What if I was to come to you with a quiet little idea and ask you to partner with me? What if I asked you if you wouldn’t mind helping me make and package some quaint little jams and jellies, to be sold at the local farmer’s market? Would you do it with me?

Maybe.

Would you do it if I told you that in four years, we’d be grossing millions? And that in six years, we’d triple that? And that nine years later, we’d be making five times that number? What if I told you that we’d become one of the most amazing success stories this state, or this region, or this country, has ever seen, even then we started with two people who just wanted to make some jam?

Who I’m talking about should be pretty clear: Stonewall Kitchen has become the model for hundreds of Mainers who want to do just what Jonathan King and James Stott did. They found a niche, and got rich doing something they love to do. It’s estimated that Maine has over 200 value-added producers like Stonewall trying to sell Maine-made everything — from candies to dried mushrooms to barbeque sauce to pancake mix. Most will never be as successful as Stonewall, but many have the potential to afford a comfortable lifestyle in the specialty food market, making what might be old family recipes.

And that market is booming in America.

First off, a few definitions for those who aren’t familiar with the market: A value-added product is what happens when you take something that grows naturally, then add some ingredient, use some process, or apply some technique to it so you can sell it for a higher price. The simplest example might be one that finds itself the subject of a political battle right in Maine: bottled water. Take your naturally occurring ingredient, put a bottle around it, and charge $2.50 for it as "Andy’s Natural Maine Spring Water." That’s adding value in its barest form, and when you put it on the market with your fancy packaging, it will generally be regarded as a specialty food.

Specialty foods, according to the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT), are "foods, beverages or confections meant for human use that are of the highest grade, style, and/or quality in their category." Right now, the specialty-food industry is growing fast. The most recent study by the NASFT shows that dollar sales of these items rose 17.9 percent from 2002 to 2004, with product highlights including beverages (up 39.1 percent); milk, eggs, yogurt, and dairy (up 37 percent); cheese (up 29.1 percent), and condiments (up 26 percent). Comparatively, the normal market for food sales increased 7.7 percent, growing at a rate less than half of the specialty foods.

Five-thousand-three-hundred-eleven specialty foods were introduced in 2004. The median annual sales for a specialty-foods manufacturer is $1 million.

There are a lot of people trying to cook up that million-dollar lobster pot pie, it seems.

Including, of course, Maine’s 200-plus companies trying to achieve what Stonewall did back in the mid-’90s. Recognizing this, two nonprofit organizations, the Maine Centers for Women, Work, and Community (WWC) and the Maine Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), in 2004 applied for and received a grant from the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) to promote Maine’s growing, but not as fast as the rest of the country, specialty-food industry. They named their program "Taste of Success," and it is officially "a partnership program of the Maine Micro-enterprise Imitative administered by the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development in association with the Maine Centers for Women, Work and Community, Maine Small Business Development Centers, and Maine’s Gourmet and Specialty Food Producers Association." Its continuing goal is to educate, promote, and unify the state’s specialty- and value-added food producers.

"We’ve got a really vibrant industry there," said Katherine Arno, Director of Training and Communications at the SBDC. "Maine growers and producers need marketing to tap into that."

In late 2004, the group launched the Taste of Success Web site, an online portal through which registered users (for free) can access food marketing data, a bank of up-to-date articles on trends in the gourmet industry, local food events and trade shows, training seminars, and even connect with other users for discussion and sales.

Recently, on April 26, T.O.S. teamed up with the Maine Grocers Association to hold their first-ever annual dual conference, with the coinciding goals of both educating attending specialty-food producers and putting grocers and value-added producers in contact so as to promote local sales of local product.

Seems like a great idea. So why had nothing like this been thought of before, in a state whose local food producers, grocers, fishermen, and farms have been suffering for so long? Filling in for a missing guest speaker (Governor Baldacci), Jack Cashman, the Commissioner of the DECD, admitted that attention to our natural-resource-based industry had "slipped over the past 10 years," and gave some startling facts: Eighty percent of fish landed in Maine are processed out of state, as are 50 percent of lobster caught in our waters. His stated goals to "brand Maine" by calling our fish "Gulf of Maine Seafood" and "build on the momentum of previous administrations to move Maine into the 21st industry" are decent, but painfully vague.

Not that the Department of Agriculture and the DECD haven’t made attempts to "brand Maine" in the past. The former organization started the "Get Real, Get Maine" program, a promotional campaign to connect consumers with Maine-made products through their Web site and product stickers (that say "Get Real, Get Maine"). The latter department has the "Maine Made" program, a promotional campaign to connect consumers with specialty products through their Web site and product stickers (that say "Maine Made"). Both Web sites also offer information on smart business practices and marketing opportunities.

