Other than switching from blue jeans to business suits, Diana Schmitt of Hampshire, a former dairy farmer who now produces 50 gourmet food products sold across the country and internationally, says her life hasn’t changed that much.
“I still get up early and work 60 hours a week at least, and I’m still a farmer,” she says.
“Diana is one of the new food producers who take pride in their products like Old World craftsmen do. They are passionate about their work,” says May Harrop, manager of the Farmside Grocery and Winery in Long Grove, which carries many of Schmitt’s products. “People don’t have time to cook, but they want gourmet food that tastes and looks great and is healthy and natural. Put Diana’s Peach and Olive Salsa over chicken and you have quick-and-easy gourmet.”
Through her Diana’s Specialty Foods, Schmitt produces vinegars, herbal oils, salsas, ketchups, barbecue sauces and mayonnaises. But hers are no ordinary kitchen staples. Their festive flavors — such as Cranberry Rosemary Vinegar, Herb Garlic Champagne Mayonnaise, Peach Ketchup and Three-Bean Apricot Salsa — turn loaves of crusty bread and plain linguine into something special.
Based at Hilltop Farm, where she lives with her husband, John, Schmitt’s privately held company exceeded $100,000 in sales in 1997. As her products cross the Pacific Ocean to new markets in Japan, Schmitt’s 1998 sales projections climb higher. Schmitt is in the right place at the right time; the $30 billion-a-year specialty food retail market is growing 10 percent annually, according to Carolyn Schwaar, editor of the Chicago-based Fancy Food trade magazine.
For 40 years, the Schmitts ran a dairy farm in Hampshire while raising four children and keeping the cellar stocked. “It never occurred to me to be in the food business,” she says.
“We always had (the cellar) jampacked with canned vegetables and fruits — always more than we needed. Everything from rhubarb sauce to pickled beans,” says Schmitt’s daughter Debbra Langham of Downstate Donnellson, Ill.
“At first, my friends told me my products would sell, but they were my friends,” Schmitt says. “When friends of friends of friends told me they liked them, I knew I should go forward.”
Schmitt’s other daughter, Joan Lodge of Sycamore, reports the Schmitt family dinners were surprises in the early ’90s, when her mother developed most of her product recipes. “Some of the mixtures were pretty funky,” Lodge says. “But one person’s opinion didn’t stop her. If she thought it would work, she’d make it anyway.”
Schmitt purposely stayed away from the traditional. “Anybody can do simple tomato salsa, but by adding more flavors, the product has so many more uses,” she says.
After Schmitt parlayed her longtime interest in what she calls “experimental cooking” into a business, the family continued to run the dairy farm for a few years. In 1996, they sold the cows to devote all their time to Diana’s Specialty Foods.
Schmitt credits her friend and neighbor Randy Klein with encouraging her to take the kitchen-to-corporate leap. In 1993, she started selling her items through his shop, Klein’s Produce, in Udina. She began with a few herbal vinegars, then added barbecue sauce. “Then I made the black bean sweet corn salsa for my son,” she says. “It made salsa fans out of people who didn’t eat salsa before, so I created the other salsas too.”
It was a simple operation. “At first, I had all my friends save empty bottles for me,” recalls Schmitt, who now buys them by the pallet load. “I didn’t have labels, so I made tags with construction paper and yarn.”
As the business grew, Schmitt translated her recipes into formulas. “Recipes serve six. Formulas serve 6,000,” she explains.
When she added more products and the company outgrew her kitchen, she contracted with a Chicago-area manufacturer to produce and bottle her foods in quantity. Schmitt doesn’t reveal the location, for fear of formula thieves. “By law, the ingredients are on the label,” she says. “So I have to protect the exact formulas.”
In 1995, she incorporated the business and hired a marketing consulting firm. “They helped me connect with food brokers, find more retailers, determine pricing,” Schmitt says. She built an office/warehouse behind her Hilltop Farm home and equipped it with computers that she learned to use through community college courses.
A high school graduate, Schmitt’s business know-how is mostly self-taught. “I spent hours and hours at the library, learning how to do a UPC code, how to make labels, how to make a business plan,” she says. “Now entrepreneurs call me and ask how to get started. I say, `Go to the library. And don’t give up your day job because there’s no quick answer.’ “
“Diana does her homework,” says Klein, who now grows some of her herbs in addition to selling her foods. “When we started growing her basil, she had studied the different basils and knew exactly what she needed. She’s got a computer to keep track, but there’s more in her head.”
Running a dairy farm was good training, says Schmitt’s longtime friend Ann Bruens of Marengo, herself a dairy farmer. “It’s a lot like running a company,” she says. “You commit your life to it and give up a lot. The cows need you 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Lodge agrees. “People have to recognize that a farm wife is a businesswoman, buying and selling livestock, doing the books,” she says.
No longer surrounded by cows, Schmitt has a team of part-time and on-contract helpers, including a graphic artist, bookkeeper, computer guru, lawyer, accountant, food photographers, distributors and manufacturers’ reps. Asked who does her advertising and public relations, though, Schmitt says, “You’re looking at her.”
