ROUSES_NovDec2021_Magazine-Pages-NEW

ida hits home

The team members at Rouses Markets are always on the lookout for great products from local entrepreneurs and found Mr. Shrimp very quickly. (“I was like, has Rouses been following me around?” Thompson laughed. “Little ol’ me? I’m just trying to feed the people!”) Within the month, Thompson did his first pop-up event, giving customers at Rouses Markets on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans the Mr. Shrimp Experience. Two weeks after that, Mr. Shrimp’s Throw It in the Pot was on select store shelves.

somehow sell the flavor of the shrimp he had been delivering. It really stayed in the back of Thompson’s mind, and one night, he says, he had a revelation. “God came to me and said, ‘Young man, I know you are tired, but the item you are boiling is going to take you far,’” Thompson recalls. “It was like somebody hit me with a baseball bat across my face.” He created the product that would be Throw It in the Pot that morning. The Throw it in the Pot Flavor Enhancer also emerged from prayer, and materialized yet again though a lot of hard work. THROW IT IN THE POT The team members at Rouses Markets are always on the lookout for great products from local entrepreneurs and found Mr. Shrimp very quickly. (“I was like, has Rouses been following me around?” Thompson laughed. “Little ol’ me? I’m just trying to feed the people!”) Within the month, Thompson did his first pop-up event, giving customers at Rouses Markets on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans the Mr. Shrimp Experience. Two weeks after that, Mr. Shrimp’s Throw It in the Pot was on select store shelves. It was wildly successful, and Thompson and Rouses began working together to roll the product out to every Rouses location. Then Hurricane Ida came. The storm did not spare Mr. Shrimp. Thompson lives in Estelle, Louisiana, not far from Jean Lafitte. He and his family evacuated to Dallas on August 28th. The hurricane arrived the next day, on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. From afar, there was an impending sense of dream as friends who had stayed behind reported that Thomson’s area was hit hard, but access was impossible. Government officials asked all people who had evacuated to stay away,

The local seafood industry and fishermen that Thompson connects with buyers were likewise devastated in the weeks to follow. Since then, the community has rallied to the Mr. Shrimp cause. A GoFundMe is ongoing, slowly inching toward its goal. As fishing resumes, Mr. Shrimp has again been able to get his shrimp back into homes and restaurants, and Thompson is slowly rebuilding his ability to make his Throw It in the Pot products, which will end up in more of Rouses Markets seafood depart- ments in the months to come. Rouses Markets has partnered with Mr. Shrimp to have him cook for people in need in places like Chauvin, Dulac, and Thibodaux, and for first responders and soldiers in the Army National Guard. He has also been doing pop-ups at the Rouses Market on Tchoupi- toulas in New Orleans. “I’ve been going out there feeding people, trying to help people recover from this terrible devastation of a storm,” he said. “It’s been a piece of work, but my wife and my family, we are doing what we need to do. It’s been a lot. And I’m still trying to find a way to put a smile on a customer’s face.” Despite this, the best days for Mr. Shrimp are ahead. To get Throw It in the Pot back on store shelves, he is looking at business locations to set up shop and get capacity to full strength. His partnership with Rouses Markets is strong and getting stronger. It is going to take time, but Thompson will do what it takes. He is grateful for how far Mr. Shrimp has gone, and hopeful about how far it might yet go. “It has been a blessing to see, from 2019 to now, how far things have gone. The best is yet to come,” Mr. Shrimp says. “I really love what I do, and it’s the people who make me get up every day. It’s not work at all. It really isn’t.”

and they did so. On September 3rd, they returned home. “There were several holes in my main roof. There were several holes in my workshop where I do my work at and develop my product.” He immediately climbed on his roof and things looked even worse. He went in his house, and his fears were realized. “My house smelled awful, like somebody died in it,” he said. His attic was filled with water. The insulation was soaked. His garage was ruined and already devel- oping mold. His master bedroom had water in the walls—“It looked like the walls were sweating,” he said—and his hallway was the same. His workshop was wet and mildewed due to water coming in from the ceiling. His machinery was destroyed as well. He did as much cleanup as he could with the remaining hours in the day. Power was out, and once the sun set, that would be it until morning. Then hard rains arrived—a miserable setback for anyone with roof damage. It got worse from there. His insurance company began robbing him blind. They said they wouldn’t cover any living expenses because there wasn’t a mandatory evacua- tion. FEMA deemed his house unlivable, and the adjuster actually said that despite all that, it wouldn’t be so bad because “It would be like camping,” Thompson recalls. “I said, ‘My wife is pregnant. I have a young son with a compromised lung, and we’ve already been through a lot. We need to do things faster.” He went through all this before, after Hurricane Katrina. He calls the entire process “overwhelming.” Seventy percent of his house had to be gutted. The insurance company continues to give Thompson the runaround. It goes without saying that his stock of Throw it in the Pot and flavor enhancers were ruined, and impossible to make until some semblance of recovery would arrive.

67 WWW. ROUSES . COM