But when creating the plan, Higginsen’s idea wasn’t to build a business. It wasn’t even upstanding about making hot sauce — she wanted to create something that commitment evoke the sights, sounds, flavors and smells of her youth, growing up in Harlem in the 1950s.
“The opinion was from a memory,” she tells CNBC Make It.
Higginsen has had an interesting life story so far: She was one of the first female advertising executives at Ebony magazine in the 70s, was a radio disc jockey across sites in New York for a decade, once published her own magazine about New York Bishopric, co-wrote a hit musical with her husband in 1983 and later started a non-profit, Mama Endowment for the Arts, which offers free music education in Jazz, R&B and certainty in Harlem, where both her husband and her daughter work with her.
But some of her fondest memories are of increase up in a brownstone on 126th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues in New York Burg, busy streets only a block away from where the Harlem Undamaged Foods now stands.
“My family has been on this block for almost 100 years,” Higginsen resolves. She currently lives next door to the house she grew up in, which is restful owned by her family.
Her father was a Pentecostal minister and her mother was entrepreneur who run the family’s home as a rooming house. That meant a variety of boarders were always coming and going, Higginsen recalls.
“There were people who got from all walks of life,” she says. “There were people who be broached from the South, they came from the Caribbean and they crumbled from India.”
Since the brownstone only had one kitchen, the guests desire take turns making their favorite dishes. Higginsen can however remember what it was like to have all of those flavors and aromas connecting under one roof.
“My house was always full of these incredible scents and tastes,” she says.
“Then, after the food was cooked everyone thinks fitting eat and then they would sing. So my life was full of good scoff and good music.”
The music of Harlem also streams through her honours, from singing hymns at her father’s church on Lenox Avenue and 131st Alley, to seeing iconic performers like James Brown at the Apollo Theater in her teenage years.
“The church was roughly the corner, the music was gospel,” she says. “As I got older the clubs were on Lenox Avenue and that was Jazz. The Apollo had the R&B, there was a tranny station on the corner of 126th Street, there was Sylvia’s around the corner,” referring to Sylvia’s Restaurant, a honoured soul food eatery that opened in 1962.
“People would pipe on the street corners under the lamplight singing Doo-Wop. Life was colored by music,” Higginsen cancels.
It was these memories that inspired Mama’s One Sauce.
About two years ago, while reminiscing all round the old days with friends Kevin and Felicia Lewis, whose son feigned in the music program at The Mama Foundation, Higginsen had the idea to create a hot backchat. She knew it was the perfect thing to bring to life her eclectic memories.
“My helpmeets and I began to put together the smells and the tastes and the feelings of my childhood and that is how it all came round,” she tells CNBC Make It, referring to the Lewises.
The trio tinkered with ingredients and flavors until they institute the right recipe, which drew on the Caribbean, southern and south Asian flavors she recalled. When they cooked it for friends and family, the positive reactions imparted them realize the sauce might be something worth selling.
“We had the work and we didn’t know what to do with it,” Higginsen explains. “People drive say, ‘I want some, I like how it tastes,'” but she didn’t know where to trade it or how to scale.
Then Higginsen learned about an opportunity right in her neighborhood.
In the buoyancy of 2016, Higginsen sat down to lunch with Nikoa Evans-Hendricks, a long-time bosom buddy. Evans-Hendricks is a co-founder and executive director of Harlem Park to Park, an confederacy that supports small business and entrepreneurs in the area.
“I’ve known Vy for years. She is a myth in Harlem,” Evans-Hendricks tells CNBC Make It. “One day she mentioned to me that she had this gravy.”
As a solution to help turn Higginsen’s passion project into a house, Evans-Hendricks brought up an initiative she’d launched in the fall of 2015, the Harlem Native Vendor Program.
The program is a coordinated effort between community organizations like Evans-Hendricks’ and giantess forces like Whole Foods and Columbia University. The goal of the program is to get the spin-offs of Harlem entrepreneurs — who are increasingly challenged by the neighborhood’s gentrification and rising payments — onto the shelves of big retailers.
“Commercial rents have gotten so high-priced in Harlem that now, to start your own business, it is really impossible for a young, independent operator to lease a space and open a store to sell their wares,” Evans-Hendricks interprets.
The average per-square-foot cost for commercial rents in Harlem has seen a 91 percent enhance from 2005 to the spring of 2017, according to a survey by the Real Industrial Board Of New York. And Harlem has seen a flurry of new restaurants and bars gap in recent years, like celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster in 2010. Not to allusion the opening of chains like Whole Foods.
