Adventure in Every Mouthful

Picture yourself on a glorious Adirondack morning, taking a break from gardening after collecting the fruits of your labors. You set down your basket of delectable, fresh-picked tomatoes, vegetables and herbs, kick back in your inviting Adirondack chair overlooking a pristine lake and enjoy the summer sun while gazing out at the beautiful mountains you call home.

This is the image specialty food entrepreneur Cindy Bates envisioned when she opened A Taste of the Adirondacks and shared her culinary works of art with food lovers from the Adirondacks and beyond.

For 12 years, Bates has been creating and perfecting recipes with the dream of combining her love for cooking and creating in the kitchen with financial independence. A correctional officer with the New York State prison system for just over 27 years, Bates admitted she used fellow correctional officers as her initial taste testers.

“Working with food is very soothing and gratifying to my soul,” she said. “To me, creating time-consuming meals is like working on a painting on a summer day. There was no gratification or fulfillment in being a correctional officer,” she said.

Bates promises a culinary adventure in every jar of Adirondack pasta sauce, salad dressing, marinade, maple sauce, salsa, Michigan sauce mix or cup of Adirondack coffee. Every recipe is her own creation, and has her stamp of approval.

Originally from Peru, Bates spent more than 23 years in the Hudson Valley. One day she received a call out of the blue from Peru High School sweetheart Steven Bates, whom she had lost touch with ten years before. Less than three months before the call, Bates had come to the realization that she wanted to reconnect with him, and began searching for him. After encountering a number of dead ends, she took a hiatus from her search, and then the call came. The two re-established their high school romance, marrying eight years ago.

“I got married at 42,” Bates explained. “Steve didn’t like the Hudson Valley and really wanted to move back here to be closer to family, so I transferred to Altona Correctional Facility.” Bates retired this past March, and started working in earnest to make her dream a reality.

Few of her fellow correctional officers realized how serious the woman they called “Blondie” was about starting the business. “My sisters, Sonya and Dana, along with my husband have been my greatest supporters. When I first started out, I didn’t want anyone to discourage me in any way, because it’s hard enough to keep on trying,” Bates said.

One of the first things she noticed when she moved home was that there was no Adirondack coffee. She saw Green Mountain coffee everywhere, but Bates thought there should be an Adirondack coffee, because she believed the Adirondacks were so much prettier than the Green Mountains. She began searching for a local coffee roaster, sampling various coffee beans to develop brews of Adirondack coffee.

“My best friend Randi (Goodwin) told me she read in the paper that a coffee roaster by the name of Dwane Bast had moved back to Peru, so I contacted him. I asked him if he was willing to roast coffee for my company. This is where I grew up and it’s a place that I love. I wanted to help promote it. I told Dwane I wanted to write a description of different coffees and have him create the blends and brews that would fit the descriptions.” He agreed. “It has been a match made in heaven (for me) to find a local roaster just down the road,” she added.

Today, A Taste of the Adirondacks boasts seven company-exclusive Adirondack coffees and two decaffeinated coffees. They bear names such as Whiteface Double Diamond, Lake Champlain Sunrise, Breakfast in the Adirondacks, Mirror Lake Morning, Lake Placid Retreat, Soothing Saranac Lake and Barkeater Brew. Bates proudly explained that all her coffees are fair trade, organically grown and locally roasted.

Bates asked her cousin, an artist in Boston, to design the logo for her label, and he captured the exact image she was seeking.

A Taste of the Adirondacks opened for business with coffee as its only product in June of 2008. The recipes Bates had been working on for 12 years had to undergo rigorous testing before they were deemed shelf stable and approved by the FDA for consumer consumption. The first step was for Bates to send each recipe and a sample to a small scale manufacturing company (Nelson Farms) which did the initial testing and processing. The recipe was then turned into a scheduled process which looks like a science formula and a sample was returned to Bates for approval. If she accepted the sample, it was sent on to Cornell University, which does its own scheduled process, and a sample was again returned to Bates for her approval. If she accepted that sample, it went to the FDA and was adjusted to meet shelf stability, with the final sample returned to Bates for approval.

