Summer Fancy Food Show Booth 2056
taurants, cruise ships, and Las Vegas casinos.
Another startup involved adding nutrition
and calorie information to guest receipts.
"I'm still wondering why I did it," he
says of starting a pickle company. "I cer-
tainly could have been more successful by
staying in software earning money instead
of spending money. Maybe I did it out of
curiosity. How do you make things? I've
always had the mindset to create some sort
of project or entity from the ground up. It's
probably why I wanted to be an architect
initially."
Launching Pacific Pickle Works cost
Bennett about $30,000 of his own money,
along with some loans from family and
friends. At first, he kept his day job and
spent his spare time working out of a cater-
ing kitchen. He also developed a relation-
ship with the city's schools, trading pickles
for free use of a kitchen. A co-packer didn't
work out so he took a course from the
University of California, Davis, and became
licensed as a cannery.
A branding exercise furthered along
the visuals and a website. In 2011, four
Santa Barbara stores agreed to stock four
kinds of his hand-packed pickles. The
names were crowd-sourced on Facebook,
the winners proving to be Jalabeaños (green
beans pickled with jalapeños), Asparagusto
(asparagus spears with jalapeños and other
robust spices), Unbeetables (beets), and
Cukarambas (spicy cucumbers, now called
¡Ay Cukarambas!). The playful names got
a dialogue going and soon more stores put
them on the shelves. In 2012, Fenn Shui
pickled fennel was released, joined the fol-
lowing year by Bloody Mary Elixir, a spicy,
customizable cocktail base.
In a Pickle
Pacific Pickle Works' growth, however, pre-
sented a problem. Bennett sometimes had
"I told myself I wasn't going to do any artificial
marketing. I was going to put the pickles on the
shelf and see if they sold because they looked
good and tasted good. It had to fundamentally
work to make a brand and a company out of it."
SPRING 2019 49
