| My Mama's Sweet Potato Pie Company |
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reviews Here's Proof That Mama Knows Best By Doral Chenoweth November, 2004 Twenty years ago Marvin Swain needed a job. So, rather than go back into one market place disappointment after another, his mama created one for him. Eliza Swain, now 78 and retired since 1984 to her family home in Springfield, had a recipe for success, a scratch recipe that had yet to be put on paper. “He came to me one day and said he wanted a (sweet potato pie) recipe. I don’t have recipes. I just make pies. So I wrote out one for him…I thought he was playing. He said he wanted to market one,” she said Then 35 and discouraged, son Marvin Swain spent three months noodling all possibilities. Low on his list was making sweet potato pies. But, circumstances, fate, timing, luck, friends and a mother’s unrecorded pie recipe all came together to create My Mama’s Sweet Potato Pie Co. This year Swain’s little pie factory at 813 E. Livingston Ave., albeit with what Wall Street and Uncle Sam call outsourcing, is geared to do more than a quarter million bucks. My Mama today has one huge wholesale customer – Kroger stores in Columbus and Cincinnati. Swain says that when he has to deliver 12,000 pies in one full truckload, he has to outsource. Eliza Swain’s recipes, since computerized, refined to define batches in big pounds, and measurements, all to come out in numbers worthy of a semi bound for stores in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana. The Swain pies also grace tables at Brownstone On Main, Linden Café, a few Chinese restaurants, and others he prefers not to name. Swain traces his business acumen to his newspaper (Springfield Daily News) route when he was nine years old. “When I had that route I collected 57 cents (weekly) from each customer…seven cents was mine and I always wondered how to get that other 50 cents,” he recalls. “I saw all those TV shows with kids and their fathers coming home with brief cases. They all had suits on. I wanted that,” he says, explaining the hows and whys of owning his own business. When Swain turned to his mother, he gave her $50 to buy test ingredients. Together they came up with five recipes, “Original, lemon, pecan, coconut and pineapple and they sell in that order,” he says. Swain’s first pie was the original (major ingredients, sweet potato, nutmeg, eggs, margarine, sugar and vanilla flavoring. “That’s (vanilla) my secret… I use a very expensive flavoring…costs me $45 a gallon,” he says.
As do most startup entrepreneurs, Swain delivered six pies on consignment to a small bakery. A few days later he returned, five had been sold for $4.50. The shop owner gave Swain $15 and said, “bring me six more.” That first year My Mama grossed $78,000. For additional information about My Mama's products, distributing, and marketing programs please contact Marvin Swain Office: 614.261.7882 Cell: 614.804.1385 next |
