By Greg Booth

Chanhassen, Minn. — Growing up, Angelica Peterson treasured her mom’s talent for turning ordinary zucchini into a zesty condiment.

Today, those taste-bud memories have inspired a budding business. Peterson has converted mom’s home recipe into Angelica’s Garden Zucchini Relish. Peterson grows most of the ingredients, cooks them up in big batches, and markets her relish through natural food stores and groceries in the Twin Cities and Chicago.

Angelica’s relish “is like sweet pickle relish, but a lot better,” Peterson says. “The texture is different because it’s zucchini. It’s more of a comfort to the mouth than pickles. It tastes tangy and rich, and adds a lot of flavor to a lot of different foods. It’s good stuff.”

“This is unique,” agrees AURI food scientist Charan Wadhawan, who has helped dozens of clients commercialize unusual recipes. “I haven’t heard of zucchini relish before.”

Full mouth comfort on a large scale

In the Crookston, Minn. food lab, Wadhawan worked with Peterson to standardize her recipe and scale it up. Wadhawan brought Peterson up to market speed by helping with packaging advice, conducting taste tests, sourcing ingredients and ensuring compliance with FDA labeling requirements.

“Many places require a nutrition label,” says Peterson. Whole Foods, a natural foods chain that carries the relish, has “very strict guidelines” for labeling, for example.

Wadhawan notes that Peterson is a “prime example of a person who has a recipe and ... doesn’t know how to go about doing certain things to (get to) the commercialization process.” Beside taste tests, the product’s development included shelf life studies to make sure the relish maintains uniformity and doesn’t spoil too quickly.

Organic is the goal

Producing and marketing zucchini relish is “a lot of work, as all good things are,” Peterson says. “My goal is to grow as much of the ingredients for the relish as I can.” Determined to use only organic ingredients, she grows the prolific summer squash on a rented community-supported farm in Lake Elmo. The raw sugar for the relish comes from organic cane sugar.

Peterson, who cans the relish at the Wilder Foundation Kitchen in St. Paul, plans to expand her line to include a hot and spicy zucchini relish and a reduced sugar version. Eventually, she would like to market other canned goods. In the meantime, she’s looking for a distributor to carry her relish into more stores in the Twin Cities and across Minnesota.