Written by Marla Hardee Milling | Photos by Anthony Harden
Beau Martin and Brandi Morrow tap into a family tradition to yield some of the tastiest products in the region.
Beau Martin couldn’t get enough of one particular taste sensation when he was a boy. He could gobble up a jar of his grandfather’s famous spicy green tomatoes in one sitting. Since his granddad, David Martin, Sr., only made 10 jars or so a year, he knew he had to take some drastic steps to fuel his addiction. Around age 14, he asked for the recipe and began making his own.
Today, Martin and his fiancée, Brandi Morrow, keep that family tradition alive by producing limited edition batches of Dave’s Spicy Green Tomatoes, seasonal specialties (like pickled ramps and watermelon rinds, relishes and chow chow), along with a line-up of seven regular offerings—Willy’s Dilly’s dill pickles, Spicy Appalachian Okra, Blue Ridge Beets, Tuxedo Beans, Southern Sweeties, The Narrows, and MF’s Jalapenos. They sell at area tailgate markets and festivals, as well as to select stores and restaurants.
The name of the pair’s Weaverville-based business, Green River Picklers, pays further homage to Beau’s roots—he grew up in Tuxedo in the Green River fire district of Henderson County—and they also chose regional names or family names for their products. (For example, MF’s Jalapenos refers to a “Mary Francis.” One that may not be immediately recognizable is “The Narrows.” This sweet and spicy pickle is named for a grueling part of the Green River favored by daredevil kayakers. It’s known as the “bread and butter” run of the Asheville area Class V paddling scene.) Meanwhile, Brandi grew up in West Asheville as a seventh generation resident of Western North Carolina. Their roots run deep in these mountains and they understand the importance of producing products that are well connected to locally grown produce and area farmers. They have a variety of farmers they source produce from, but they also buy up left-overs at the tailgate markets.
“Our goal is to only source local, but garlic is tough for us,” says Brandi. “When it’s coming in locally, it’s a lot to process.”
“There’s a lot of work in peeling garlic. It will burn your hands. It’s the only thing we get from California,” says Beau. “We’d like to do a pickled garlic just by itself and that would highlight the local garlic. Instead of being an ingredient, it would be the whole jar.”
Born to Pickle
Beau says he has always had his hands in the food. While he learned how to make the spicy green tomatoes from his paternal grandfather, he also soaked up kitchen techniques by watching and helping his maternal Italian grandmother.
“He’s the only one who can roll the dough for the ravioli like his grandma,” says Brandi.
Beau spent 15 years as a chef in establishments as varied as the Grove Park Inn and Waffle House, additionally serving as a live-in/on-call chef for a boutique hotel in Costa Rica and working as a private cook for a team of professional skateboarders. All along, though, he thought of starting his own business, and he already had an understanding of pickling. He was working at Roots Hummus in the River Arts District of Asheville when he met Brandi. “Once we were together for six months, I knew I had a partner who would go at it with me,” he recalls.
As it turns out, Beau had recently inherited $20,000 worth of Walmart, and Coca-Cola stock from his grandmother, so he decided to use that as seed money to begin the business. “I boycott Walmart and I try not to support Coca-Cola for what they’ve done around the world,” explains Beau, “so I promptly sold the stock. I bought a travel trailer for $10,000 and used the remaining $10,000 to go to ‘pickle school,’ buy some equipment, a couple pallets of jars, and file papers for the business.”
They began some initial test runs in Tuxedo, with Beau’s family, then moved to a shared use kitchen, formerly known as Grow Down Home Kitchen, in Black Mountain when they were ready to start producing products for sale. They were in that space with other producers like Imladris Jams, Fire on the Mountain hot sauce, and a couple of food trucks who used it as their commissary.
“It was great for all the folks at our level—just starting out or just wanting to scale products locally,” says Brandi. “None of us were thinking about our products nationally so it was nice to have a cheap option to start a business, and then we benefited from all the networking and connections and ideas and suggestions that we would get from one another.”
