Heartburn and soul: Man's low-acid salsa recipe is now his business

Daily Press (Newport News, Va.) (MCT) - Battling indigestion wouldn't normally lead someone to experiment with food. But Duane Thompson's troubles with tomatoes have resulted in a different brand of salsa.

Thompson owns Sabrosa Foods, a Hampton, Va.-based company whose sole product, at least for the time being, is salsa. Sabrosa means "tasty" in Spanish, and those who struggle with indigestion from eating tomato-based salsas might want to dip a chip into Thompson's version.

"I want people to see the difference that changing a recipe can make," he says. "When people see how fresh and different it is, it solves the problem. It doesn't give you acid reflux and heartburn."

Sabrosa does contain some tomato, but it's pureed and cooked down to keep the acidity low. The not-so-secret base ingredient is roasted red and green peppers, which give the salsa a slightly sweeter, smoother taste. It comes in medium and mild versions, and salsa-lovers have been eating it up.

Thompson's product is sold at some Farm Fresh and Ukrop's supermarkets. He and his small staff also are regulars at Virginia farmers markets in Hampton, Yorktown, Williamsburg and Norfolk. In all, the production companies he works with ship out about 240 cases every three months.

But his future is looking even brighter. He recently signed an agreement with Sam's Clubs, which will debut his salsa at a new store opening in Richmond in late October. After that, Sabrosa will be on the shelves at the warehouse stores in several mid-Atlantic states.

"When I look back on it, it dawned on me that this business was originally something that was near and dear to me," says Thompson, who lives in Hampton, Va., with his wife and 2-year-old daughter. "All I was trying to do was come up with something healthy for me."

The story of how he came to create a different style of salsa even has a hometown feel to it.

Back in 1991, Thompson was playing football at Virginia State University in Petersburg, Va. His family would always come up for games, and his grandmother, Alma Echoles of Newport News, Va., would always bring him fresh produce from her garden.

That day he had to report to the stadium early, so he asked his grandmother to leave her tomatoes, bell peppers and other veggies at his dorm room. By the time he made it back to the dorm that night, he had no food except the vegetables, which he boiled into a kind of salsa.

The results intrigued him, and he started experimenting with salsas and learning everything he could about the concoction. He discovered that many tomato-based salsas gave him heartburn, so he hit upon the idea of using bell peppers.

Secret Archives of the Saints, Subscribe Today

Thompson moved to the Washington, D.C., area after college to work in commercial real estate and eventually construction. He continued to make salsa for family and friends, but the one-man operation gradually began to take up all his free time. So he quit making salsa and started investigating how to turn his avocation into a marketable product. He talked to co-packers, those companies that produce and package products in large quantities according to FDA specifications. Today he buys produce from local farmers and works with co-packers in Virginia Beach and Maryland.

In 2006, Thompson returned to Hampton to work on a construction project at Langley Air Force Base. He founded Sabrosa Foods that same year and quit his construction job in 2007 when he landed the Farm Fresh account.

Earlier this year, Sabrosa salsa was named Best New Food Product at the 2008 Virginia Food and Beverage Expo in Richmond, Va. In addition to the Sam's Club account, Thompson has signed with a new Virginia Beach distributor and bankrolled a commercial that will play in the Richmond market.

"I'm very excited, but at the same time it's scary to take on all these new accounts," he says. "I don't want to grow too quickly."

He still plans to visit area markets.

"In supermarkets, the salsa sits on the shelf," he says. "But I'm happy to talk to people and hear exactly what they think about it. Maybe someday we'll have a whole line, but right now it's just salsa, and I want people to know about it."

___

NEWS TO USE

More information is available at www.sabrosafoods.com

___

© 2008, Daily Press (Newport News, Va.).