“Julia, are you lost?” Marta grinned at me.
“I . . .” I gulped. “Did you see that booth over there? Melissa’s Munchers?”
“No. Stupid name. What are they?”
“They’re . . . They look a lot like muffets.”
Marta stopped, her bloodred fingernails frozen in place on a carton of muffets. “Oh.”
I took a deep breath. “It had to happen sooner or later, you know? Maybe ours taste better?”
Marta nodded. “Damn straight.”
“Maybe ours are cheaper.”
“Doubt it! Not with our expenses.”
“Well, Melissa just blew several grand on a convention display booth. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
Marta laughed, shaking her head. “Where are the platters?”
“Oh! Here.” I held up the shopping bag I’d been carrying. I put two platters onto Yona’s table. I switched on the lights, and the surface was suffused with a white glow. “Where’s the box of brochures?”
Marta pointed at a carton with her foot. I set about arranging our literature in piles. We would talk to as many people as we could; hand out samples, business cards, blessings. Whatever it took. We were there to network.
We tied on our new green aprons. It was time to set out the merchandise.
“Let me show you what I was thinking,” Marta said. On the cake stand I’d brought, she arranged one muffet of each flavor. Into each she inserted a little toothpick flag, carefully printed with the flavor’s name.
“Gorgeous! I’m going to start calling you Marta Stewart.”
She grinned like a cat. “You go ahead, chica. Because that old blonde lady makes a lot of money. But wait until you see this.”
We’d brought about five hundred muffets. Some were packaged as if for sale, but most sat in plastic bins, unwrapped, for tasting.
“See—I made loaves,” Marta informed me. She took the plastic off, revealing giant, rectangular muffets.
“Wow. I guess if we’re cutting them anyway, that makes sense. Do you think the centers are cooked?”
“I’m Marta Stewart, remember? I fiddled a bit with the moisture content and the baking temperature. Worked like a charm. Greasing every one of those muffin tins wasn’t working for me.”
We sliced the muffet loaves into one-inch cubes, each with a little toothpick for easy tasting. We arranged them as attractively as we could on the platters I’d brought.
At eight thirty, convention attendees arrived like a tidal wave, just as Marta and I were managing to eat a bite of bagel and sip coffee. It was showtime.
The first plates of muffets disappeared in a heartbeat. Marta cut up more while I attempted to greet each visitor. The trade-show attendees drifting into our booth were men and women, young and old. Any adult who wanted to pony up thirty dollars for a badge was welcome to the show. Attendees all wore the same square plastic passes, usually hung around the neck. We looked like so many items at a tag sale.
I studied the faces in the crowd. Some would be food store buyers (yes!), writers for the trade press (okay!), and a few were probably competitors (boo!). I scrutinized everyone, wondering how I would identify the VIPs.
“I’m Elmer,” an older man said, offering his hand. His long gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail, atop of which he wore a ten-gallon hat. “I run a health-food store in Dallas. And I love your product! Do you think you can ship these to me?” He munched an Autumn Harvest Muffet.
Flattered, I tried to imagine how that would work. Styrofoam coolers with dry ice inside? FedEx overnight? That would just about double my production cost. “I’d sure like to think about trying,” I said. “Do you have a business card?”
“Sure, little lady.” He tipped his hat to me. I put the card in my pocket, holding a hand over it protectively.
But then that conversation began to repeat itself. I met scads of buyers with tiny retail operations far from New York. Sure, a few of my admirers were more local. It was possible to imagine delivering to Jersey or Long Island. But for every friendly buyer from within a hundred miles there were three more from the ends of the earth. As much as I enjoyed chatting about muffets, in my gut I knew that these smaller orders would not save my company.
Still, I repeated my pitch dozens of times to these buyers who had traveled so far. I didn’t mind. It was like attending an enormous party where every guest was just as excited as I was about natural kids’ products. I recited ingredient lists. I extolled the virtues of flash-freezing. I waxed nostalgic about my organic farmland in Vermont. I tried to believe my own hype.
