Is there really a Heidi?


Thats the question Heidi Acuff heard so often after she started a small pancake-mix company called Heidis Cottage Classics LLC five years ago.


Posing for a photograph with a plateful of pancakes on her heada picture to be used on a trade-show banner with the slogan Pancakes On Your Mind?she had an idea. She would put the question of her existence to rest by putting herself on the front of each box of pancake mix. Instead of wearing pancakes on the box cover, though, shed don a tall bakers hat and hold a plateful of flapjacks topped with fruit and laden with syrup.


Its still a great marketing tool, Acuff says of the light-hearted photographs.


The companys pancake mixes now can be found in supermarkets throughout the Northwest and California. Chains that carry them include Fred Meyer Stores, Albertsons Inc., and Tidymans LLC, among others.


Acuff is the companys only employee and operates the business from her familys home on Fernan Lake, just east of Coeur dAlene. A black-and-white drawing thats part of the Cottage Classics logo is a depiction of her home. She contracts with a packing company in Seattle that blends and packages the mixes to her specifications.


The Seattle company also ships larger orders to the supermarkets that carry them, but Acuff fills smaller orders, including Internet orders, herself from a small warehouse space in Dalton Gardens, north of Coeur dAlene.


In 2004, Heidis Cottage Classics had about $50,000 in sales, and Acuff says she expects to match that level this year.


With the customers question about her existence answered satisfactorily, Acuff now is looking to answer another: How does she grow the business?


Id like to do anything to get volumes up, she says.


First, Acuff says she hopes to contract with a packing facility in the Midwest and link up with distributors in the Midwest and Eastern U.S. by the end of this year. She says that working with a Midwestern manufacturer would help reduce shipping costsand make the pancake mixes more price competitivein other parts of the U.S. In the West, a box of her pancake mix typically carries a $3.50 price tag.


Such a manufacturer also would handle Internet sales, which have spiked since May, when national television-and-print food critic David Rosengarten gave glowing reviews to Heidis Cottage Classics mixes in one of his publications. Acuff says the company has sold about 3,000 boxes of its pancake mixes a month over the last couple of months via the Internet, though she doesnt expect the small concern to sustain that level of Internet orders.


Once the company is working with a second manufacturer and more distributors, Acuff says she plans to begin selling mixes to restaurants and other food-service operations. She says she has been selling batches of mix to a restaurant in California on a trial basis, and the products have been well-received there.


Also, Acuff says shes pursuing private-label opportunities, in which Heidis Cottage Classics would make a unique mix for a specific retailer. Acuff already had made a private-label mix and written up a special recipe for Bath & Body Works, which packaged the mix with other products as part of a gift set one holiday season.


Private label work aside, Heidis Cottage Classics has five different pancake mixes that it currently sells in supermarkets: Original Cottage Cheese, Whole Wheat Cottage Cheese, Grainy Day, Sourdough, and Oats & Apple.


The cottage cheese mixes require fresh cottage cheese, eggs, and water; the others just need eggs and water.


Depending on the kind of mix, the product can be prepared as either low in fat or fat free, Acuff says. Also, some are high in fiber and protein, she says.


As weve developed lines of mix, weve made sure the lines are very different from each other, but all are healthy, she says.


The original productthe one that Acuff says distinguished the company from conventional pancake-mix makersis the cottage cheese pancakes.


She says she developed the cottage cheese-pancake recipe when she was in her mid-20s and was both an active runner and an avid cook. She says she doesnt have any formal training in the kitchen, nor has she ever worked in a restaurant, but cooking always has been a big, strong hobby for her.


In 1986, she started a business called Heidis Original, through which she made the cottage cheese-pancake mix and sold it to small specialty shops. At that time, though, she was mixing the product herself in her home, which made it difficult to grow that business. She shut down Heidis Original in 1991.


She got married in 1996 and, shortly thereafter, had a son named Colby, now 8 years old.


Heidi Acuff says she decided to revisit the pancake-mix enterprise after exploring the possibility of having an outside company make the mixes for her.


Theres a lot of growth potential now, she says. Once you get the distribution and it hits, you have the potential to move very fast.