Here’s an entrepreneurial recipe: Start with three existing gourmet food-product businesses, add a common goal and mix well under one roof.
The result is Flavor Trade, a new Kansas City gourmet food manufacturing company that combines the enterprises of Nina Ward, owner of KC Classic Gourmet Foods; Shannon Kimball, owner of FireBug Grill’n Sauce, and Ron Rupp, owner of RQ Barbecue restaurant in the Chicago area and its sauces.
“We’re all too small to do it ourselves,” Kimball said. “So we just collaborated and found a way with all three volumes to make this happen.”
Flavor Trade was incorporated in January, and since April has produced and packaged its partners’ individual sauces, dips, salsas, dressings, rubs, bulk spices and custom blends in a shared space at 3001 Mercier St. The company plans to relocate in July to a former bakery plant site at 3000 Troost Ave.
Flavor Trade sells its products to food artisans, chefs and culinary entrepreneurs. Customers include Next Door Pizza in Lee’s Summit, Mano’s Gifts in Kansas City and Texas Smokehouse and Saloon in the St. Louis area.
The company also welcomes consultancy and R&D opportunities.
“A restaurant will seek us out and say, ‘We want you to design us a prime rib rub that’s exclusive for us,’” Kimball said. “So we will do research and development, create that flavor profile and then sell them the recipe. Or we will retain the recipe and they will buy the rubs from us.
“And gift shop companies that build gift baskets are always looking for unique items each year. So we’ll help them design novel products.”
Additionally, Flavor Trade offers co-packing services to other food-product makers who need their foods reliably produced and packaged, including Rib Stars barbecue rub and Hayward’s Pit Bar B Que in Overland Park.
Although Hayward’s has been around since 1972, Kimball thinks it’s important to offer co-packing services, he said, “for other customers that might be in the position that I was in two or three years ago, when I was trying to figure out how to get started. We want to help people like that.”
