Holly and Luis Barnett were flirting with a business venture when they took the plunge and signed up for StartUp Tucson’s inaugural Recipes for Success Food Accelerator program this fall.
“This was a way for us to dip our toes” into food entrepreneurship, said Holly, who brought her sister, Jessie McFarland, into the venture.
The idea was to re-create the sisters’ great-grandmother’s sweet relish, which Grandma Hannah made and slathered on sandwiches that she sold along Grange Road in rural Pennsylvania during the Great Depression.
In homage to their grandmother, the trio named their relish Grange Hall Relish.
The StartUp Tucson program helped them develop a label for the relish and identify all the steps they needed to launch the product, including finding a commercial kitchen for production.
“We learned a tremendous amount in the sense of labeling, supplies, distribution, scalability,” said Luis Barnett, who with his wife and her sister works as a recruiter at Grand Canyon University, where all three earned business degrees. “It opened our eyes to everything we need and made us realize the steps we need to do to get this off the ground.”
The trio is still testing the recipe, which uses tomatillos instead of the green tomatoes that Grandma Hannah used.
“We would like to kind of keep it more regional,” Luis Barnett said. “It gives it more of a connection to this area, as well.”
They also are exploring renting commercial kitchen space and hope to have a spot by the end of the year so they can begin producing and selling Grange Hall Relish early next year.
“We’re very excited to get this off the ground,” said Holly Barnett.
“The StartUp Tucson program has been amazing,” added her husband.”Even though we are not ready to launch at this instant, we are so much closer because of that program.”
