Family
Tradition Turns into Thriving Enterprise
The Star-Ledger
Wednesday, October 11, 2000
By Robert Rastelli, Star-Ledger Staff
If you can dream it, you can make it happen, so the saying goes.
Loretta Gregory Bowe of East Orange is living proof. And it all started
with her mother’s gelatin desserts.
Take a look - and taste -at Britt’s Gourmet Desserts, Inc., a 5-foot-by-6-foot
kiosk in the Woodbridge Mall, and you will see a business growing from
a cart to a cartel. Gelatin, apparently, is still a hot seller.
“When looking at the name, some people think that it is a British
product, but it was actually named after my daughter, Brittney,”
says Bowe. Brittney, 11, wasn’t around when Bowe’s mother,
Anita Gregory, started making special cream-based fruit-flavor gelatin
desserts for church “doings,” back some 20 years ago.
Now, after “playing with measuring cups” for a few years,
Britt’s will be breaking ground for its own production plant on
Prospect Street in East Orange within the next three weeks.
Strong-willed and more than a little determined, Bowe can point directly
to the enjoyment she gets from her “theme” and from the knowledge
that her creations were begun with love. Some sugar here, some cream here,
some strawberries there and, eventually, the jiggly treats came together.
“The tropical fruit theme really seems
to appeal to people,” says Bowe, 41, whose Woodbridge kiosk is decorated
with plastic birds, plastic fruit and baskets. But there’s nothing
fake about the treats she sells, anywhere from 300 to 400 a day ($1.95-$2.95
each). “I sell more when it rains, when people come to the malls.”
“This began more than 20 years ago. My mother, who had a small catering
business in East Orange, made her original desserts in large quantities
for weddings, then she would shrink them and take them to the church for
fund-raisers,” says Bowe.
The Faith Temple New Hope Church couldn’t have been luckier.
Once Bowe began investigating methods of how to make the desserts in larger
quantities – and cajoling all her friends into sampling them –
it was just a short leap to marketing them, a task Bowe found daunting.
But not impossible.
First came a couple of small clients, like the Newark law firm of McCarter
& English. Then “one thing led to another” and two commercial
accounts appeared in Lakewood, as well as the Town Hall Deli in South
Orange.
“There’s no stopping me now,” says Bowe, with visions
of strawberry, raspberry, cherry, orange sherbet and pineapple gelatin
in her head. “I believe I’m taking gelatin to a whole ‘nother
level.”
And she doesn’t mean another level of the mall.
Britt’s Gourmet will be opening Nov. 1 at the Jersey Gardens mall
in Elizabeth with another kiosk similar to the one in Woodbridge. Bowe
also has just secured four new contracts to supply existing establishments
with her product, she says: the Garden Café in Battery Park in
New York, Munchy’s Gourmet Market and Deli Plus, both in the Port
Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street, and Le Bon Café in New York’s
Pennsylvania Station at 34th Street.
There’s more on the way, if God stays on Bowe’s side for a
while longer.
“If it had not been for God, I would not be standing here today,”
she says, on her ever-present cell phone from the Woodbridge kiosk. Unwavering
help from the family helps, also, including husband Willie, supervisor
of the frozen food warehouse for Supermarkets General in Dayton.
Bowe also is moving toward a seven-state distributorship agreement with
Bermuda Italian Ices, based on the vacation island. Possibilities also
exist for a spot in the Kings County Mall in Brooklyn.
“This is growing so fast it’s almost overwhelming,”
says Bowe. “You learn by trying, especially when you are a minority
and a woman.”
She envisions the product being served on board major air carriers, as
well as being on the menus of “upscale” restaurants as part
of their standard dessert line.
Even the bookseller giant Barnes & Noble is interested, and in a bout
two weeks will begin carrying Bowe’s desserts in the café
of the Route 22 megastore in Springfield.
Gelatin, God and love are taking Loretta Bowe to new levels, also, although
she had the feeling six years ago – when she sold her first “unit”
at the church – that the best, and the tastiest, would become a
reality.
“Just don’t call it J…-O!”
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