Marketing
with fruit flair

Selling her spreads takes many avenues
for Crookston entrepreneur

Crookston, Minn. — There is more than one way to sell a fruit spread. There are elaborate market strategies, such as TV home shopping shows. Then there are simple ideas, such as flipping through a phone book and plunking your finger down on a random customer.

They both work for Kim Samuelson.

The tenacious creator of RBJ Rhubarb Strawberry Spreadable Fruit has seen her products spread across the country. The fruit spreads were so popular on QVC last year that the TV shopping channel oversold its allotted supply. Samuelson had to quickly produce more jars to fill the orders. The QVC success helped launch three other spreadable fruit flavors — rhubarb pineapple, strawberry peach and rhubarb almond — along with a rhubarb sauce.

“We do a lot of direct shipping to customers who bought originally on QVC,” says Samuelson, who also owns and operates RBJ’s Restaurant in Crookston. The family-style restaurant — like the fruit spreads — bears the initials of her late father, Roger Bernald Johnson, who started the restaurant in 1981. Involved with restaurants since she was nine, Samuelson has run RBJ’s since 1987.

The fruit spreads have two Midwest distributors, but much of RBJ’s success is due to Samuelson’s enterprising marketing method: sending jars to retail addresses gleaned from telephone books.

Carrying the “Pride of Dakota” stamp on the RBJ label also helps. The North Dakota marketing program, similar to “Minnesota Grown,” is available to RBJ because of its Hillsboro, N.D. packaging location. “We’re proud of being from Crookston, and from Minnesota, but we have a lot in common with North Dakota,” Samuelson says.

Besides promoting the spread’s “home-grown” distinction, the label has enhanced the company’s presence at trade shows. The Pride of Dakota program advertises heavily to promote the label, Samuelson says.

The spreadable fruits were featured in the New York Fancy Foods Show this summer, and in the Chicago and Minneapolis Gift Marts, which introduce retailers to holiday gift products.

“We’re really starting to grow,” says Samuelson, who employs two other people. “Last year we averaged 120 cases a month of the 14-ounce size, and now we’re up from that. A gift box, a book of rhubarb recipes, and a package of three 5-ounce sampler jars have been added to the product line.

“Our goal is 300 cases a month average. That would be a real nice point for us to start seeing a return.”
The business, which complements Samuelson’s restaurant business, is only two years old, but is “becoming increasingly more important as time goes by. It’s nice revenue in the wintertime — we can sell to people in Arizona who aren’t having a snowstorm. It helps to round out the inconsistencies.”