wegg® showcase: Stacy Moritz, Owner and Operator, Secret Aardvark Trading Co.

Selling first in farmers’ markets gave him an opportunity to try out new flavors. He did kimchi, which he made in our house. Which drove me nuts because it made the house stink. He did gazpacho, sauerkraut—he was really creative. He bottled the sauce and I did the labels. He’d come up with a new sauce and I’d be like, “What? I need to get labels for that!” I did a lot of background stuff and kept everything going. That was how our first year went.

By 2004, he couldn’t work enough farmers’ markets to clear even a small amount of money. I was working farmers’ markets, too, but I also had a day job, so I couldn’t do any more. It was time to take Secret Aardvark to the stores.

The business was small at first. My husband had four flavors in grocery stores. He hand-bottled them and thirty cases of inventory lasted several weeks. He’d drive his pickup truck and deliver products in random boxes he picked up at Cash and Carry. So you might get your sauce in a green bean box. When the business got big quickly, I said, “It’s time to take it to a co-packer.” We have been through a number of co-packers as we’ve grown.

Then my husband was diagnosed with cancer. During his illness, I was like, “I can do this on evenings and weekends and holidays.” I loaded my husband in the car and drove him around delivering sauce because, when you are sick, you need to be out in the world. Next was to get the business running like a business. For example, my husband marked one paper bag “In” and another paper bag “Out,” but nobody knew if the bills in the “In” bag had been paid or what he was spending going out. A lot of customers hadn’t paid us, and some were a year or two late. I got that fixed, and it made a huge difference in our profitability.

When my husband passed away in September 2009, the business was one hundred percent my responsibility. I began working with distributors. The first was a beer distributor, which sounds wrong, but it got us into restaurants and grocery. We grew incrementally, and probably slower than most businesses grow, because I held onto my day job until about eleven years ago.