I grew sweaty in my efforts to greet everyone, all the while scanning the crowd for Mr. Big, whoever he might be. And sometimes I would actually sense the presence of heavier firepower. More than once I watched as a stealthy attendee sidled into our booth. I would invariably be trapped in conversation with one of the Elmers from Dallas. The stealthy ones held a folder in front of their ID tag. They would take a taste of the product, or inspect the brochure, and then disappear again into the crowd.
“Marta, did you see that?” I asked once. “Was that guy covering up an ID that said Costco? Or am I having paranoid fantasies?”
She stared after the man, probably in his forties, slipping away into the crowd. “I don’t know,” she said. “But if I were a buyer for a company that big, I’d keep it under wraps. A guy from Costco would practically need his own security detail in this place.”
I nodded grimly as another clump of people arrived at our booth.
Then, after the initial rush, the pace of muffet consumption slowed. I began to realize that our earlier popularity had more to do with the hour—breakfast time—than buyer interest. Now people began to skip our booth. I had to hope that it was because they were, say, apparel buyers and not because we looked like shabby losers.
Sometime around noon I ducked behind our chalkboard and wolfed down the congealed cream-cheese bagel I’d brought that morning. I took gulps of bottled water, stretched my arms and legs. There was music pulsing from somewhere nearby. I realized that it had been on all morning, but I had internalized the driving tempo as the soundtrack to my ambitions. Things were happening, right here in this room. While some of the mom-and-pop exhibitors were bound to come away with nothing, others would be discovered, their dreams brought to fruition.
The products around us varied from inspired to downright stupid. On my only sprint to the ladies’ room, I’d glimpsed heirloom-quality wooden toys and gorgeous children’s clothing made domestically, not by child labor in China. But I’d also spied a group marketing the Sick Bunny Bowl, for kids to puke into in the car. That one left me scratching my head. “Two handles! Just the right size! Comforting for upset tummies!”
The product that tickled Marta’s funny bone was the PeePee TeePee. “It’s a paper cone that you’re supposed to set over your baby boy’s weewee while you’re changing his diaper, so he doesn’t pee on you.”
“So he . . . pees on himself instead?”
“I guess. They got a twenty-foot booth, and five people working it, all dressed like Indians.”
“Then at least we’re not the craziest people in the room.”
“Not even close.”
I dove back into the fray. We had another wave of muffet consumption around lunch hour. I unwrapped more muffets while chatting about sodium levels with a health-food-store owner from Berkeley. I quartered them while discussing distribution with a store owner from Northampton, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, my pocket filled up with business cards for far-flung buyers, the likes of whom I could only support if I went truly national. They weighed me down, like another missed opportunity.
Then I watched a pair of people enter our booth, a man and a woman. He was tall, with a prominent mustache. She had rather heavy calves poking out from underneath her skirt. But the oddest thing about them was their empty hands. Unlike every other visitor to the trade show, they weren’t laden with pamphlets or samples.
“Morning!” I
greeted them cheerfully.
“Hiya,” the man said. He went right over to the chalkboard and began to read our signage.
“Would you like to try a muffet?” I asked the woman.
“Sure.” Her brown eyes darted between Marta and me. She took up a chunk of the Autumn Harvest flavor and nibbled daintily on the corner. “Delicious,” she said.
Mr. Mustache came around to the front of our table. “You make these products yourself?” he asked.
“We sure do. Every one of them.”
“And you do that where?”
“In sunny Brooklyn,” I answered. His manner was abrupt, but I was all charm and salesmanship today.
“You store them where? Who do you use for distribution?”
So many questions. I looked for his convention tag. But he wasn’t even wearing one, which was against regulations. I tried to keep the smile on my face. “We have freezer space in Brooklyn. Our truck driver does local deliveries, and we’re just now working on our national, um, distribution. Would you like a sample?”
