It

I slowly got back to doing the sauce thing. I got the sauce on the shelf at the Cherry Hill Whole Foods, and started going to other stores as well to sell to them, and soon I had Saint Brian’s on the shelf at 4 different Whole Foods locations, plus a few other small stores in the area. I was hitting the stores and the farmers markets every weekend to demo the sauce. I was heading to Cool Dog once or twice a month to make more batches of sauce, usually 3-4 cases at a time. And this was while I was working full-time.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

The Ups And Downs

Smooth sailing was not to continue, though.

Ira came to me and said Cool Dog was closing down, and he was opening a new place at the Moorestown Mall, but it wouldn’t be able to accommodate me making the sauce. I needed to find a new place to cook.

I was making enough off the sauce now that renting kitchen space by the hour wasn’t out of the question. After a two month search, which included another run-in with the Philadelphia City bureaucracy overstepping its legal boundaries, I found a place in West Chester, about an hour from my house, where I could make the sauce at night.

(There’s a whole story with the first night I made sauce there that turned into a comedy of errors that I’ll tell another time.)

I also took a meeting with a distributor that was going to be able to set me up with Costco to see if I could get the sauce in there. (Again, a funny story, as the guys who owned the business were French, and my sauce nearly killed them…the French can’t handle spicy.)

This was a mixed blessing: it would represent tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue, but it also meant a substantial investment to get my production up to where I could meet their needs. I was going to need a co-packer.

(A co-packer is a company that would take my recipe, scale it up, and be able to make, bottle, and label my sauce at much higher quantities, usually by the hundreds of gallons, and at a much lower price than what I was making it for per bottle.)

And I was exhausted. The business was breaking even every year, and I was working a full-time day job, nights, and weekends. I knew that this wasn’t sustainable.

I made a decision: I was attending an industry trade show in September. If, by the end of the trade show, and by extension December 31st, I didn’t have a clear path for how the business was going to grow, I was going to shut it down.

This was summer of 2017.

Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Around this time (early 2017) I started running into some troubling signs. Whole Foods was no longer allowing any outside vendors to sample on weekends, the prime time for this activity, in favor of only allowing sampling of their own house brand.

Another Whole Foods, one that was moving two cases a week (which is a lot) said they were going to needed to take me off the shelf because of the new planogram (merchandising scheme) and that I would need to go through the regional manager to get back in. The regional manager said they didn’t have control over that, and that it was the local buyer who had control.

All of the other Whole Foods I walked into said they weren’t looking for local vendors at the moment, that there was some kind of moratorium on local buying of new brands.

I had been contacted by a potential investor in the business after an article appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer about my business (again, someone legit, I did my research) who, out of the blue, wouldn’t return my calls any more.

I had reached out to a co-packer, a key step in going for the Costco deal, several actually, and most didn’t bother to return my calls. The one that did resulted in a few conversations, and we even got to the point where I sent them my recipe to get a price quote…and then never heard from them again. (They were a legit business that was recommended to me by a reputable distributor.)

The Deadline

December 31, 2017 arrived. There was no clear path forward. I could keep grinding it out for another year, pouring more time and money into this, or I could stop.

I decided to stop. It was time.

Saint Brian’s BBQ ceased operations on December 31, 2017.

What Happened?

With the benefit of hindsight, I figured a few of the following things were what kept Saint Brian’s from becoming a full-time, legitimate business; some were in my control, some were not.

• Pricing. I had my pricing all wrong. I didn’t know enough about CPG, and companies are notoriously closed-lipped about margins, so there wasn’t much to be found in terms of research, and I guessed. Based on what I know now (that my wholesale margins should have been around 30%, which would have made my wholesale price much cheaper, which would have made the require retail markup (about 50%) $5 or so…much more competitive. I had it priced at $6.95. I was way to expensive.

• Amazon. The timing of all this was right when Amazon was buying Whole Foods, hence my inability to grow the business that way. My guess is that when they started the acquisition process that all local buying was ordered to stop.

• Lack of diverse sales channels. I should have gone to more small businesses, and should have focused more in direct sales, where my margins were much higher. Then the Whole Foods hit wouldn’t have taken such a chunk out of my annual revenues when it tanked.

• Lack of marketing. I should have been making way more content on social.

At any rate, I don’t look at these bullet points with regret, I look at them as things I learned, things that happened, and things I know I’ll do better in the future.

Thank You

As I draw the curtains closed on the final act of Saint Brian’s BBQ, I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight some very important people.

• Joanne McTamney, my wife. I couldn’t have done it without her. She was so unbelievably supportive and understanding during the whole journey. She talked me off the ledge more than once when I was in the middle of a meltdown. I will never be able to pay her back for that, but I will spend every day trying. I love you. You’re my favorite.

• Ira Gutman and Bern McTamney. If Ira and Bern hadn’t given me use of Cool Dog’s kitchen, there would be no story. They’ve also been incredibly supportive over the last almost two years by giving me a place to work at the new restaurant when I was in a bad spot. Go to Moon Dog Grill at Moorestown Mall as soon as it opens again.

• Frederick Kinglee. You let me throw sauce on you. And you helped at the farmer’s markets. I love you, my brother. Couldn’t have done it without you.

• Christian Belko. You were there almost every weekend for the farmers markets. You came to Baltimore with me. When you decided we were going to sell all of our product, dammit, we sold all of that product. And you didn’t throw me through a window freshman year at La Salle over 25 years ago. For all of that and more, thank you, my brother, I love you.

• John Costa. Thanks for sending me the Whole Foods Hatchery info. It was a key moment in this story. You rock.

• Tammy Paolino of the Courier Post and Diane Mastrull of the Philly Inquirer. You wrote the first articles on the business, and it led to good things. Thank you for taking the time to hear the story pitch from some random guy in Northeast Philly.

I have no doubt that there are more, and believe me, as soon as I can bring that into focus I will make the acknowledgement, but for now, please know, if you helped, I am truly, from the bottom of my being, grateful.