The Salsa of Invention
Necessity is the mom of invention and of adaptation. That’s where Cheryl Wilcox comes in. Wilcox, who is office manager for an oral surgeon in Ottawa, unexpectedly finds herself building Mom’s Homemade, an asyet small company. It was sparked by Wilcox’s own mother’s hankering for salsa. The grandmother to Wilcox’s three children was diabetic and couldn’t abide the sugar added to mass-market salsas.
Food conglomerates add sugar to their products with abandon — it’s a key factor in North America’s obesity epidemic, with all its consequences for public health. Yet millions of people scarf down jars of brand-name salsas without stopping to ask, does all that sugar need to be there?
The answer, Wilcox proves, is no. Naturally occurring sugars give her salsa an appealing sweetness, without backing a truckload of refined sugar up to the kitchen door. Because Mom’s Homemade salsa has no added sugar, Wilcox’s mom can eat it to her heart’s — and her pancreas’s — content.
The story of Mom’s Homemade began 16 years ago, when Wilcox’s three children, Jessica, James and David, were all still in their teens.
“A co-worker gave me her salsa recipe,” Wilcox says. “My daughter Jessica and I have been making it every year since then, tweaking the recipe to suit our family preferences.”
Then more family got involved. Wilcox’s husband, Don, who worked for many years as a newspaper sports editor and writer, and their two sons are now part of the cooking/marketing/ distribution team.
“Every September the tradition was set. We started cooking on Friday afternoon until Sunday late at night,” Wilcox says. The weekends evolved to include her daughters-in-law and niece — sometimes, memorably, at their own risk.
“Funny story,” Wilcox says. “My niece was cutting jalapeños. She had to leave to go to school at Carleton and called an Uber. Justthen she rubbed her eye. Ouch! We had to ask the Uber driver to wait while we attended to her. When she got to university, she texted me that her driver was an eye doctor in his country. He gave her some advice and a sucker.”
No such rookie mishaps these days, and while making a recent batch, eldest son David was chopping, mixing and bottling with a practiced hand.
Over the years, in their increasingly crowded home kitchen, Wilcox adapted the recipe. “We found that by adjusting the mix of the other ingredients, we were able to give it a succulent flavour and compensate for the removal of the sugar.”
Mom’s Homemade is available around the Ottawa area in mild, medium and hot varieties. The salsa has a natural sweetness from the roma tomatoes, red onions and various peppers that Wilcox prefers, just enough to nicely balance the salty hit of a tortilla chip. (Mom’s Homemade is also very low in salt.)
Her salsa tastes fresh and moist, though not watery: it doesn’t leak over the side of the chip and onto that shirt you just washed earlier today. Mom’s recipe got good enough that friends and others who shared or were gifted jars demanded more.
“For years we have been told ‘This is really good. You should sell it.’ On Christmas Eve last year, my son Dave was telling me they had a Christmas party at their house and served our salsa. He said at 1 a.m., and after ‘a few’ drinks, all their friends were still talking about how good the salsa was. Hearing that, this time it stuck in my head. After the Christmas hustle and bustle, I sat down and did some research.”
The first question was where to make these ever-growing batches of salsa.
“Every year we would make more and more batches,” she says. “Eventually the dining room table would be covered in jars. The house would smell like onions and salsa for days, and so did we. With a small kitchen and so many boxes of vegetables, we did not have much space.”
Wilcox, who had no prior experience in running her own food company, took a jar to Janet Campbell, the owner of Mrs. McGarrigle’s, the mustard maker in Merrickville that has a fine-food shop and a commercial kitchen in the back.
“I let her taste the salsa and asked her if I was crazy to be thinking about this. She was really enthusiastic, said I should pursue it and offered me an enormous amount of advice and guidance. Her support has been invaluable, so when we started the business we moved all our cooking to the kitchen at her store. We cooked our first 10 dozen jars and the smell permeated the store.”
Wilcox came up with a name that reflects the family nature of the salsa and is “catchy… comforting and friendly.” Other business lessons had to be learned through trial and error, as the once-annual cooking has increased to every four or five weeks. She decided, last winter, to add a “Hot” variety.
“As a newbie, I didn’t know the hot peppers we needed were not available until fall. After a couple of months of searching, I was able to get my hands on what I needed from local pepper enthusiasts. I have learned my lesson and now have a freezer full of ghost peppers to carry us through the winter.”
The “Hot” salsa has heat, but is not I-just-licked-the-sun hot. Some customers want it hotter, so this spring Wilcox will make “a few special batches of hotter salsa. A vacuum-sealed package of Carolina Reapers is hibernating in my freezer.”
The family is also growing jalapeño, habanero and ghost peppers in the backyard and Wilcox hopes to add green and red bell peppers to the crop — which may expand to North Gower, where son James and his girlfriend recently bought a house with “a big garden.”
Wilcox knows she has plenty more to learn about running a business and that there may come a time when making salsa demands more of her time.
“Last January, I told my family I will give myself two years to see where this goes. I never expected the success that has happened in nine months of being in stores.” As for her office-manager career, she laughs and says, “I think this summer I will modify the days I work to add more days in the kitchen.”
The growth signs are encouraging. Christmas 2019 was the first for Mom’s Homemade and Wilcox “was overwhelmed by the sales.” She managed to keep stock supplied to the 10 or so stores and markets — including Mrs. McGarrigle's, Nature's Buzz, Produce Depot (South Ottawa store) and The Perth Cheese Shop — that sell her salsa. Jars also went coast to coast in mail-order gift baskets.
For now, the focus is on filling more jars. Recently, the kitchen of Mrs. McGarrigle’s was again redolent with those piquant aromas. Wilcox presided over the operation, dressed from head to toe in her favourite colour, purple. She stirred with a purple spoon. Even her cooking pots were purple.
That’s why the labels of Mom’s Homemade salsa are purple: because Mom wants it that way.
Mom’s Homemade
momhomemade.ca | @moms_homemade_salsa
