THE BIG CHEESE
Farmers market samples hooked customers for pimento spread
Tom Flournoy believes that farmers markets are to the small business owner what focus groups are to large corporations.
The owner of Tom’s Tiny Kitchen, a local company that makes and sells pimento cheese, Flournoy built his business by offering samples at markets around town.
“You get instant feedback,” he said. “About 95 percent of the people who try the product buy it. You get it right. You don’t want to stand there and have someone say, ‘Bless your heart, you need to get out of the food business.”
Flournoy’s venture into the food business came later in life, and got off to a rough start.
Flournoy was 60 when he lost his job in the auto parts industry in 2008.
“Two weeks before Christmas, they fired me, quote ‘let me go,’” he said. “I spent two years looking for a job.”
Eventually, he decided to try his hand at self-employment.
“The cheapest thing to do, if you have no money, is to do something in the kitchen,” he said.
He tried cookies and this and that before settling on pimento cheese.
“I got out my mother’s pimento cheese recipe, and my wife and I tweaked it,” he said.
Friends and family said they loved it. But they were friends and family, after all, and Flournoy was skeptical. Still, in December 2010, he and his wife, Jill, made a batch and took it to the Gingerbread House, a holiday shopping event presented by St. Agnes Academy and St. Dominic School.
“I had to go home three times and make more,” he said.
In May 2011, he started selling his classic pimento cheese at Agri-center Farmers Market; by September he was in Miss Cordelia’s. Next came High Point Grocery, then SuperLo on Spottswood, three Easy Way locations, and so on. But he never gave up the farmers markets.
“At one point, I think I was doing four or five farmers markets a week,” said Ross Flournoy, Tom’s son and partner in PC.
Beginning Monday, Tom’s Tiny Kitchen classic pimento cheese and chipotle pimento cheese will be available in six area Kroger stores (3444 Plaza Ave.; 6660 Poplar; 540 S. Mendenhall; 576 S. Perkins; and 799 Truse Parkway).
To meet production — well, Tom and Ross will just have to work harder.
They’ll have to buy more mayonnaise, more sharp cheddar cheese, more pimentos. They’ll have to ramp up their production of secret sauce, and their 14- cup Cuisinart will be put to the test; Tom won’t switch to a commercial machine until he can find one that grates cheese with the same texture.
Luckily, they won’t have to chop more green onion, as they’ve recently hired someone to take care of the onion chopping and the portioning of pimento cheese into containers.
“Up until a few weeks ago, Ross and I were doing all that ourselves, said Tom, 65. “They’d have to be washed, dried — they can’t be wet or it messes up the texture — rough chopped and fine diced.”
About a month ago, they also leased a small commercial kitchen on Summer. They’d been preparing their product from the kitchen of Cafe Piazza on the square in Collierville, owned by
Without the farmers markets, we wouldn’t be where we are.”
Tom Flournoy
friend Pat Lucchesi.
“This opportunity kind of sprang up, and we took it,” said Ross, 34. “It happened to coincide with the Kroger deal.”
The younger Flournoy is a musician who recently scored the theme song to CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” In addition to helping his father make the pimento cheese, he makes daily deliveries.
He insists his father is the engine behind the tiny kitchen machine.
“He’s got an incredible amount of energy, way more than I do,” Ross said.
But the family business also includes Jill, who helped Tom start the business and was at the farmers markets, too.
“She does the R& D,” Tom said. “She’s a phenomenal cook, and she is a very important part of this deal.”
Research and development, or R&D, is how the chipotle variety came to be, after customers asked for a jalapeño pimento cheese.
“The jalapeño didn’t really deliver,” Tom said. “What people really wanted was a little bit of heat, but with some flavor the jalapeño didn’t have.”
What R&D does not include, for this business, is another variety of pimento cheese.
“I’m not going to do more than two,” Tom said. “But we might do another product.”
When the time comes, they’ll be at the farmers markets.
“Without the farmers markets, we wouldn’t be where we are,” he said. “It’s an instant acid test. If people like it, they buy it.”