We recently connected with Bradley Bennett and have shared our conversation below.

Bradley, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?

It would be too long of a story to outline the incredibly nice thing that people have done for me over the years. I certainly wouldn’t have had the ability to launch Pacific Pickle Works without the stack of those kind generous acts backing us up. But the things that come to mind most when I think about what people did for us as we were starting up this venture were the people that gave us a free or extremely cheap kitchen to do the work.

When launching a food product, you need a commercial kitchen to make your products, but that’s not the real problem. You could make your products out of your home kitchen at first, but to be legitimate, especially in the canning business, you must be operating from a facility that can be certified by the appropriate regulatory agencies and that can be expensive. The challenge for a small startup is that you may not have have the funds to pay for the level of commercial kitchen, let alone a legitimate production facility, that you need to get your product off the ground. This was certainly the case in our origin story. Our first production space was a house that was converted to a food truck commissary. Fortunately it was a certified food production facility, so we could get our license to operate there. The person leasing this facility took pity on us and gave us a space to work for trade. We made pickled carrots and daikon for their Banh Mi sandwiches as trade for the “rent” to operate from their facility. Our second facility was a huge upgrade from there – a state of the art kitchen for the local school district. Again, we were given an amazing gift to trade making bulk pickles for the school district in exchange for using their amazing facility for two nights a week.

Eventually, we outgrew the ability to work in other people’s spaces and had to bit the bullet to get a facility of our own. We needed a place were we could receive full palletized shipments, store the materials, make the products, and store and ship the finished goods. But of course we could not afford the space on our own in the beginning, but we found enough up and coming local food makers that could use the space and help offset the rent enough for us to make the space work for all involved.

Bradley, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Pacific Pickle Works was founded in 2010 by Bradley Bennett, a Santa Barbara native whose spicy homemade pickles began as holiday gifts for friends and family, and quickly sparked a craving amongst locals. Today, the company’s Union St. factory hand-packs its signature West Coast pickles all year ‘round, each batch a refreshingly crunchy, full-flavored salute to peak-season produce that lifts the pickle from sidekick to standalone snack. In 2016, the company launched an all-natural trio of one-step savory cocktail mixers including the multiple award-winning Bloody Mary Elixir made from their own house-made Worcestershire sauce.

Pacific Pickle Works’ full line of pickled vegetables is non-GMO Project Verified, naturally gluten free, fat free and certified kosher; offering shelf-stable convenience with zero artificial ingredients or preservatives. Pacific Pickle Works has won numerous awards for their products including four Good Food Awards, four sofi™ awards and various spirits and mixers awards for the entire savory drink mixer line.

Pacific Pickle Works is currently carried in 3,000+ retail and foodservice locations, including Whole Foods Market, Sprouts Farmer’s Market, Bristol Farms, Lazy Acres, Harmon’s, AJ’s Market among many others and is also sold online through Amazon and at pacificpickleworks.com. With its playful branding and bold flavor profiles, the company looks forward to delighting customers around the world as they gather together around the table.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We do all of our manufacturing in our small and humble little factory in Santa Barbara. While it is a small building, we have maximized the use of every inch of space indoors. We started out simple and had other small food makers renting back space from us. As we grew the business, we built more and more capability into our space including adding structures outside to house refrigerated and dry storage, and built a whole facility where we do our labeling and packaging out of a complex of steel storage containers. It’s a small buy mighty facility! In the last couple of years we have added two additional warehouses and moved our fulfillment center down the street where we store finished product and do all of our mail order and wholesale fulfillment. The day will come when we outgrow our current facility, but that’s a good problem and we welcome the challenge for that next phase of growth.

Manufacturing has been a key tenant for us from day one – well may be day two. The initial plan was to find a co-packer for the products, but we struggled to find a co-packer in our area that could meet the quality and timely demands we had for our business. When we figured out that we would have to do it ourselves, I went out and got certified process controls for food manufacturing and set out to find a space we could share to get started. We went through two shared facilities before building out our own space. We shared our own space for the first few years until we outgrew the ability to have other companies working here and gradually took it all over.

For the last 5 years we have not only grown our own brand, but now do manufacturing for several other brands including some that we export overseas to other continents. At this time about 40% of our business is contract manufacturing for other brands. Several of those are pickled products, we we also do a fair amount of sauce, condiment and drink mixer canning and bottling.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Getting funding for our business was a matter of several things coming together at once. Much in the way I didn’t think I would be able to pull the funds necessary to by my first home, the resources and people came to bat to make it happen.

Our first plan was to run a Kickstarter campaign. It was at a time when there were many Kickstarter success stories and so we jumped on that bandwagon. A filmmaker friend of ours wanted to try his hand at this type of a video format and made a very nice pitch video for us. From there we ran a campaign that raised about $35,000. In the end, you really only keep less than 50% because you have to build in valuable rewards for the “donations”. The reality is that Kickstarter is really a “pre-purchase” platform where people develop confidence in your idea or product and help you with early funds by you promising to send them product later. The purpose of those funds were intended to help us build out our first space, but in the end really just went towards working capital for the business. A couple of years later we built out our own facility, but our funding for that needed to be closer to $250,000 than the 15 to 20K we earned from our Kickstarter campaign.

To get the money needed to build out our facility, we had a mix of personal friends and family that stepped up and let us borrow money at favorable rates to have the cash to do what we needed to do. I had never imagined these loans would have been an option, but it turns out that when people that care about you hear what you are trying to do and have confidence in you, things can happen. We were fortunate in that way.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://pacificpickleworks.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pacificpickleworks
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pacificpickleworks
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pacificpickleworks

Image Credits
Silas Fallstitch for the two very styled pictures of the carrots (Carriots of Fire) and the sweet pickles in the bowl (Bread & Buddhas).