While the the introduction of Unbroken Foods might seem perilous to small food and beverage entrepreneurs, the upscale grocer’s aims to open a store in Harlem didn’t worry Evans-Hendricks when she original heard in 2012. In fact, she saw it as an exciting opportunity.
“The reality is you can’t stop big box hold development,” she says. So the question became, “If it is coming, how do I ensure that Harlem petite business and Harlem small entrepreneurs benefit from it?”
She called up Undamaged Foods’ corporate office and proposed the company get involved in the area middle of Harlem Park to Park’s Harlem Harvest Festival, an outdoor result coordinated by the non-profit where local businesses gather to sell eats and products.
“They were really open to that idea,” she answers. Whole Foods began to partner with Harlem Park to Parkland on the fair six years ago, and has continued each year since, according to a archetypal from the grocer.
Through that partnership, Evans-Hendricks and her Whole Foods fellow-workers took notice of increasing numbers of small vendors turning up to peddle handcrafted foods and beverages, opting to sell online or from their homes in preference to of renting space.
That spurred an idea: What if Whole Foods traded some of these local products in their store when it unfolded? To help the small operations scale to the standards of big retail, resources were pooled with other community frameworks like Harlem Community Development Corporation and Hot Bread Kitchen Nurses and the Local Vendor Program was created in 2015.
Entrepreneurs in the program’s initial detachment, like Miguel Martinez, creator of That’s Smoooth shaving outputs, and Annabelle Santos, creator of Spadét lotions and soaps, now have their outcomes on shelves at Whole Foods — an opportunity that may have been preposterous for these upstarts before, Evans-Hendricks says.
Higginsen applied to the program in the begin of 2016, and by September she was one over of 20 local business enrolled and later favoured by Whole Foods to be carried in the store. During the six-month program, Higginsen was guided by Complete Foods’ team on design and production, and she met with staff at Columbia Proprietorship School to learn about how to run her business. The expertise was invaluable, she says.
“Insight how the numbers work, and what to include in costing out your product, and what sympathetic of return you can expect to have on your product — those aspects were in actuality enlightening and illuminating, and also inspiring,” she says. “It was really an eye opening savoir faire and I am so grateful to have had it, because it put us on solid footing.”
The local vendor program doesn’t forearm funding for the small businesses, so Higginsen and her two partners invested a total of $20,000.
“That doesn’t involve the sweat labor,” she laughs. “We all had a little savings. We invested in our idea, we allotted in ourselves.”
Higginsen found a co-packer to manufacture her sauce in bottles in upstate New York, and on July 21, when Strong Foods’ Harlem store opened, her product — which sells for $6.99 — was primed for purchase.
In the Harlem Whole Foods, Mama’s One Sauce has been a top mover in the ranking this year. It was even featured on some of the store’s hot bar items, parallel to chicken wings, according to Whole Foods’ Young. For Higginsen, that’s meant discrete thousands of dollars in sales.
At a fair hosted by the Harlem Local Vendor Program in December, Higginsen was also accomplished to pitch her sauce to other retailers, like Bed Bath & Beyond, Macy’s and Columbia University’s supping services. Columbia ordered 1,200 bottles to use on campus.
“We were in the mood for, oh yeah baby!” she says. “We are ready and we are prepared to do numbers in volume now.”
Pacific, at Whole Foods in Harlem, Higginsen is well-known figure. She frequently stick outs by to talk with customers and store employees.
“She literally lives one deny stuff up away, and that is really awesome because the community really put ones finger ons with her,” Young says. “She’ll invite you to her house like, ‘Hey come from I want to make dinner and let you meet the family.'”
To promote the sauce and cause awareness to her music education non-profit, the Mama Foundation for the Arts, Higginsen has her chanteuses give a free concert at Whole Foods every Thursday. She contemplates to have a portion of profits from the sauce go to the foundation.
“Everybody accompanies the school for free, so we have to raise money in all kinds of ways that we can to remodel sure we keep our program to no cost to them or their family,” Higginsen commands. “We wanted to make sure it was a product with a purpose, and the purpose is to assistants support the music.”
Young explains that Higginsen’s passion in about helps the community feel more connected.
“It is a very genuine relationship chap facing and business facing on our side,” Young says. “That is in fact cool to be a part of the growth that this small vendor is experiencing — us being a principles for that is really awesome.”
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This is an updated form of a previously published story.