By Adelia Ladson

adelia.ladson@gaflnews.com



“Down-home cookin’ make’s you doggone good lookin’,” is something Lauri Jo Bennett of Norman Park hopes people can identify with her green tomato pickles, salsa and pepper jelly. This clever saying is part of her Lauri Jo’s Southern Style Canning, LLC. logo, along with her two English bulldogs, Mack and Sarge, and her husband’s grandfather’s restored 65 Chevy truck.

This kind of “down-home” feeling portrayed by the label on her products, she believes, has helped her to have success, so far, with attracting customers to her booth at various food shows; this coupled with the fact that her husband, Mike and two children, Mikelyn and Hal are also on-hand to help out. She said, in the midst of all the larger corporations, her “mom and pop” business seemed more appealing to people. And staying a “mom and pop” business is just how she wants to keep things.

“We’re definitely family owned and operated,” she said.

Bennett was born and raised in Norman Park and is living in the same house she grew-up in and her husband was raised in Omega and attended school in Tifton. She is now, teaching special education at Colquitt County High School, after teaching gifted reading at C.A. Gray Middle School for seven years. The couple own a trucking company, which Mike runs.

“I started going to the canning plant with a friend,” said Bennett.

She said she started going about eight or ten years ago and started with salsa, spaghetti sauce, peas and corn, and jelly. She said she would do about 2,000 jars of salsa or spaghetti sauce, at a time.

“It was just something I lived for every summer,” she said.

“The canning plant was like a drug to her. She lives for the summer to go to the canning plant,” Mike chimed in teasingly.

She said she would just give the jars away to family and friends but then, about a year ago, a few of her friends encouraged her to sell her products. She added that the Ag teachers at the high school were also really encouraged her to give it a try.

“The first place I started with was the Colquitt County Extension Office,” she said.

She said former extension agent, Debbie Purvis, told her everything she needed to know to get her started with the business end of things. She said the extension office was also able to provide her with names of certified kitchens that she could use to make her jellies and pickles. For her salsa, she uses a co-packer, which is a place that takes her recipe and produces and bottles it. She said the co-packer gave her the name of a label company.

“Doors just kept opening for us,” she said.

The Bennetts went to the Fall Gift and Home Furnishings Gourmet Market, in Atlanta, the middle of this month, and set up their booth.

“We took a leap of faith and prayed real hard,” Bennett said.

While there, she won a Best of Atlanta Award for her green tomato pickles. Ten product categories were judged and her pickles won the Best Extra award.

“I certainly never dreamed, a year ago, that we would have this award to take with us to other shows,” she said.

She said that going to the food shows has taught them a lot about what the specialty items market was like and she believes that bottling her spaghetti sauce will be her next venture.

“I knew when I went into the business, I wanted to target specialty shops,” she said.

She said she and her husband always loved to go to the little food shops when they were on vacation.

So far, the couple has sold their products from Watkins Glen, N.Y. down to Florida ,and out to Garden City, Kansas. They currently do all of the shipping out of their home, which has been challenging, she said.

“It’s been a roller coaster ride from there,” she said.

The couple would like to, eventually, build a warehouse to make shipping and storing easier for them.

“It’s definitely been a learning experience. Everything’s just happened so fast,” she said.

On Friday, of this week, she will be going to Ocilla for a show and, locally, she will have a booth at both the Sunbelt Expo in October and the Calico Arts and Crafts Show in November. She said she really enjoyed going to the shows because she was a people person.

She said she had grown-up putting things up and her pepper jelly and green tomato pickles were her grandmother’s recipes. She said she has memories of her grandmother’s pickles always sitting on the table for meals. When she moved into her mother and father’s house, she found her grandmother’s old cookbook which her mother had left in a cabinet. She really treasures the book, she said.

“I’m the one in the family who always wants the old stuff,” she said.

She also believes that it is important for kids today to know how to put-up food, especially, with the way the economy has been lately. She said she thinks that a lot of people have gone back to it.

“Plus, it’s a lot better than the frozen stuff you buy at the market,” she said.

The Bennetts go out, when they are in season here, and pick their tomatoes from Mobley Farms and Gibbs Patrick farm out of Omega. She said she loved to go out in the field. They also use locally grown peppers, as well, when they are in season.

She said that after working at school all day, she will go to the kitchen and make up batches of her jelly and pickles.

“Truly, it’s something I love doing,” she said.

Another dream of hers, she said, was to be able to, eventually, employ local people to help her so that she could offer some more job opportunities to the community.

Right now, Lauri Jo’s Southern Style Canning products can be found at various businesses around the community including the Catfish House, Market on the Square, at the farmer’s market, Pineridge Meats, Allegood’s, Everything Special, Rocky’s, Hall’s Hardware, Jernigan’s Restaurant, Three Chicks and a Hen, and in the gift shop at the Georgia Baptist Conference Center.

Her website, www.laurijossouthernstylecanning.com, should be up and running in a couple of weeks.

“Be careful what you wish for, you might get green tomato pickles,” she said laughing.