Mikey Barrios, the founder of the Canela Company, wearing “Canela” shirt, surrounded by his family as the Canela Company won the Future of Tucson Award. The Salpointe High School junior and the Canela Company plans to sell bottled horchata from his family’s recipe.

 Courtesy of StartUp Tucson

Terry Kyte had an idea for a new product line for his 5-year-old Ombre Coffee Roasters: a canned coffee using the beans he roasts for his family’s Bisbee Breakfast Club restaurants and sells retail and to a few Tucson wholesale customers.

But he didn’t know exactly where to start.

Greg Smith and his wife Elizabeth flirted with the idea of creating a line of regionally flavored spice blends to complement their year-old food truck Wrapido. But after 35 years in Tucson’s day-to-day culinary industry including spending 21 years as the executive chef at the Marriott University near the UA, Smith needed some advice on how to start.

Enter StartUp Tucson, the non-profit whose sole purpose is to elevate entrepreneurs and promote innovation.

Smith and Kyte were among 15 participants of StartUp Tucson’s inaugural Recipes for Success Food Accelerator program.

For 11 weeks, participants from a 17-year-old high school junior who wants to bottle and sell his family’s generations-old horchata recipe to a class of eighth-graders pitching a Tajín pickling mix for fruits and vegetables and a bakery looking to expand its e-commerce operation learned how to develop and market new food products to help grow their existing business or launch new ones.

“It’s a great program,” said Kyte, who hopes to begin marketing a nitro cold brew and regular cold brew canned coffees next year. “It was an opportunity for me to learn a lot of the stuff I had never been taught like customer profile and lean canvasses that all these entrepreneur people deal with all the time.”

Ombre Coffee wants to roll out two styles of canned coffee early next year.

“The (program) has been amazing,” said Luis Barnett, who has plans with his wife and sister-in-law to bottle and sell their family’s generational relish recipe. “Even though we are not ready to launch at this instant, we are so much closer because of that program.”

The Food Accelerator program is funded through a two-year $300,000 grant StartUp Tucson received in 2020 to explore ways to help food-centric businesses recover and thrive from the pandemic. They partnered in the program with Merchant Gardens, Visit Tucson, BRINK Creative Group and the University of Arizona Department of Agricultural Education, Technology and Innovation.

“We were fielding calls from a lot of food entrepreneurs and even agricultural producers whose main source of revenues — markets — had closed down,” said StartUp Tucson Executive Vice President Dre Thompson. “They were suffering financially and wanted to explore ways to pivot through e-commerce to the digital world, which was a significant need.”

A key component of the Food Accelerator Program was helping the entrepreneurs develop strong e-commerce websites to introduce them to new customers and new markets in Southern Arizona and beyond.

But the big mission of the program, which StartUp Tucson will bring back in spring 2022, is to help food entrepreneurs diversify their revenue models to increase their economic stability.

That’s what the Smiths hope to do with Spicesmith, their new venture that will specialize in spice blends and seasonings based on the flavors of the Southwest.

Luis, Holly and Jessie, from Grange Hall Relish. They make a sweet relish from Holly and Jessie’s great-grandmother’s recipe that she came up with during the Great Depression.

Greg Smith said the plan is to create an online business using locally sourced products, including chiles he grows in the Rita Ranch Community Garden at 7471 S. Houghton Road that his wife created several years ago.

“I went to StatUp Tucson to have them help me to get the business up and going,” he said, especially when it comes to developing the website.

Smith said once he creates the website he’ll be ready to launch with several spice blends including an ancho pumpkin chipotle and a steak seasoning blend both flavored with locally grown chiles.

“When you buy (seasonings) from the store, they have quite a bit of salt in them. I put in less salt so you get more flavoring from the chiles. You get a better sense of the flavor profile of the chiles,” Smith said. “That’s how mine, I think, are different.”

Kyte is looking for a canning company so that he can begin producing his canned Ombre No Magic coffees early next year. He estimated it will cost him around $10,000 to launch the venture and he plans to sell the cans in his family’s restaurants as well as through a few of his coffee clients including Tumerico, Gourmet Girls Gluten Free Bakery/Bistro and Locale Neighborhood Italian restaurant.

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Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com. On Twitter @Starburch