“There are many times my recipes didn’t come back tasting the way I wanted them to,” she recalled. The preservatives used to make products shelf stable can affect the taste, and it costs $50 every time she sent a sample out. She currently has a number of products that are pending for that reason,”

Bates prides herself on using only the highest quality ingredients in each of her recipes. In her pasta sauce, she uses San Marzano tomatoes, which are grown in the volcanic ash of Mount Vesuvius in Italy and are considered to be the best tomatoes in the world. She tries to incorporate local or Adirondack ingredients, such as maple syrup, in her products whenever possible.

Bates credits her mother for inspiring her to become a food entrepreneur. According to Bates, her mother once remarked that she wondered what it would take to get her homemade salad dressing manufactured and sold. Two years ago, Bates presented her mother with a bottle of the salad dressing on Mother’s Day. The dressing is still in the processing stage, and Bates hopes to make it available to the public in the near future.

Bates, a self-professed lover of gourmet food, said “I love to eat! My favorite thing to do is go to different restaurants and try foods from all cultures. I must have been Italian in another life, because I really love marinara.”

Bates now markets five pasta/marinara sauces, six rubs and brines, two salsas, three maple sauces, three salad dressings/marinades and a Michigan seasoning mix which has been her best seller so far.

Since June 2008, Bates and her husband have been on the road looking for buyers. Currently she sells her products in 56 stores as far west as Potsdam, Tupper Lake, Brushton and Malone, in Plattsburgh, Ticonderoga, Willsboro, Westport and Port Henry and as far south as the Catskills. Plattsburgh vendors include Carsana’s, General Trading Company, North Country Co-Op, Hannaford, Yandos and a chain of convenience stores. Bates also rents a space at the Market Barn in Malone, where all of her products can be purchased individually. White Pine Camp, located near Paul Smiths, carries her coffee and a few of her other products and puts gift baskets containing her products in each of their guest rooms. Bates believes if she and her husband had the time to go into the field every day to market their products, they would sign a new store every day.

Bates credits her husband, Steve, for believing in her enough to contribute his own money to the business and become her partner. It was a huge financial risk for the couple—they poured savings and retirement money into a dream that might not make it. In the beginning, Cindy did it all herself—the marketing, the research and development, the deliveries and the public relations. She has been called “a control freak” when it comes to the business, but she says she is learning to let go, because running it began to be overwhelming. “It’s like having a newborn baby. You have to nurture it, and you’re afraid to leave it with a babysitter,” she quipped. “It’s very fulfilling now to hear people say they see my products all over.”

Steve does the deliveries now, which has freed Cindy up to do what she loves best—the one-on-one contacts with customers. “I love the person-to-person, down home conversations and developing relationships with people.” Even so, it isn’t unusual for her to work from 9 a.m. until midnight, or to get up as early as 3 a.m. to check e-mails and messages. She admits to being tired, but enjoys the challenge of running her own business.

Bates learned to step outside her comfort zone and try different spices and seasonings by incorporating different cultural influences into her cooking. Although it was hard for her to release her recipes to the market, she was most afraid of failure. But her mantras have always been ‘If you don’t try, you’ve already failed’ and ‘the only place you’ll find success before work is the dictionary.’

Bates’ optimism is contagious. Her venture has the support of her entire family—from aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings to nieces and nephews. She talks about the friendliness of 97 percent of the vendors she works with, along with the absolute certainty that her products are superior to those of her competitors because of the love and passion that have gone into creating them, the integrity and commitment to quality and the ability to please the customer’s palate.

A Taste of the Adirondacks hasn’t suffered because of the economy, although some stores are only carrying limited inventory these days. She believes her products will move faster when the economy improves, but with families taking stay-cations instead of vacations and cutting back on restaurant expenses, more people are eating at home.

“If you can’t treat yourself by going to a nice restaurant, you can still treat yourself at home with fresh coffee, pasta or Michigans. Everyone has to allow themselves little treats,” she said.

Bates’ goal was to create the best pasta sauce in a jar. “One you could open and heat without having to add anything to it,” she emphasized. “I worked on it so hard and so long, I think I achieved that. But taste is subjective, and I know I won’t be able to please everyone’s palate. What makes my products different from others is that I probably tried harder. We’ve done very well in a short period of time. God has really blessed me.”

Bates’ recipe for success: Take one dream, add a 12-year culinary journey, mix in the desire to create something special, sift with a commitment to customer satisfaction and slowly stir in years of hard work.

Bon Appetite!