Today I'm talking with Chuck and John at Turners Fresh Gourmet. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Chuck and John at Turner's Fresh Gourmet. Hi guys, how are you? Good. And you're in Wisconsin, right? We are. Okay, so you're neighbors. Yes. Yeah, we live... 00:28 I don't know, less than five minutes apart, right, John? That's a true story. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I meant neighbors to me because I'm in Minnesota. But hey, we're all neighbors. Oh, yes. Yes. No. So where in Wisconsin are you? So we're in Wapaka County and in the the closest town is Wapaka, whereby the beautiful chain of lakes area. 00:56 I guess the only other way I would describe where we are is we're in the central sands farming area, which is where the glaciers dumped a huge amount of sand. That's interesting because as my grandfather used to say, it used to be before irrigation or modern irrigation, some of the most difficult land to farm on. 01:26 And then with the advent of irrigation, which was something that really exploded during his generation, it became some of the best land to farm on because it has great drainage and you have more control over the water input. Awesome. So what's the biggest city near you? 01:54 We're between Appleton and Stevens Point, almost midpoint, a little bit more toward point, but about 40 miles west of Appleton, west a little bit north. Okay. That gives me a dot on the map to picture in my head. Perfect. Thank you. All right. So tell me the story of how you guys got together and started the project here. I'll start out because I was sort of the instigating person on this. I was actually on vacation with my 02:24 my wife in the Oregon area, Portland, we landed in Portland, and we were heading to the Willamette Valley to do some little wine tasting, do some hiking along the coast, et cetera. But first place we went to eat was a restaurant that had Portland ketchup on the table. And I've not been a particular foodie. 02:49 necessarily, but I do, I've always noticed that sort of thing. If a restaurant says we've got house ketchup, I'm like, okay, I want something with that ketchup on it. And so I ordered a burger, whatever had the ketchup next restaurant, same thing, portly ketchup, and I'm kind of turning the bottle over and looking at it, looking up on the website, portly ketchup, I'm just curious, like this regional ketchup company. So long story short, I just kind of put that in the back of my 03:19 marketing and healthcare consultant, very specific niche. That was my job. And we had just moved to Wapaka in this sort of retirement transition I had been doing, or we've been doing. And we knew the Turner family for years because we'd be coming up here. And at a historical society presentation about three months later, we see John, along with his father and his sister presenting all about Turner Farms. 03:47 and the history of it, all that stuff. And the last people to get up were John and his sister, Tara. And they talk about, you know, here's some things we're looking to do to kind of expand and looking toward the future. And this idea resurfaced in my head. I went up to John, I said, what do you think about making a ketchup and having your own ketchup? And he said, that sounds interesting. And for reasons that he knew that I didn't, which was that they have a bunch of tomatoes left over every year, so why not? 04:17 And so that was, I think, February right before the pandemic. In the ensuing, you know, couple of years, we'd been working on our recipe and just kind of making the ketchup from home and sharing some jars of John, but not really talking too much about it because there's a pandemic. And then about a year and a half later or about a year and a half ago, John and I met up and he said, you know, we've been talking. We'd love to have your ketchup on the shelf. And I said, 04:47 John it's not my ketchup. This is this be Turner's fresh ketchup. It's it's the it's your brand your tomatoes your farm I'm almost a minority player in this thing because I think you guys have got the local farming Etc. So that's it. I'll let John fill in the rest of it, but Okay, that that became the idea Yeah it's funny because I had 05:12 recently moved back to the farm after being away for a number of years. And, um, as Chuck said, like, uh, there was a presentation of mainly about the past and as I remember it, Chuck just was like, you know, what's next and how about ketchup and, uh, it all sounded good. Uh, but I, I really didn't know how serious Chuck was about, um, this project ...
