Growing up in the 1920s, Dorothy Holterman loved her mother’s unique homemade dressing served on salads and slaws. As an adult, Holterman tried to make the dressing herself but could never get it right—and her mother was of little help, since she never had an exact recipe.“She always made it with a dab of this and a dab of that, and I fooled with those dabs for years, but it never tasted like Mama’s,” Holterman says. “It took me 23 years to perfect it.”
Once she got the recipe right, Holterman found that friends loved the dressing and frequently asked for bottles of their own. She dreamed of marketing it, but never had the know-how or the cash to do it. At Holterman’s 84th birthday party in 1999, the family’s conversation again drifted to talk about marketing Grandma’s dressing. Holterman’s grandson, Steve Picker, decided to accept the challenge.
By January 2000, the first bottles of Holterman’s famous Grandma’s Cool & Zesty Dressing were on grocery shelves in Holterman’s hometown of Jefferson City, Mo. Within months, the dressing was being sold at stores within a 65-mile radius of Jefferson City, and by mid-2001, it had entered the St. Louis market. In almost five years of business, Grandma’s Cool & Zesty Dressing has grown its profits by at least 15 percent each year. And in 2004, after introducing Grandma’s Cool & Zesty Sugar-Free and Carb-Free Dressing, the company earned even higher margins of almost 40 percent growth.
“My grandson Steve takes care of everything; and I just enjoy every minute of it,” Holterman says. “It’s my product, but it’s his business.”
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