BY MICHAEL GUTIERREZ
Woodward Corner Market Honors Innovative Products and the Exceptional Women Behind Them
On Tuesday, March 16th, stories of courage and perseverance told by leaders of women-owned businesses in Michigan echoed through the aisles of Woodward Corner Market.
The collective achievements of the women honored at the Business Women’s Network luncheon highlight both the adversity and the fortitude behind some of Michigan’s most successful women-led companies — and the exciting products they’re creating that are innovating markets (and flying off the shelves).
As told by Lydia Gutierrez (Hacienda Mexican Foods), Chef Kelli Lewton (Two Unique Caterers & Event Planners), Tiffany Nicole Cartwright (Amarra Products), Jessica Mindell (Jessica’s Natural Foods), and Laura Romito (High 5 Salts with Benefits & Food Geek Foods), Meijer has proven to be an invaluable partner in growing their companies, aided by the fervor and personality of Woodward Corner Market Store Manager Natalie Rubino.
Natalie Rubino - Store Director at Woodward Corner Market
“This is a people business,
we’re just selling groceries on the side.”
Since the opening of Meijer’s Woodward Corner Market in January 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic changed the world and the way it does business, Woodward Corner Market Store Manager Natalie Rubino admits, “It’s been an awesome, unique, challenging two years.” She likens her eighteen years of experience in the grocery business to a marathon, not a sprint. Rubino started in the grocery business in 2004 and ran her first store in 2010, a time where she recalls she “was like a tornado.” “I just wanted to move quickly and drive results.”
“I’ve learned that it’s okay to make mistakes, to be vulnerable,” and to know when to sit back and have fun. Rubino quotes a former boss in coming to learn that “this is a people business, we’re just selling groceries on the side.”
“Natalie and Woodward Corner have been so incredibly supportive, not only of me, but of all the other local vendors,” says Laura Romito, the Owner and Creator of High 5 Salts with Benefits & Food Geek Foods. “In lots of stores, you have to pay to get your product on the shelf. You have to donate a whole case of product or you have to pay them a fee. I’m in four different locations in this store. That’s unheard of.”
Twenty-six years ago, Romito was a high school teacher when she decided to take a two year sabbatical to attend culinary school at Schoolcraft College in Livonia. Despite being one of the only women enrolled in the program, “and certainly one of very few older, second career women,” Romito graduated first in her class — but the new graduate experienced a professional reckoning at her first job. “As a woman walking into a restaurant kitchen, the stuff you hear, the stories, the Anthony Bourdain of it — that’s real. And I learned that wasn’t the life I wanted.”
Laura Romito - Owner and Creator of High 5 Salts with Benefits
“It’s really important to realize that if you are a woman in the food industry, you can do it how you want. You can do it the way you want to do it, at your own pace. Use your other skills from the rest of your life, pivot when you need to, and then you will be successful.”
Romito pivoted and began working for a local food company, starting their catering business, cooking school, and product promotion department, which directly led her to the next part in her journey: creating her own retail products. Romito professes that her organic food seasonings are the culmination of everything she’s learned about cooking “in little packages.”
Chef Kelli Lewton, Owner of TwoUnique Creations, a catering and event planning company that was one of the first few in Michigan to do home delivery for organic food, also holds high praise for Rubino, sharing with luncheon attendees that Meijer and Rubino “kept people at my work employed.”
Lewton started her company with six employees in the basement of a private school thirty-three years ago, “and I just wondered, like, what’s gonna happen? Why did I quit my job?” Not three weeks later, she recalls, she never looked back, growing her business the same way she creates her food: “everything from scratch.”
During the pandemic, Lewton realized her calling to fulfill a lifelong dream: writing a book. Her upcoming book Make Your Own Party: Twenty Blueprints to MYO Party! was written to help those who don’t know where to start when it comes to party planning. “That was my heart for the book. Someone that would be afraid to never do anything could be like, ‘Yeah, I could do that. It doesn’t have to be what my mother did, or my grandmother did, and it doesn’t have to be perfect china.’” With twenty different chapters, Lewton hopes that her book will help inspire people to create community through food and embrace life in its simplest moments. “Our most important event is the event of right now. Everything we do is intentional. Every event is celebrated.” (Ten percent of book proceeds go to Detroit Food Academy.)
Prior to March 2020, Lewton employed around 150 people, “and then in one week I had seven.” She is steadily working to rebuild her workforce in a year that’s looking to be her largest for weddings.
Kelli Lewton - Owner of 2 Unique Caterers & Event Planners
For many of the featured businesswomen, the drive behind their products began out of fulfilling a need for a loved one.
Jessica Mindell, the Owner and Founder of Jessica’s Natural Foods, started her company out of her husband’s decision to go gluten-free back in 2009 when there were very few gluten-free options — and when the American economy was still reeling from the impact from the prior year’s recession. “I wasn’t sure if it was the worst time possible to start a business.”
