It all started pretty humbly back in the summer of 1999 at our local Kamloops Farmers’ Market. We began making our own salsa at home as we were growing our own garden and were looking to eat healthier as a family. It had been suggested to us by friends who would taste Colin’s salsa at parties that we should sell it, they would buy it. So we gave it a go.
Armed that first day with 20 units of Medium Salsa’s and a smile Colin hit the Kamloops Farmers’ Market at 6 am. By 10 am the smile was gone and the 19 salsa sat untouched, as one was open as a sample but no one had tried it yet… A few hundred people had walked by already. Colin felt like heading home but the market insisted that vendors and vehicles could not leave before noon. Colin stayed reluctantly. Good thing. An hour later… he SOLD OUT! No one ever samples in the early morning after just brushing teeth, we learned later. The next week we were back with 40 salsa this time in different heats.
We needed a chip to sample the salsa with and thought, rather than a spoon but all the brands we tried were either too salty, too crumbled, and broken, or too flavoured to do justice to our fresh salsa. So, the next week we learned how to make our own chips and hit the market with them as samples to get more people to try our salsa. People asked, “Where they can get these yummy chips?” So the next week we started stuffing our chips in a bag and the rest, as they say, is history… Fresh is Best was born.
