Salsa For Sale: Friends Turn Christmas Gift Into Business
McKinney News - July 8, 2007

by Beth Shumate

Bobette Hilliard and Dixie Thomas were low on funds Christmas of 2003. The friends decided to make jars of salsa as gifts instead of hitting the mall. Less than four years later, they are entrepreneurs with a commercially-bottled product, filling orders from around the country.

“We just threw it together,” Hilliard said. “After Christmas, everyone started asking us for more. By November 2004, we had a professionally bottled product that people wanted to buy.”

The women came up with their recipe by trial and error, Thomas favoring tomatoes and Hilliard garlic. Both were happy with the results – a not-too-tomato-y salsa with an extra kick of flavor. The future business partners spent nine hours with two food processors going non-stop to fill their first post-Christmas order of 48 jars.

Hilliard and Thomas met when Bobette’s husband Joe, and daughter Tahnie, 15, boarded their new horse with Thomas. (The Hillards also have a son, Robert who is 20.) The Hilliards live in McKinney and Thomas recently moved north to Calera, Okla. The women share the day-to-day work, spreading the word while finding retailers to carry their salsa.

“A distributor keeps up with our Albertson’s business, and Dixie and I handle the rest of it,” Hilliard said.

The women found a commercial bottler in Dallas that could mass-produce the salsa. Then they started making phone calls and pounding the pavement to find stores to sell it.

“We hired a broker that got us into Albertsons. We did ‘Good Morning Texas’ with Gary Cogill last July. The rest of it has been giving away jars and asking people for their opinion,” Hilliard said, who is very low pressure at sales. “Either they like it or they don’t. If they like it, maybe they’ll sell it in their stores.”

Hilliard was visiting family in Granbury and stopped into a furniture store there, The Wagon Yard.

“I gave them a sample of our salsa. Now they sell it like crazy!” Hilliard said.

The product also found its way into a consignment shop, western wear shops, feed stores and even a vet supplier specializing in equine products.

Two small McKinney stores carrying the salsa are D&L Ag Mart on University, and Hamm’s Spiral Cut Honey & Custom Meats just off the downtown square on Tennessee.

“It’s very good and it sells real well,” said Joan Uselton of Hamm’s. “We sell lots of the mild and medium. The hot is great when you mix it with cream cheese as a dip.”

The cream cheese dip recipe is on the salsa Web site, as are recipes featuring the salsa - a chicken dish, nachos, sloppy joes, meatloaf and pasta.

“We really need to add more recipes to the site. We always appreciate e-mail comments and recipe ideas submitted by ‘SOTS’ fans.” Hilliard said.

Spirit of Texas Salsa is enjoying an increase in Internet exposure, too. LoneStarSpirits.org, a ghost hunting site, features a link to the salsa site because of a love of the product and the salsa’s name parallel with its own. The salsa will soon be available online from GourmetFoodMall.com once Hilliard secures the contracts.

“We’ll be included in a Texas-made products section [on the site] and hopefully in the Kosher section, too,” Hilliard said. The women recently moved their bottling to Tennessee when their Dallas bottling rep relocated there.

“Our bottler is Kosher, so whatever it is they do to obtain this status, includes our product as well,” Hilliard said. “We just don’t have the ‘Kosher’ label stamped on our jars yet.”

Hillard thanks ignorance of the business world for their success so far.

“If Dixie and I had been scared going into this, we would never have done it. We still fly by the seat of our pants,” Hilliard said. “I don’t get stressed very easily so the day I lose sleep over it is the day I don’t need to do it any more.”

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