“Sure,” he said. He reached for the nearest muffet—Focaccia Fiesta. He popped it in his mouth. “Nice to meet you,” he said. He nodded at his partner, and they retreated quickly down the aisle.
“What was that all about?” I asked as they walked away.
“Spies!” Marta had a flair for drama.
I shook my head. “I doubt it. A spy would ask about the recipes.”
“Not me,” Marta argued. “I’d want to know about production. Let’s send somebody over to grill Melissa’s Munchers. Let’s ask if they manage to make their product during daylight hours. We’re like vampires, you and me.”
It was a couple of hours later when Marta’s voice sang out purposefully. “Oh, Julia!” I turned to her. “Meet Kai from Whole Foods!”
Aha! Hours ago, I had thought to wonder whether he’d turn up. I looked him up and down. Kai was tall, dark, and handsome, perhaps half Asian, half skater dude. He had coffee-colored skin, straight brown hair, and big brown eyes. “Ladies, it’s a pleasure,” he said warmly. “I thought you weren’t going to make the trade show.”
“I decided that wasn’t wise,” I said evenly.
“So how’s it going?”
“Good! It’s good,” I insisted. “I can’t believe how much product we’ve moved today. And I’m going hoarse, and it’s only . . .” I looked at my watch. Oh. It was five thirty already. I had an hour left to meet the buyer of my dreams.
“Hang in there,” he said kindly. “These things can kill a person. Look at me! I’ll need a chiropractor if I don’t get out of here soon.”
In each hand he had a heavy shopping bag full of product samples—every one of them, I was sure, made by one of my competitors.
I stared at those bags with the feeling of doom, wondering if Melissa’s Munchers had made it inside. I tried for a joke. “Well, Kai, you don’t really need all that stuff. With muffets selling out at three of your stores already . . .”
He laughed. “I hear you, Julia. We’ll talk soon. When all this madness is over.” As he walked away, I said a silent prayer that those bags were full of twenty-five brands of yogurt smoothies.
Marta read my thoughts. “You know, Julia, possession is nine tenths of the law. You’re already on his shelves. Why would he take the trouble to replace our product with another one just like it?”
“From your lips to God’s ears, Marta.” I could only pray that she was right.
“Anyway, it looks like we brought enough.” Marta showed me what was left—a few cartons of muffets. “With only an hour to go.”
One more hour. I spun around to squint at the stream of people trickling past our booth. Maybe this would be the moment when one of them would appear. Yes! That must be how it would happen. Someone who tasted muffets earlier in the day would come back now to talk to us about a deal. There was no reason it shouldn’t play out that way. A serious buyer would sample everything before circling back to make up his mind.
Wouldn’t he?
I was like the survivor of a shipwreck, treading water in the ocean: I knew I couldn’t go on like this forever, but I wasn’t quite ready to slip beneath the waves yet.
I brushed a few crumbs off Yona’s table and then stepped over to the chalkboard to smooth down the flapping corner of a poster. It was a blow-up of Wylie, his arms stretched wide, looking upwards. We’d superimposed the various flavors of muffets in an arc above him, creating the illusion that Wylie was juggling them like a circus performer. The flavors were labeled over each picture: “Apple and Cheddar!” “Focaccia Fiesta!” They sailed above his rounded toddler head like a rainbow.
I’d studied my dog-eared entrepreneur magazines while designing those signs. They’d cautioned me that it usually took a few rounds on the trade-show circuit to find your audience. But I’d really believed that this one day would do it for me. I needed ANKST to work for me, and so I’d believed that it would.
Wallowing in my disappointment, I almost didn’t notice the suits stroll into our booth. The two unfamiliar men wore pinstripes. I glanced over at Marta to see if she’d noticed them. But she was busy with a gray-haired lady, probably a health-food-store owner.
“Hello there,” I greeted our visitors.