“Black Mountain is a hub for free thinkers,” Beau adds.
They began selling at the tailgate market in Black Mountain in 2012, and then branched out to include the Asheville City Market on Charlotte Street, the North Asheville tailgate market on the campus of UNC Asheville, and the TD Market in Greenville, South Carolina. Beau’s mother also sells at the Flat Rock tailgate market on Thursdays.
“We used to do more weekday markets,” says Brandi, “but we started to stretch ourselves too thin. It’s hard to be at the markets and be able to make the pickles when the produce comes in.”
Customers also find Green River Picklers in a variety of artisan markets, shops, and restaurants around Western North Carolina. That includes Duncan & York, the Fresh Quarter in the Grove Arcade, and French Broad Co-Op, all in Asheville, Food Matters in Brevard, Montgomery Street Market in Waynesville, Trout Lily in Fairview, Black Mountain’s Roots & Fruits Organic Market and Town Hardware, and Hendersonville Co-op.
Their products are also in three Southern Season stores in Raleigh, the Old Mill in Pigeon Forge, and several stores in Knoxville. In addition, they are working this year to build a distribution route in Charlotte and Gastonia. They believe in “full truck in, full truck out” so they team up with other companies to deliver their products. “The idea for them to deliver for us hasn’t come to fruition,” says Beau, “but we’ve been making deliveries and charging 10% of the total invoice. We’re basically just doing it now for people who contact us who know we have a van and we’re going that way.”
“When we go to Charlotte to deliver to some retailers, we pick up Uncle Scott’s Root Beer at their warehouse and bring it here,” says Brandi. “Let’s say the Knoxville Co-op orders pickles and root beer; we take it there. We’re also trying to help get the other in stores they aren’t in. So if I’m already delivering pickles here or they’re delivering root beer here, then we try to get the other in there.”
Beau and Brandi have also been talking with Ingles, Earth Fare, and Harris Teeter about getting in select stores. If everything goes according to plan, Beau says they expect to soon be in 10 Ingles stores, a few Earth Fares, and three Harris Teeter locations. They’re also moving more food service buckets in restaurants. Currently, Homegrown, Bonfire BBQ, City Bakery, and Foothills Butchery are putting in the largest orders among restaurants.
Another big draw, for those flying in and out of the Asheville Regional Airport, is finding Green River Picklers’ products there.
“If we have tourists who visit us at the tailgate market, they can’t take them through the airport,” explains Brandi. “But once they pass through security, they can buy them at the airport store. Tourists are buying a lot of our jalapenos at the airport.”
Getting into the airport was a bit of serendipity, as one of the managers for Paradies (a company that operate kiosks in more than 80 airports in the United States) tasted the pickles at a local market and asked Brandi and Beau to send samples to the corporate office in Atlanta. They were actually in Atlanta when that request came in, so they delivered samples in person.
“They order from us about once a month,” says Beau. “Right now we’re just in the Asheville Airport, but we’re opening up talks to be in other airports, including Greensboro and Charlotte. They are the big ones we want to push for.”
Beau and Brandi appreciate the Western North Carolina connections they have with their business, from sourcing locally grown produce, to enlisting the help of family and friends, to getting connected with the land.
Staying Connected
There’s a string art map of North Carolina hanging in their office that Brandi made for Beau and it shows a small triangle with points at Asheville, Brevard, and Tuxedo. When the map is mentioned, Beau quickly rolls up his right sleeve to reveal a similar design on his arm. His tattoo features the outline of the state, again with the triangle emphasizing the area that is closest to his heart.
Beau and Brandi appreciate the Western North Carolina connections they have with their business, from sourcing locally grown produce, to enlisting the help of family and friends, to getting connected with the land as they venture this year into growing some of their own spices and peppers. In August of 2014, they located a home for themselves and their business, and they’re getting ready to plow up a small garden.
