Greetings and welcome to the first newsletter from “Steve’s Gourmet Olives”! We are a Tampa-based small business specializing in wine-marinated olives owned and operated my husband, Steve, and myself. We have been building the business over the past 3 years and we are thrilled to have finally launched a company website, www.stevesgourmetolives.com, and a monthly newsletter. We want to say a heartfelt “Thank You!” to all our friends and family for helping us get our business up and running. It has been a labor of love over the last few years and it simply wouldn’t have been possible without your encouragement. We intend to send out a monthly newsletter to update you on our list of retail locations, local tasting events and other special events we want you know about. Each month we’ll also offer you a new recipe featuring our olives. Let’s begin with a little history. Steve is the cook in the family, thank goodness, and that is why his name is on the label. He is blessed with the ability to go into the kitchen with no recipe and no plan, and emerge an hour or so later with a masterpiece. He has been marinating olives for his own recipes for over 10 years now. They were never spicy enough for his palate. He started cold marinating in the refrigerator at first with various ingredients. He has tweaked the recipe over the years, experimenting with different types of peppers, herbs and wines. When we married in 2009 and I moved into his house, half the refrigerator was filled with olives. Out of necessity, he began heat pasteurizing them to make them shelf-stable, get them out of the fridge, and give us some space. They are unique and delicious olives, definitely not your ordinary grocery store olives tasting of salt and little else. We currently have 6 wine-marinated flavors that can be used in many ways. Whether it is spicing up a recipe or dressing up a cocktail, these are truly amazing olives. And olives remain a central part of our diet. We eat olives every day, in virtually every meal, and we both love heat. A match made in heaven! There is a reason I waited 39 years to get married. I am truly blessed. Before we started our olive business, we often gave jars of olives away to friends and clients as unique gifts. I was working as a pharmaceutical sales representative at the time, and many of my clients were from India and Korea, where spicy food rules. They gave us exotic peppers to experiment with and lots of encouragement. When we finally decided to turn our passion into a business, we incorporated as Moon Bay Consulting in October of 2011, and named our business after my mother (part Cherokee Indian) whose maiden name was Moon. Next we needed an endless supply of good wine to take our business to the next level. In the fall of 2011, I visited the “ABC Fine Wines” in Carrollwood and asked Glenn Witherbee, the wine consultant, for advice on bold red wines for our olive recipe. He sent me home with several wines to experiment with. When I returned later with a jar of our olives as a gift, he suggested we become vendors at their wine tasting events, and he said we could sell our olives directly to the public at these events. So began our business and our relationship with “ABC Fine Wines”. I transitioned out of pharmaceutical sales in January 2014 to focus full time on our business. On February 1st we were on the shelves at our first retail location, Casa Jimenez, a unique Spanish wine and tapas market in west Tampa. Many thanks to our good friends Drs. Nannette Diaz and Edgard Janer for introducing us to the Jimenez family! Immediately, Gus Chinchilla of ABC offered to carry our olives in several of his stores in Tampa. As sales picked up, so did the offers from other ABC locations in Central Florida. That’s when we formed Steve’s Gourmet Olives as a division under the Moon Bay Corporation. Since then, and with continued support from Gus Chinchilla, Heather Marquis, Dave Paxton and Bill Jackson at ABC, our business has blossomed. We are currently in 15 ABC locations in Central Florida, plus 3 other gourmet food stores. Cheers! Susan Dodd, M.B.A. Steve’s Gourmet Olives |