One of them held a map of the trade-show booth assignments, marked up in ink pen. The other one checked his ANKST catalog and addressed me. “Are you Julia Bailey? I’m J. P. Smith.”
“Yes, sir.” I shook his hand. “How can I help you, Mr. Smith?”
He definitely wasn’t a health-food-store owner. He looked more like a corporate lawyer. His starched white shirt collar stood up just so. “I’m from GPG. We were wondering if you’d take a meeting. Say, next week? You’re based in New York, correct? Our offices are just in midtown.”
I blinked at him for a minute, trying to decide whether or not to admit that the name GPG didn’t ring any bells. Some of the big grocery chains were part of large corporations.
“A meeting?”
The two men nodded in unison.
I’d prefer an order, but sure I’ll take a meeting. The subway fare would be the cheapest business expense in Julia’s Child’s history. “Certainly,” I said. “Next week in midtown.”
“Super. My team and I look forward to hearing more about Julia’s Child.” He handed me his business card.
I promised to phone his assistant on Monday. Then they were gone.
I turned to Marta. “GPG?”
She shook her head. “Chica, I never heard of it. But that don’t matter, as long as their checks don’t bounce.”
Chapter 18
“GPG? I think it stands for Gulf Pacific Group,” Luke said. “It’s a big conglomerate. Why?”
I’d arrived home from the trade show in the midst of bath-time and bedtime madness, so I’d been waiting an hour to talk to Luke about my whirlwind day. “Well, I hope it’s a conglomerate that owns a chain of grocery stores. They turned up at the end of the day. They want to meet with me, but I don’t know why.”
I handed the business card to Luke. He looked at it, shrugged, and handed it back. It was only marginally more forthcoming than what you’d expect to receive from a CIA operative. It contained just a name and phone number under the gray letters GPG.
“Interesting,” Luke said. “So let’s Google.”
“Oh, baby!” I teased. But I trotted after him toward his computer. He sat down in the desk chair and I sat down on his lap, and together we stared at GPG’s corporate Web facade. There was a long list of food brands, brands they owned. We recognized a Napa winery and a luxury ice cream.
There weren’t any grocers on the list.
“What do you suppose these guys are after?”
“I don’t know, honey.” Luke scratched his chin. “Maybe they want to buy your business, not your products.”
I sat up straighter on Luke’s lap. It was an idea I’d never considered.
Luke skimmed the list. “You’d be in good com
pany with these brands.” We clicked through the meager information on their site. After reading every word, I still wasn’t even sure what gulf the first G in GPG referred to. The corporation had offices on every continent except Antarctica. I chewed on my lip. “They didn’t tell me a thing, Luke. But it says here that they acquire a brand every two weeks.”
“This is really wild, Julia. I’d better get some champagne out of the fridge.”
I shook my head. “Don’t pop the cork yet. Why on earth would they want my unprofitable company? These other brands are all big-time. Maybe they’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
Luke laughed. “Don’t you think they started small? Whatever they’re after, you’ll have an interesting meeting. Shall we have a cocktail now?”
I followed him into the kitchen.
Luke sliced a lime, while I stared out the window, lost in thought.
“Did any of the chain grocery stores you were looking for turn up?”
I shook my head miserably. “Not unless they were incognito. There were dozens of independent stores that showed interest. But without a big distributor behind me, that will never work.”
“It’s not nothing. Maybe health-food stores are your brand’s niche?”
“If I could sell to every single one in the country, then maybe it would work. Otherwise . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence. Unless GPG had big ideas for my company, it might be curtains for Julia’s Child.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
If we ever have to do another trade show, I’m going to quit my job.
So here’s my version of our Squash-Carrot-Raisin Muffet Bread!
Best,
Marta
P.S. Joking!
Ingredients ⅞ cup white flour
¾ cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
Pinch ground ginger
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
¾ stick butter, softened
Julia's Child (9781101559741) Page 16