The two had been living for a year in that travel trailer Beau had bought with his inheritance and spent a summer at the base of Mount Pisgah without electricity or water. (Beau: “It was a 2010 Keystone Hideout travel trailer. We pulled it into the middle of the woods and built a little deck around it. I could turn on the generator and plug in our incinerator toilet—it burns the matter—they use them on sailboats and things like that.”)
They drove to the shared use kitchen in Black Mountain to make the pickles, but with high gas prices at the time and the need to be more efficient, they scanned offerings on the Western North Carolina Commercial Property Exchange. They moved to a house in Oakley, where they shared the rent with a roommate to keep expenses low while they continued their business and kept searching for their own production facility.
They had intended to find a place closer to Beau’s family home in Tuxedo, but efforts to find what they were looking for in Fletcher or Arden didn’t pan out. They ultimately landed on a 5,000-square-foot building on seven acres just off the Flat Creek Exit of Northern Buncombe County near Weaverville. Not only did it have a ready to use building for pickle production, there’s also a brick house where they can live, a barn, and open land.
The business is located on the former site of a Greek Orthodox Church, and they are leasing to own the property from St. Nicholas Brotherhood of Theotokos, notes Brandi. “We looked at a lot of properties, and a lot we looked at are now leased by some sort of production—cider and beer. Any other buildings we saw of this size were all raw and unfinished, but this building was finished. They had already planned on making a commercial kitchen [in the church] so it was ready to become that. We didn’t have to frame it out. We just had to do a little plumbing and electric.”
After about two years into running their business, they sought private investments from family and friends to expand. Once they secured their new property, they also ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that provided funding to get through the transition period while they finished the kitchen space and walk-in cooler, and to purchase a van for direct deliveries. Six of their Kickstarter backers will get quarterly shipments all year, so that will aid them in learning the best shipping methods as they work to beef up online sales.
“When we got this space, I already had 60 or 70% of the equipment we needed,” says Beau. “I would buy it when I spotted it cheap on Craigslist—things like sinks and stainless steel tables and racks. It slowly accumulated over the course of a couple of years. It was just scrounging around and making it work.”
There are actually remnants of the worship that took place in the converted church. As Beau and Brandi lead a tour through the various rooms—including an office, storage rooms, walk-in cooler, employee lounge, bathrooms, and commercial kitchen—they finally come to closed wooden doors that open to reveal what was once the church’s chapel.
Looking around this large room, there are frequent big white circles punctuating the outlying blue paint detailing where art work had once hung.
“They had over $100,000 worth of art that they came in here and removed,” remembers Brandi.
“They were painted on canvas and glued to the walls,” adds Beau. “So they peeled it all off and then rented it.”
Right now, this former chapel serves as a storage area and they even rent space to some other businesses, but they have a vision for what this area will eventually become: a tasting area. They don’t expect it to become a public gathering spot, but instead will be used for private events.
They also have a food truck that they take on the road.
“We’re looking at taking our food trailer once a month to some of the breweries like Highland and Green Man,” says Brandi. They sell a variety of things from jars of their products, from fried pickles to burgers with pickles.
Brandi and Beau aren’t afraid of long hours to build their business and achieve their goals. As Beau quips, “You haven’t even started working until you’ve hit 12 hours.” They both devote full-time hours to running Green River Picklers, but it doesn’t stop there. Brandi is taking online classes through Western Carolina University, with three semesters left to graduate with a degree in business administration and law.
For his part, Beau has had many part-time jobs that have run simultaneously with operating his own business. He spends time doing catering for events and has worked for a countertop business doing heavy lifting. “I still occasionally work at Homegrown on Merrimon Avenue,” he says. “I’m number one on their emergency call list as a line cook, as well as coordinating and running festivals with them. I also save my cans and take them to the scrap yard. That’s always good for a tank of gas.”
“Once you think you know all the back-up plans, there’s always something you didn’t think of that’s going to happen. There’s only so much planning you can do, because reality still happens,” says Brandi.