Mindell started off with three flavors of oats and handed out sample bags to friends and family, incorporating their feedback until she settled on the formulas for her recipes. Prior to launching her company, the only baking experience Mindell had was a holiday season working at Zingerman's where she realized she had neither the expertise nor the resources to build her own bakery. “At the time, there were no gluten-free commissary kitchens or incubator kitchens [in Michigan],” but when she discovered one out of Chicago, she drove west and spent a week with the company’s team making hundreds of pounds of granola.
Jessica Mindell - Owner and Founder of Jessica's Natural Foods
“I literally had no idea if anyone was going to buy this granola. I made 300 bags of each granola and I was kind of terrified. My family thought I was crazy.”
Challenges still exist, like a thirty-five percent increase in costs of goods and “the worst oat crop since 1866,” but in January, Mindell finally accomplished a thirteen-year goal: her products are for sale in at least one store in every state.
Prior to her success in the skin care industry, Tiffany Nicole Cartwright, the Founder and CEO of Amarra Products, a certified minority-owned business specializing in natural and organic skin care products known as G.L.A.M. Organic Body Scrubs, had never been a business owner and never dreamed of owning a business. “I was just a new mom trying to help her daughter.”
Cartwright’s daughter, Taylor, was born with eczema. “I was miserable seeing her scratching and itching, going through all of that suffering. As a new mom, I thought I had to do something.” Before the age of organic, holistic health products, Cartwright recalls, the nearest (and oftentimes best) solution was a homemade remedy. “I grew up where it was like, you say, ‘Mom, I’ve got a headache.’ ‘Here, take some castor oil.’ ‘Mom, my back hurts.’ ‘Here, take some cod liver oil…’ There was always something that you could find in your garden. It was just what you knew to do because it was natural. So as a mom, I did the same thing.” The good news is that Cartwright’s kitchen concoctions actually worked — but that was before she turned her homemade remedies into a booming business with products in over 650 retail stores nationwide, and it was long before her first-hand exposure to running her own business.
“I don’t come from a family of entrepreneurs. I didn’t grow up understanding how to start, much less run, a business.” A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, Cartwright served as an assistant attorney general and was working as an administrative law judge when, without notice, she lost her job to statewide budget cuts. She lost her home, her car, and filed for bankruptcy.
Tiffany Nicole Cartwright - Founder and CEO of Amarra GLAM Body Scrubs
“I think I’m one of the few people on the face of the earth that went from presiding over unemployment hearings to relying on an unemployment check.”
While Cartwright was driven to find a solution for her daughter Taylor’s eczema, it wasn’t until she listened to her own brother Art on his Sunday morning radio program that she felt compelled to start her own business. “He said, ‘Listen, that book that’s inside of you… that invention that you’ve been working on for the past twenty years… those recipes that were handed down to you from your mother, your grandmother, your great-grandmother… those concoctions you’ve been mixing in your kitchen — that’s a business you’ve been sitting on, and the world needs what you have. What’re you doing? It’s time to start a business.’ I sat there listening to my own brother saying, ‘He’s talking to me!’”
Cartwright developed her business at her brother’s free mentorship class offered on Tuesday nights as part of his Global Empowerment Ministries, and was encouraged to pitch to Shark Tank, the hit ABC television show, which had held auditions in Tech Town. Accompanied by her daughter Taylor, Cartwright presented her G.L.A.M. product line and received a resounding yes. Soon thereafter, Cartwright met Woodward Corner Market Store Manager Natalie Rubino, who accepted the product into the store and opened the floor for Cartwright to offer samples to customers. “[Natalie understood] customer engagement was vital, crucial.” Cartwright says that mindset from a decision-maker like Rubino was essential in growing her business.
The most recent successes for Hacienda Mexican Foods, owned and operated by Lydia Gutierrez, also came from opportunities presented by Meijer.
Lydia Gutierrez - President and CEO of Hacienda Mexican Foods
“I can tell you that if it weren’t for our family at Meijer, we wouldn’t be here today.
”
Gutierrez has persevered through her fair share of adversity. In 2005, Gutierrez lost her husband, the founder of the company and her mentor, leaving behind two young children and over fifty employees in her care. “My mentor was my late husband. He was the one that encouraged me. He allowed me to make mistakes. We grew out of his passion for the business.”
Gutierrez advises luncheon attendees to diversify their client base and avoid putting “all your eggs in one basket.” Before Garden Fresh Gourmet sold to Campell’s for over $230 million, they made up nearly ninety-percent of Gutierrez’s business. “Before that, we were working two shifts, six days a week… And almost overnight, we went to [working] twenty-three hours in a week.” Gutierrez recalls that the number of employees she lost was heartbreaking, and for those who she could afford to hold onto, the future looked dim. “I had to sit and encourage my employees, saying, ‘All I need you to do is look beyond our circumstance. There is something better for us.’” It was Gutierrez’s “Five F’s” that helped her throughout the most difficult periods in her life: “faith, family, friends, food, and fun.”
Now Gutierrez’s 313 Urban Tortilla Chips, which come in salted, chili lime, blue corn, and unsalted, are available in every Meijer in the state. “In just a week, we sold 1,750 cases. That’s about two truckloads and a second shift — putting people to work.”
Woodward Corner Market is grateful to honor the stories of these emerging titans of industry and the products they create. All of the products mentioned above are available in our stores today.