Apparently, though, someone realized that Web sites and stickers were not enough. Thus, the Taste of Success initiative and conference concentrates heavily on the development of sound business skills, including marketing, pricing, navigating government regulations, and growth. This is what separates this initiative from the others: Its primary goal is educating Maine business owners how to responsibly run their operations on a day-to-day basis. This is difficult, especially in the hectic life of the small-business owner, but necessary, says SBDC’s Arno. "Taking the time away to learn how to operate your business and improve business skills is of real value. We’re trying to teach how to improve your opportunities for success."

Growth is a popular subject for Maine producers. One of the most popular seminars at the April 26 conference was titled "Making Sales," and was led by Natalie King, VP of sales and marketing for Stonewall Kitchen. While her brother’s extraordinary success story was inspirational, the seminar floated more towards ways to diversify your sales plan once you’ve achieved considerable growth ("You cannot grow unless you automate your line"), rather than how to market from the ground up.

On a slightly more grassroots level, Coffee by Design co-founder and co-owner Mary Allen Lindemann provided some of the best advice to the participants with foresight enough to be at her seminar, "Marketing Your Niche." She and co-host Aaron Anker (Grandy Oats) offered hard truths: "The true test of an entrepreneur," Mary Allen said, "is that if someone tells you that you can’t do it, and you roll over, that you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." She and her husband founded their now-landmark coffee house in the face of incredible odds in a part of town that had nothing going for it at the time. Through extremely popular but extremely localized guerilla marketing campaigns, they developed a niche market with a fierce following, and now, fierce competition. That’s a sure sign of success.

"Customers come into a store knowing they want to buy something. What they want to know is: Why do they want to buy it from you?" she asked, and proceeded to question the notion that bigger companies have the marketing edge. As a local business, she says, you know your customers better than anybody, and you can directly inform them of who you are, what you do, and why you do it. You can skip the red tape that larger corporations have to cut through to get local initiatives like sponsorships and partnerships underway faster. A locally owned business is much more likely to give back to its community.

This trend is true for value-added producers as well. The 2002 Economic Impact Study of the Maine Food System and Farm Vitality Policy Implications, prepared by the Office of Policy and Legal Analysis, Maine State Legislature, states that for every $1000 of processed food produced by Maine food firms, $1698 of economic activity is produced within the state.

Translation: Keeping Maine food production in Maine is unbelievably important to everyone in the state, not just the value-added producers and specialty food buyers. For consumers, remember this: Every time you buy local, no matter how small you think the purchase is, you make an impact on your community and state. It’s a fact.

What the Taste of Success program and conference is indicative of is the growing recognition that, at present, Maine isn’t doing enough for its small-food producers, and that the food producers aren’t doing enough to help themselves. There are unbelievable opportunities for businesses to take free classes on any aspect on running a successful venture. Stonewall Kitchen did not become as large as they are just because there was an open niche; they were slick marketers, they educated themselves, hired good people, grew their business appropriately, and continue to watch every single penny that goes in and out of their organization. How many local food producers can say the same thing?

This is where the government can step in, and through their support of the Micro Enterprise grant, they did. But their support needs to continue in more ways than just Web sites, stickers, and grants, according to Larry Fisher, the keynote speaker during the luncheon at the T.O.S. conference. His organization, the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks (ACENet), exists in Ohio to create opportunities for local value-added food producers. His speech gave the most insight into how other state governments have been successful in promoting their local foods: give incentives to retailers and distributors who buy local products; create an available list of these organizations so that producers can market effectively; develop creative low-interest funding opportunities — not grants, which can be few and far between — with front-end grace periods for businesses just getting off the ground; and create innovative incentives for cooperative forms of distribution.

Most importantly, the state has to develop an infrastructure for clear lines of communication between farmers, producers, distributors, and retail outlets.

An example of government helping specialty-food makers to hone their skills is the developing plan for "shared kitchens," fully licensed and regulated commercial kitchens where formerly home-based businesses can learn what it takes to produce their victuals on a large scale. There’s a kitchen in the works in York, sponsored by the York County Community Action Program, and another in the works for Eastern Maine.

These steps are just an important beginning of a long road for many of the state’s value-added producers. Any help, be it in the form of grants, conferences, stickers, or classes, will be useless if the businesses don’t take the onus onto themselves to become educated on how to run their businesses effectively; as it stands, both ends of the spectrum need to reach out to the other. The Taste of Success program is a good start, and annual conferences will become more streamlined, targeted, and more populous as the word gets out. But there’s a third party, too: you, the consumer.

Buy local.

Andy King can be reached at dinnerwithandy@yahoo.com

For more information on the Taste of Success initiative, visit the Small Business Development Center’s Web site at www.mainesbdc.org