Couple Finds Recipe For Success -- Fudge Replaces Rice Pudding As Lead Product

BOTHELL

Chris Psomas really believes that the proof is in the pudding - rice pudding, specifically.

Fifteen years ago, at age 55, Psomas, and his wife, Annie, sold their New York luncheonette, moved to the Puget Sound area and sunk their life savings into building the Just Delicious Rice Pudding Factory.

"We exhausted all the money we had, including selling our life- insurance policy . . . We even sold my car, because we needed a machine to pump the pudding out of the 40-gallon electric kettle," Psomas says.

The company, which was started in 1976 and is now called Just Delicious Foods Inc., is a family effort. Christy Crissinger, the Psomas' daughter and Robert, her husband, were living in the Seattle area and joined the business.

"We didn't have any money, so we contributed sweat equity," Robert Crissinger says. The Psomas' oldest son, Sig, joined the company in 1979.

The family already had a track record for their rice pudding. They sold it for dessert at their New York sandwich shop and, briefly, marketed it to Bloomingdale's and Macy's.

The Puget Sound area offered some additional challenges, however, and the family learned various business lessons through "the school of hard knocks," Crissinger says.

Few Northwesterners were familiar with rice pudding, there was no money for advertising and the new venture was located in a raucous section of Seattle along Aurora Avenue where many potential

customers were afraid to stop, Psomas says.

To familiarize customers with their factory and rice pudding, the family painted the shop yellow, used a large billboard located on top of the shop for advertising and sat outside the shop offering samples to anyone who stopped.

"We had silver trays filled with little one-ounce cups, and we'd run out and grab people to give them a taste," Psomas says. "Some people ran away . . . I chased one little old lady all the way down to the light, caught her, dragged her back for a taste and she bought four pounds."

Seattle's rowdy North End actually became a plus for Just Delicious. The area's seedy side prompted Al Wallace, a then-popular roving reporter for a local television station, to do a story about the troubles. After the piece ran, a viewer called to complain that Wallace targeted the area's negative aspects and ignored its best attribute - the Just Delicious Rice Pudding Factory.

Wallace came back and did a story about the Just Delicious Rice Pudding Factory, and sales climbed.

Wallace played an inadvertent role in the company's expansion into fudge, too. The reporter, who had become a friend, would have received a five-pound batch of Christmas fudge from Psomas in 1979. Unfortunately, Wallace was out of the country for a month and the candy wouldn't last, so Psomas and Crissinger cut the fudge into pieces and sold them for 20 cents each. Today, fudge is the company's major product. Rice pudding is still distributed mostly in Washington and Oregon, but fudge has gone national, Crissinger says.

The 7,000-square-foot Just Delicious Foods factory in a business park in Bothell is the third location since 1976, Crissinger says. The factory produces 200 pounds to 250 pounds of fudge per hour and is looking at increasing that capacity significantly to keep pace with demand, Crissinger says. Currently, the company has several back orders and expects vending-machine sales, which are new for Just Delicious Foods, to grow rapidly.

Besides its recent foray into vending machines, Just Delicious sells to Safeway, Olson's, 7-Eleven Stores, Costco Wholesale and other stores, Crissinger says. Overall, revenues are running at about $1 million per year, he says.

Despite Just Delicious Foods longevity and its successes, the candy industry is a tough business dominated by big players.

The top 25 suppliers of confectionery products enjoy a 90 percent market share. The two largest suppliers, Hershey Foods Corp. and Mars Inc., control more than 35 percent of the industry, according to statistics from the Candy & Tobacco Distributors Association.

At 70, Psomas has turned the daily operations of Just Delicious Foods over to the next generation, but he isn't finished with the candy business. After four years of kitchen research and tasting competitor's offering, the Psomases started a new business called the Ultimate Truffle Inc.

The candy is sold mostly through word-of-mouth, and Psomas is still not sure how he should market the Ultimate Truffle. He does, however, resort to occasionally chasing people down to give them a taste.

On their way to the grocery store a while ago, the couple saw a car with a license-plate frame saying, "I want chocolate, and I want it now." Psomas followed the driver to a store and gave him and his two children truffles.