Tony Marks/Ville Platte Gazette
When most people hear the term “pepper jelly,” they normally first think of cream cheese and crackers to be eaten during parties around Christmas.
However, for two sisters from the Lone Pine area in northern Evangeline Parish, pepper jelly has grown from just being a holiday condiment into a multi-million dollar industry.
It all started with Kim White not being able to find an adequate pepper jelly. “We like pepper jelly, but we didn’t have one that we had found that we actually loved,” she said. “Then, we got this place and just started making our own jelly. We turned it into something great.”
White and her husband Loren moved onto the property in the Lone Pine area after she and her sister Cindy Johnson inherited it from their parents.
“We grew up in Westlake, but this is where our family is from,” White said. “This is where our family roots are. Our parents are from here. This was our great-grandparents’ farm house, and our dad was born on this property. We inherited this house with 20 acres. Loren and I moved here, and we just started planting a garden.”
The Whites began planting peppers among other vegetables in the garden, and Kim began making her own pepper jelly for family get-togethers at her home.
“This is the juke joint,” Johnson said of White’s home. “All of the family come here all weekend long to party, dance, and sing karaoke. Kim would always put out some of her pepper jelly. Somebody would bring deer backstrap, and somebody would bring duck poppers. So, she started glazing and cooking with the pepper jelly. Now it’s something you could use all year not just during the holidays.”
White said, “We cook a lot with it. We try to get people out of only having it when they have a party in the fall. Now, it’s a grilling thing and a cooking thing for wild game. We want it to be a staple in your pantry.”
Word about the pepper jelly spread as more and more family members started talking about how good it was. The idea then came for White and Johnson to start promoting it at different food shows.
“The first thing I did was the Forest Hill Nursery Show, and I sold out,” White said. “I think I made about $3,000.00. Everybody started loving it.”
“It was so much fun,” Johnson added about doing other shows in Forest Hill. “You couldn’t get people out of our booth just because we were so much fun, and they loved the jelly.”
White shared one of her favorite experiences in Forest Hill. “Cindy one year had some shrimp boots on, and we were dancing to Zydeco music. It was like a side-show, and we could have sold tickets to watch us sell jelly.”
As the sisters went to more and more food shows, the demand for their pepper jelly continued to grow as well as more and more stores started carrying the product.
“I would just grind bushels of peppers,” White said. “Nobody could even breath. I did habanera, Serrano, and jalapeño. I was making 250 jars a day at the peak of it. At that time, I had a 10-foot farm table. It would just be packed everyday, and I did my own labels.”
The labels and the name of the product stem from White’s own pets. “I had two French bulldogs,” she said. “Rocco passed away two summers ago, but JoJo (also called Jolie Blonde) is still here. We were thinking of a name, and Bulldog Pepper Jelly The Jelly with a Bite just stuck. People who have dogs buy it even though they don’t like pepper jelly.”
At one point, it got too much for the sisters to handle by themselves and became not as much fun. “We had met the potential of what we could do in this kitchen,” White said. “Now we have a manufacturer, and we’re in 118 stores right now and growing including Champagne’s and both locations of B&S.”
Having the manufacturer and other outside help allows the sisters to do what they love best. As White said, “This now put us back on the road together where we could go cold-call our product to get it in stores, demo it, and go in and visit with our existing customers,” White said. “Now that we got it reigned in, it’s fun again.”
For White, the pepper jelly experience presents advice she can give to others. As she concluded, “Follow your heart, however, have a plan because, if you’re like Cindy and I, we make happen everything we touch.”