Best Laid Plans
The current production schedule requires about four days for making pickles. Sometimes, especially in season, they are running two shifts 8AM to 5PM and 5PM to 10 or 11PM. Fridays are spent prepping for markets and/or festivals, and then they may spend time doing some vegetable prep on Sunday nights as well.
Okra is the number one best seller followed by the beets and Willy’s Dilly’s, but sales can fluctuate for no apparent reason. “We’ll sell a lot of everything, but just when we say ‘Oh those beans aren’t really selling that well,’ the next time we turn around we’re out of beans,” says Beau. “It’s really hard to say why one product goes more than another at a certain event. It really depends on the people. If they grew up eating pickled beans, they’ll buy that.”
They’ve also learned to expect the unexpected.
“Once you think you know all the back-up plans, there’s always something you didn’t think of that’s going to happen. There’s only so much planning you can do, because reality still happens,” says Brandi.
Case in point: An unexpected setback came last summer when they had an issue with their jar manufacturer and supplier. “They were on backorder for almost three months,” she notes. “They are the only manufacturer of Kerr Jars—the wide mouth, flat sided, made in America.”
Adds Beau, “There are probably other companies that would have seen that obstacle and thought, ‘Okay, great, we can start using cheaper jars now,’ but we didn’t do that. We waited it out. We wanted to use that jar.”
“We tried using Ball jars, but we couldn’t put our label on them correctly,” Brandi continues. “It set us back a little bit, but getting to the end of 2015 and comparing it to 2014, even with two months of not selling any wholesale, we did better than the year before. That was a surprise.”
The company is poised for exponential growth this year and expects to sell close to 90 cases a week in season. “I think Brandi will actually get a paycheck this year,” says Beau. “I still won’t, but I’m the sole member of the LLC. I don’t get a paycheck, I get profits. The way I like to spend money when I have it, there won’t be any profits, but I have a new tool in the kitchen to make my life easier.”
“Every year we put all of the profit back into the business,” says Brandi.
Moving Forward
Green River Picklers has a small crew of people who work with them, but one thing is a requirement: Everyone has to make pickles, even if they’re the graphic designer or salesperson.
“You have to eat them, too,” laughs Beau. “That’s the trouble I have with one employee. He’ll eat a cheeseburger—just the cheese, meat, and bread. I say, ‘Come on man, put a pickle on it.’ If you make pickles, you’ve gotta like to eat them.”
“We’ve definitely taught a lot of people how to make pickles,” says Brandi.
And they hope to teach even more. One big goal is to make their business employee owned. “If we could grow it to the point of having a couple people on staff full-time in a salaried position, they could eventually start buying their way into it and taking on more leadership roles,” says Beau. “Already this year we’re looking for someone to take the burden off of me making pickles so I can make more deliveries. Hopefully we’ll find the right person and see how long it takes to build a company that would consider itself employee owned and have the right kind of employees to understand that position and work in it. I think it’s going to be a tough thing to do, but that’s the goal for sure.
“We’ve also tossed around the idea of becoming the people who make the vinegar that we sell to Green River Picklers. If Green River Picklers was up and running as its own entity and people reported to us that everything is going smoothly, then we could concentrate on making one of the products that Green River Picklers already has to buy.”
They’ve also explored options regarding how big they want the company to grow. “We would never want to distribute pickles on the West Coast,” says Brandi, “but if it went well, we could replicate this idea out west and distribute from there.”
“It would be a reverse New Belgium” says Beau. “Doing well here and then moving to Colorado and starting grassroots and building it up again.”
Another big goal is finding time amid all the pickling to get married. Beau and Brandi got engaged at New Year’s, but when the “I Do’s” will take place is still up in the air. Of course, there’s a former chapel just steps away from their commercial kitchen. Maybe it will be the first event in their new tasting room.
The original article is below. Click to open in fullscreen…
