Specialty Food Magazine

SUMMER 2014

Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.

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CHOCOLATE ART BOX As seen in From impressive c h ocolate gifts to impulse items! wholesale@debrand.com www.debrand.com Summer FFS Booth #3975 260.969.8335, ask for the Wholesale Division Summer Fancy Food Show Booth 3975 Summer Fancy Food Show Booth 4121 convinced a good number of them, especially when she tossed the ingredient in salads. Next came sherry-like vinegar from Banyuls, in Southern France, introduced to her by a friend. Another acquaintence said her French mother thought it would be wise to import f leur de sel. This was all before the internet took off, Keller points out—before businesses turned global, before anyone could easily buy these items in specialty shops across the U.S., especially at peak freshness. Keller had sales experience, but not in any field that could be considered gourmet. After getting a degree in political science, she became a waitress because she couldn't type and there weren't any jobs available to women that interested her, she recalls. This was all before that fateful trip to France. "My mom thought I should get a job on a cruise ship so I could see the world, have an exotic life," she says. "Then I met this odd man who thought it would be fun to hire a girl to sell adding machines in East Oakland, at the time of the Black Panthers." More sales jobs followed, including marketing for a potato salad company. Personal Challenges Produce Changes By 2004, the business, then named K.L. Keller Imports, was going strong. Keller had developed relationships with small-scale, artisan producers throughout France and Spain and found plenty of retail- ers back in the States who enthusiastically sold them. That year at Alimentaria, Barcelona's biannual, international food and drinks exhibition, she was feeling oddly tired. Eight to 10 cups of coffee a day failed to maintain her usual robust energy. Her heart began to race. Alarmed, she went to a doctor who did a blood test. She was anemic, down three pints of blood. It was leukemia. Keller was given two years to live. Chemotherapy didn't work. A risky bone marrow transplant miraculously turned things around. Still, Keller made the difficult decision to sell her company. "I'd left my assistant running it during my treatment," she says. "I didn't know what was going to happen. Customers and farmers had placed faith in me to sell their products. Vineyards had put their "If I were to sum up my products, they are all things I'd want in my kitchen." 92 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE specialtyfood.com ProducerProfiile_Keller.indd 92 6/6/14 8:12 AM

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