After logging many miles in her pickup, hauling new products to retailers, Schmitt gladly relinquished distribution to manufacturers’ reps. “It’s like the college kid who can’t get a job because he has no experience,” she says. “You call on a store over and over but can’t sell your products until you prove salability. No one wants to pioneer your product for you.”
Schmitt says she demands her reps push her products “at least 75 percent as hard as I would.” The competition is growing and fierce, she says. “For every placement on a store shelf, there are 100 producers waiting behind you,” she says.
For fun, though, Schmitt still personally visits six longtime house accounts. When she calls on Ethel’s Place in Lake Zurich, her mother, Goldie Ganoe, tags along, duster in hand. “Most mothers and daughters get dressed up and go out to lunch,” Schmitt says. “We go to Ethel’s. Mom cleans the shelves while I price and stock the products.”
Diana’s is a family affair, with John, her husband of 42 years, her unofficial partner (she is president and sole owner). John helps label the oils and vinegars, deliver to the house accounts, exhibit at six trade shows a year and oversee nearby farmers who grow their herbs.
Now that the business consumes most of his wife’s time, John also does the housework, laundry and grocery shopping, plus farming 150 acres of corn and soybeans. “Just because I spend all day with food, I don’t have time to cook it or buy it,” says Schmitt, who praises her husband for switching hats.
Their son, William, a Hampshire-based excavator, recruits co-workers to taste-test new products. “My best taste-testers are my son’s friends at job sites; they’re honest,” Schmitt says. “I also get feedback from my banker, who likes the Peach Olive Salsa the best; my lawyer, even my dentist.”
Schmitt gives her tasters jars — marked A, B and C — with variations of a new product and asks them to score the flavors. So far, the system has worked; she has had no product bombs.
So valuable is Schmitt’s time now, her retailers appreciate her personal visits to store product tastings, when fans collect copies of her cookbook and recipe cards and welcome her cooking tips.
“There are lots of things you can do with salsa other than using it as a chip dip,” she says. “Put it on a baked potato. Add it to a tuna sandwich. Stuff peppers or zucchinis with it. Mix it with ground beef to make salsaburgers. Toss it with pasta or with greens. Use it to jazz up your spaghetti sauce. Or just put it on chicken and broil it.”
In exchange, customers tell Schmitt their likes and dislikes and contribute new recipes.
“Some of my best recipes have come from people I’ve met in the stores, like the bean-salad recipe with my Chili Pepper Oil from a man I met at the Blue Goose (market) in St. Charles,” she says. “Another man taught me to use the Black Bean & Corn Salsa to make chili; you just add whole tomatoes and ground beef. People are so innovative and excited about their recipes. Sometimes, I hear one and think, `I don’t want to go there,’ but everyone has their own tastes, which is great.”
Today, Schmitt’s products line store shelves in every state except Hawaii, and that’s in the works. California and New York are her hottest markets.
In 1997, Schmitt began exporting to the Far East. “I ship by train to the West Coast, then by boat to Japan,” Schmitt explains. “Internationally, I ship by container lots. One lot contains, for example, 285 cases of ketchup.”
Schmitt markets her foods under three labels — Diana’s and Hilltop Farm for gourmet shops, and Farm Fresh Recipes for groceries. The exceptions are the Hilltop Farm products sold through a few grocers that were original accounts before Farm Fresh Recipes came onto the scene. There, Schmitt kept the Hilltop label to maintain name recognition.
Schmitt says her research shows that her customer demographics are across the board, including all ages and income levels. “In fact, many people on fixed incomes tell me they treat themselves to gourmet foods because they don’t have the money to travel,” she says.
Although all-natural foods are hot today, Schmitt says she always cooked that way, partly to control John’s high blood pressure and partly because that’s the way farm wives cook. This one, at least.
“Dinner was always on the table at 5 p.m., and everything homemade and homegrown,” says Lodge of her Hilltop Farm childhood. “At Christmas and at summer picnics, she’d cook for 75 people, all from scratch.” A big-deal treat for the Schmitt kids was a store-bought birthday cake.
Now in their 30s and 40s, Lodge and her siblings say they appreciate that their parents taught them to be frugal and to work hard, plus how to make pie crusts and can vegetables.
“We still don’t get anything for free,” Lodge says, referring to her mother’s warehouse full of goodies. “We either pay for it or work for it. For a case of vinegars for my staff for Christmas, I worked for her for a morning.”
Success hasn’t spoiled Schmitt, who still keeps up with classmates from the St. Charles High School Class of ’56. “Diana’s a sharing, caring friend,” Bruens says. “Family and friends still come first.”
In the future, Schmitt says she plans to expand her markets but not necessarily her product line. She has no intention of retiring. “People retire to enjoy themselves, but we’re already enjoying ourselves,” she says as she dashes from computer to fax to files. “Success is a state of mind. It’s not just liking your job, but loving it.”
SALSA PIZZA (FROM HILLTOP FARM’S RECIPE BOOK)
One-half jar Hilltop Farm Peach and Olive Salsa
2 tablespoons Hilltop Farm Garlic Oil
6 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
1 tube of refrigerated jumbo-sized baking powder biscuits
Flatten biscuits on pizza pan. Drizzle with garlic oil. Cover with salsa and cheese. Bake according to instructions on biscuit tube.
