When Vicky Huxtable is creating recipes for...

When Vicky Huxtable is creating recipes for her line of fresh and frozen meals, she usually finds that as a small business, her company cannot afford to do extensive test-marketing, focus groups and surveys. But she has found she can sell new entrees by knowing what her buyers like--and tempting their taste buds. Huxtable was interviewed by freelance writer Karen E. Klein.

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Cooking has always been my hobby. I just kind of understand it. I took a Chinese cooking course at Venice High School one time, and that’s all the formal training I ever had.

In 1981, I had a newborn son and needed to make money from home, so I started selling my homemade pate to a lot of little gourmet shops. The business took off from there.

We went into pasta sauces and then started producing family-sized “home-meal replacements,” including an entree and side dishes, about a year and a half ago.

About eight years ago I proposed the idea of turkey holiday dinners to Vons’ service deli. Now, in November and December, all the supermarket chains offer them. Last year, we sold 240,000 dinners, including a ham dinner and a prime rib dinner.

As I interfaced with the buyers for service delis at supermarkets, I started to go to them with product ideas and program ideas, and we became like an extended commissary for them. I found it was important to really know those buyers and what they want.

If you have a big company, there’s a whole science to choosing what products you are going to produce and market. You get 100 people and put them in focus groups to taste-test and then ask them questions. It can cost $25,000 to select just the right people so you know you are getting responses from your target customers.

The big corporations do all that testing by hiring outside professionals. But I don’t know of any small producer that’s got the kind of dough to do that.

When I’m selling a new product, I find that I have to go in with the conviction that the consumer is going to like this. Then I have to convince the buyer that I’m right. Usually, that means that the buyer has to like the item themselves.

That means I have to know the buyers and know what they like. The buyer at Costco, for instance, wants to build his home-meal-replacement section on the concept of “value-added” items. I took him a braised beef product, and since I knew what would please him, I described it as beef with pearl onions and braised carrots.

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A buyer I sell to in San Diego really likes comfort food and wants to offer a lot of it. So to him, I’d pitch this same item as beef stew. It’s basically the same product, but I have found ways to appeal to what they want to buy.

I sell a lasagna. To one buyer I would billboard the idea that it includes sun-dried tomatoes. To the one who likes the old favorites, I’d just call it plain old meat lasagna.

Since we’re small, we are able to take items off our production list when they aren’t selling and replace them with new ones quickly. We don’t view them as failures; we compare ourselves to a restaurant that continually revamps its menu.

Because we can replace items with better ones quickly, that makes us very attractive to buyers and keeps our product line interesting to consumers. The big companies that do extensive consumer studies may test something for up to two years before they put it in their freezer case. It is almost an advantage that we can’t afford to do that, because it keeps us light on our feet so we can offer a buyer a quick turnaround.

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At a Glance

* Company: Huxtable’s Kitchen

* Owners: Austen Ventures, Yellowstone Capital, Vicky Huxtable and Fred Epstein

* Nature of business: Food manufacturer

* Location: 2100 49th St., Vernon

* Year founded: 1984

* Employees: 1984

* Annual revenue: $12 million