Rouses_May-June-2018

the Eat Local issue

As the company has grown, the process, while refined, remains the same. Kate has the critique chef ’s palate of the team. Once a product makes it past her, it goes to focus groups for testing. When they added a honey mustard salad dressing to the lineup, for example, it took three months of work before Hanley found the right recipe — the best in the world, he says. A batch involves four days of preparation.The seeds have to be fermented for 72 hours. They are then ground, and from that, a paste is made. From that, the dressing.They started making three bottles at a time.They ramped up to a gallon.Then five gallons.They went to the farmers’ market for further feedback and testing. Soon they were at 20 gallons, then 40, 50 and then 100. Every bottle has to taste the same, but sometimes ingredients change. When the Hanleys developed a strawberry vinaigrette, obvious things in a home kitchen became interesting challenges in the food lab. Sometimes strawberries are sweet. Sometimes they’re sour. Sometimes they’re in-between. Every 100-gallon batch is thus carefully made with an eye toward consistency. However, the strawberries’ taste, in every bottle of dressing, must be the same. It’s not a problem that can be solved on a spreadsheet. Hanley and his team taste every batch to ensure that it meets scientific standards like pH, as well as an internal checklist of taste, texture and consistency. It has to be as thick or as thin as designed, and has to move properly in the bottle. “There’s no way of writing that down on paper,” says Hanley. “You know how it should look. How it should pour out. It’s an art form and a science to get it right every single time.” Five years after opening the company, Hanley still puts in over a hundred hours a week. Getting a product on store shelves is only the start. A food entrepreneur then has to get the product off shelves (i.e., sold) quickly, and also must have follow-

up batches ready for stores to stock shelves again. The path from the food lab to the kitchen table, once the product is produced, runs from convincing stores to sell the product to negotiating with distributors and overseeing marketing efforts. If business is good, products put on a store shelf by stock clerks get taken off by buyers.When enough products are sold, though, big brands notice and start targeting the upstart. Not only, now, is the battle about getting on and off of shelves, but also about fending off billion- dollar competitor companies. To handle the onslaught, Hanley says, the product has to be made well, shipped efficiently, sold and restocked quickly, and marketed effectively. In Hanley’s case, it’s all done by hand. The ingredients added to the mixing vats. The dressing poured into the bottles. The movement of bottles down the line. The capping, labeling, sealing, boxing — every step is done by gloved human hands in a sterile facility. The ingredients are locally sourced whenever possible. The employees are Baton Rouge’s very own. “There’s a lot of work that goes into every bottle on that shelf,” says Hanley. “As a business owner I’m extremely proud that people share their hardworking dollars for something that we’ve created. To have that kind of validation is very rewarding.” Everything had to be learned. Even a salad savant would still have to figure out the tiny things, like, how do you get a barcode? How do you get the FDA and Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals to come out and permit your process? In terms of logistics, it’s about getting the raw materials. Getting the people. And once you’ve packed a case of dressing, where next? Delivery by truck to an offsite warehouse where distributors pick it up and carry it to stores. Locally sourcing clean food and all- natural ingredients is part of the DNA of the company. Sensation came from Baton

Rouge, and Hanley is making sure it goes back into it. “As the business grows and becomes more profitable, we can really start making the community better,” he says. “Not only an economic impact in the city, but real change. Everything starts with food. It’s something you vote on three times a day. And if we can make better, healthier products and give back to the community, that’s more than enough for us. We want to make Sensation the next big flavor in food. From potato chips to dressing to croutons, we want it to be the next big flavor, and maybe put Baton Rouge on the map for that.” A casual walk through Downtown Baton Rouge is eye-opening. At some point between the relighting of the famed Coca-Cola sign in 2002 and today, the city’s culture changed. Maybe it was the infusion of talent and fresh ideas following Katrina. Maybe it was the city’s investment in art and its efforts at economic revitalization, but Downtown went from a decaying memory in the shadow of the state capitol — a vestigial part of a city sprawling ever outward, from College to Bluebonnet to Siegen Lane — to a hive of entrepreneurship. It’s what the Hanley family is doing on a citywide scale. Sixty- one restaurants, 21 bars, hotels, art galleries, coworking spaces, business incubators — the city is booming in ways few could have predicted. And in a very real way, that has become the new identity of Baton Rouge: scrappy young entrepreneurs reshaping the city for the better. It is sensational to see, so why wouldn’t restaurants sell a salad to honor that spirit? Why wouldn’t an artistic young couple make a salad dressing with that very name, part of a growing food empire with plans of going national? Everything about what’s happening is sensational, contagious and, like the salad, seems unlikely to end for a very long time.

“ A Sensation salad’s soul is this: garlic, cheese, oil and lemon — the latter squeezed, sprightly, just before serving. Local foodies in the know toy with percentages and varieties — Romano or Parmesan, vegetable oil or olive, and for the bold, this spice or that.”

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY MAY | JUNE 2018