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December 18 2000 >> Source: People
Magazine
"My first memory of solid food," says Amy Berliner,13, "was looking at Amy's Kitchen macaroni and cheese and thinking, 'Yummy!' I had no idea I was the Amy." Or that so many other people were thinking 'Yummy!' too. Begun by Amy's parents, Andy and Rachel Berliner, in their Petaluma, Calif., home in 1987, Amy's Kitchen produces frozen, organic, preservative free, vegetarian dishes for health food stores and supermarkets. A hit from the start—six months after the company's inception, its first item, a vegetable pot pie, was outselling meat pies in health food stores nationwide—Amy's is now a $90-million-a-year enterprise commanding 70 percent of the organic frozen-food market. "The Berliners are pioneers," says Mike Gilliland, founder and CEO of the Wild Oats organic-food chain. "They've made comfort food that's healthy." That, not big bucks, was what the Berliners were after from the beginning. Amy's Kitchen got its start when Rachel, pregnant with Amy in 1987, worried about having time to cook nutritious meals once their baby was born. "Until then," she says, "there had never been anything good and frozen." Realizing that others must share their need, the couple launched the biz and named it after their daughter. "We looked at it as: We are going to make good food," says Rachel, 47. "The money came afterward." Indeed, both cash and know-how were initially in short supply. "It was hard to start something on the ground floor," says Andy, 53, who raised $20,000 in seed money by selling his gold watch, pawning Rachel's car and remortgaging their house. "I couldn't afford to hire anyone who actually knew anything." So they taste-tested the pot pie for a month in the kitchen of their Victorian farmhouse before finally getting it right. Their repertoire grew gradually (Amy's 60-plus offerings now include the $1.89 Bean Burrito, $4.49 Spinach Pizza and $4.99 Skillet Meals) as the couple sought advice on packaging and freezing from equipment makers—and eventual competitors. "I called Swanson," says Andy. "They were happy to help." For the first two years Andy would rise at 3 a.m. every day to make the sauce, then drive to the bakery to supervise the pie making. These days, 600 employees whip up 180,000 meals daily at a warehouse —though the Berliners are on call around the clock. "We still get calls from the cooks: 'Can you taste the sauce?"' Andy says. "[We] come to the door in [our] pajamas." Fred Scarpulla, Amy's chef for the past 11 years, says that Rachel "has the best mouth for picking out flavors." (She also oversees the company's package design and its $100,000 ad campaign.) The daughter of a Los Angeles private investigator, Rachel grew up eating vegetables from her librarian mother's organic garden. "My mother always said, 'If you can't pronounce an ingredient on a label, it's a good idea not to eat it,"' Rachel says. (Mom Eleanor Goodman, 69, now writes the copy on Amy's Kitchen boxes; Rachel's brother Joel, 49, is a company vice president.) Andy was raised on heartier fare. His father was a Chicago meat buyer, his mother a legal secretary. A self described "spiritual seeker" who turned to vegetarianism in his 20s, Andy helped run a profitable newspaper while a student at Purdue University. He was managing a small herbal tea company, and Rachel was working for a homeopathic doctor, when they met on a meditation retreat in India in 1979. Each was married at the time, but after their respective unions broke up they began dating. They wed in 1985. Millionaires today, the Berliners still live simply: Their only indulgences are twin silver BMWs. "We like nice things," says Andy, "but we don't want a lot of them." Nor do they want to sell their mom-and-pop operation, despite plenty of offers from conglomerates. After all, the next generation is already in place. "It's nice for people to know that Amy's Kitchen is family-owned," says Amy, an only child. "I love reading the consumer letters. I write back. I want them to know that my family really cares about them."
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Marketing
tasty vegetarian dishes has Rachel and Andy Berliner rolling
in dough
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