A leap of faith, blind luck and a craving for salsa, Darrin Savage and his family have gone from making a batch of salsa just for kicks to finding out that their sweet peppered surprise will soon be on the shelves at 144 Kroger locations in Texas and Louisiana. Back in the summer of 2011, Savage having never made salsa before started throwing around some recipe ideas and made a batch that he says that accidentally turned out really good. After eating it at their house, they decided to take it to a church luncheon where they attend at the Howe Church of Christ. He and wife Amber didn’t say anything to anybody about the salsa at the Mexican food luncheon. It wasn’t long before everyone started talking about it and wondering where it came from.
“I was shocked because I didn’t know what I was doing. It was just luck.” said Savage. “We told them (at the church) that we made it and then we started getting people calling us wanting orders.”
It was taking Savage two hours to make three jars after buying the ingredients, cooking it and letting it sit. He began to stay up late every night making salsa due to the demand from friends. Upon doing some research, he found that it was illegal to make it and sell it out of his home, so he decided to try to rent space in a restaurant to use their kitchen to make the salsa there. Without luck from that angle, Savage discovered copacking. A copacker is a company that manufactures and packages foods or other products for their clients. To market and distribute, a copacker works under contract with the hiring company to manufacture food as though the products were manufactured directly by the hiring company. Savage used County Fair Foods from Arlington as their copacking company. Later, they went with Renfro Foods out of Fort Worth.
His research
began with a simple internet search and County Fair Foods were one of the few copackers that had a website, so Savage became familiar with the program. Savage had to visit the Arlington company and do several ‘recipe runs’ to make sure his recipe was precisely duplicated by County Fair Foods. After a month of tweaking, they sent the salsa off to a lab to verify its acidity to make sure it was shelf-stable and see how long it is shelf-stable. Once that was all approved, it was time to start ordering.
Savage, a Howe native who went kindergarten through graduation in Howe ISD, tipped his salsa hat to his roots and named the product Summit Salsa.
“When Howe was first found, it was named Summit and we really wanted somehow to include our town in our name to include in our branding. Howe Salsa just kind of sounded weird.” Savage joked. “We went with Summit Salsa Company. The people that aren’t from around here expect to see mountains on the logo, but for us locals, we all understand what that’s about.”
Summit Salsa Company has two different products available. It is a sweet salsa that has a lot of green bell pepper that makes it stand out from the others that flood the southwest salsa market. They currently offer sweet hot or sweet mild salsa, both of which are going on the shelves in the Kroger locations. Summit Salsa Company products were originally on the shelves at Diamond Food Stores and then Green Market stores.
With Savage using Renfro Foods as a copacker, he does have a nondisclosure agreement with them that protects him from anyone else copying his ratios of ingredients for the salsa.
In a uniq
ue industry, Summit Salsa Company’s customer is the distributor (which is Jake’s Finer Foods of Houston) and not the grocery store although they want to interact with them as they are.
“We sell at wholesale price and they cut us a check.” said Savage. “As far as receiving revenue, that’s where it ends for us.”
The distributor will put a 13 percent markup on it and sell it to the grocery store, who will put their markup on it to sell it off of the shelf.
“We will work with the grocery stores to do coupon runs and in-store price reductions.”. said Savage. “We have to pay for all of that.”
When asked whether this is a highly profitable business, Savage laughingly said that he would highly discourage anyone from getting in to it.
“When I got in this, I just thought you dropped off big quantities at grocery stores and everyone is happy.” said Savage. “It’s not like that at all, but we will become profitable with this. Maybe not in the first six months to a year, because any profits made will go back into the in-store marketing, but probably starting next year, we will be profitable.”
While the salsa is exactly the same lucky mixture that was served at the Howe Church of Christ back in 2011, everything is now outsourced. Savage does however do some store deliveries to local Diamonds and Green Market stores, but for the product that will be going to Kroger shelves, he won’t see the salsa made or hauled out of the warehouse to the distributor.
“Our goal one day is to bring it back in-house, but for me being a one-man-show, this works out the best.” said Savage.
The Kroger story began with a trip to Houston by Savage and his family. They stayed there overnight and met with the buyer for Kroger. After touching base several times without trying to be too pushy, Savage went for a month without hearing anything. Recently, while sitting with his family at restaurant in Sherman, he received an email with a purchase order from the distributor. With that, he knew Kroger had bought in.
“I kind of did a little ‘woo hoo’ in the restaurant and everybody looked at me funny.” said Savage. “I didn’t care. I was excited.”
He says that his wife has been fully supportive throughout the process and it’s been a leap of faith for her wondering how long he was going to sink money into the salsa dream.
“This was validation for us that we have a good product that people like.” said Savage. “It’s not just friends and family trying to make you feel good saying we like your salsa. It’s a good product and a good price.”
The good news for The Summit Salsa Company is that once product hits the shelf and sells, it will stay on the shelf for an extraordinary amount of time.
The system is set 
up to weed out guys like Savage – the ‘mom and pops.’ Most people in his situation don’t go for copackers that do bigger batches so they’re not able to get their cost down. Those end up hand delivered to specialty stores. But Savage’s dream is to be a large manufacturer one day with Summit Salsa all over the country.
“We’ve got other recipes that we’re working on, but we wanted to wait until we were with a big chain to bring them to market.” said Savage. “We’ve been patient. We’ve played the game and got our cost down. We can’t compete with Pace on cost, but we can compete with anyone else.”
Summit Salsa Company is getting very close to being available in two other big named grocery stores in the south. But for now, if anyone is interested in purchasing the hometown sweet salsa, it is available at Diamonds in Van Alstyne or Green Market in Sheman.
Getting a salsa company on the shelves in the south is like trying to get wine on the shelf in Napa Valley. Everyone has a salsa or a barbecue sauce that claims to be different than the rest. Distributors and grocers have become deaf to those two products in particular. However, Savage’s product seems to be rising to the summit.
