Ryan Waggoner had always enjoyed food and cooking, and since he had done a great deal of traveling, he found some amazing varieties of salsa in various parts of the country. When he moved back to Lenawee, he realized there was a severe lack in this area. According to Ryan: “I experienced a lot of really good salsas out in the world. When I moved back to Michigan, I looked around for something exciting in the stores and couldn’t find anything that I was excited about.”
This dilemma led Ryan to do some experimenting in the kitchen. Originally, he wanted to find some flavors for his enjoyment. Also, he shared his salsa with friends, some of whom worked in the restaurant industry, and were well-versed in the culinary trades. Whenever Ryan presented his endeavors, the forms of salsa were always met with high degrees of enthusiasm. Therefore, he decided to start selling the product, initially from his porch. The porch side business began to garner a rather large fan base. The business was spread by word of mouth, and the fact that salsa is an item often taken to parties, allows multitudes of people to try it, without purchasing a container. Eventually, it grew to a point where it didn’t make sense to sell it off the porch. Ryan had always wanted to start a business. Therefore, he combined his entrepreneurial dreams with his love of salsa and decided to take his salsa sales to the next level.
The creation of the enterprise involved both scaling sales from directly to consumers and selling to retailers. Because his wares were so unfamiliar to his customer base, sales posed some unique challenges. Trying to explain the product in a manner that got the customer excited was more difficult than in other industries. According to Ryan: “Some of the flavors are so different from anything out there, there’s nothing to compare it to. I can explain the ingredients and how they came together but until you taste it, you have no idea.”
Early on, Ryan discovered that the best way to get the word out was through events that allowed patrons to taste his wares. He frequented farmers’ markets and tasting events. Rather than begin by pitching his product to prospective customers, he started by giving them a free sample and explaining the salsa as they were eating.
Retail establishments were a different matter. Like marketing to the population at large, the tasting was a major component of getting salsa into stores, prompting Ryan to do store demos whenever possible. When selling the product to stores, it was important to determine if the store was a good fit, and how well food items of that nature performed. From promoting the product to different retail establishments, Ryan discovered that local shops with gourmet offerings performed best.
As one who relied heavily on the taste of the product to make sales, trying to pitch a product, with which most of the prospective audience was unfamiliar, could prove nerve-wracking, and that was exactly what happened when Ryan Waggoner entered the 2022 Square One Pitch Competition. Ryan reflected on the event:
“I was very nervous. but very excited. One of the central ways that I try to win people over with my salsa is by getting them to taste it. At Square One, I had to think about other ways to convince people. That terrified me but was also the reason why I wanted to put myself on that stage.”
In the weeks leading up to the event, Ryan had to consider all aspects of his business pitch. In addition to carefully crafting verbiage to sell his salsa, Ryan also worked with Lenawee Now’s pitch coach, who gave him some additional considerations about how to sell with only just a PowerPoint and a microphone.
The question of what to include when describing a product best experienced provided a unique sort of difficulty. In his copious hours of preparation, Ryan worked with the pitch coach to hone his messaging, leading to multiple revisions of the slide deck. On the day of the presentation, Ryan presented a compelling narrative about how he discovered some of the most amazing salsas on his travels and recreated them to fill the need in Lenawee County. Ryan declared at the competition: “I had no choice, I had to start making salsa.”
Ryan won the Square One Audience Choice Award. In addition to the increased recognition of the Audience Choice award, Ryan had found the insights he gained, as well as the notoriety invaluable. Using what he learned, he has been working on an entire rebrand, including a logo, webpage, and packaging to convey the Salsa Bliss brand.
Ryan is looking forward to the completion of the rebrand and is very optimistic about the future of Salsa Bliss. He hopes to hire his first full-time employees and expand to Ann Arbor and Toledo, and obtain a dedicated facility. Ryan noted that he doesn’t want to be a national brand, but he is excited about the prospects of growth in the region:
“I don’t want to take over the world. I’d like to build a successful regional business where maybe Salsa Bliss is in Illinois and Indiana and Ohio and Michigan and is known as a superior, unique product that’s different from the competition.”