PROFILES IN BUSINESS: Annie's Naturals: Annie Christopher and Peter Backman

Vermont Business Magazine, Jun 01, 2004 by Marcel, Joyce

It's an early spring day and sunlight is reflected in the surface of several ponds and streams. The leaves are greening, the birds are darting, warbling and wooing, the daffodils are blooming, and the strawberry patch has recently been mulched with hay. But although this is a 200-acre working farm in North Calais, the work here is more about art and commerce than cows.

The farm is the home of Annie Christopher, 58, and her husband and business partner, Peter Backman, 53. These two calm, hard-working, attractive blue-eyed blondes share a talent for creativity, a deadpan sense of humor, and Annie's Enterprises, Inc, the Star Trek-influenced corporate name for Annie's Naturals, a $15 million salad dressing and condiment business that. they built themselves.

Starting out in 1984 with one barbecue sauce, Annie's Naturals now has 39 products. It is the leader in the natural foods industry's salad dressing category, last year outselling Newman's Own by more than 27 percent. In regular supermarkets it is the fifth-largest seller in the "specialty" salad dressing category.

"It's a great success story," said Richard Angney, now executive vice president of the Central Vermont Economic Development Corp. but once the couple's first banker. "They started in the kitchen and developed into a nationally recognized brand. We had some friends visiting from Chicago recently, and their daughter is a strict vegetarian. She was traveling with Annie's Naturals - she said she takes them wherever she goes. She was very excited when I said I know Annie."

Christopher and Backman share a love story as well as a business story. Their love story began in New York City in 1976, when Christopher was an artist working in gold leaf and egg tempera, and Backman was the New York-based salesman for Montpelier's Capitol City Press; he was also running his own publishing company, Lotswana, publishing translations of Tibetan books.

Like many struggling - actors and painters, Christopher was earning a living as a waitress. She worked at Fanelli's, a well-known artists' bar and hangout in the then-new neighborhood of SoHo. That's where she met Backman.

"Peter was working in the kitchen, proofreading a manuscript, and so I had to serve his drinks back there," Christopher said. "We had an opportunity to speak one-on-one, without the distractions in front, and the chemistry started there."

Soon they were living together. Christopher soon left art for culinary school, and on weekends the couple alternated between exploring the city and driving north to the farm, which had been in Backman's mother's family for generations. One day they got off Interstate 91 in Putney and discovered the famous Curtis's Bar-BQue.

"After that, every weekend we stopped in for ribs," Christopher said. "I'm in culinary school, I'm thinking American regional food is like the coolest thing in the universe, and here's this barbecue that's so American. And we came up with idea that we should open a barbecue stand just like Curtis's, but in Montpelier. And you have no idea what a great idea we thought this was. And we did it. I ran it for three summers. And it was so much hard work, and it was only open for three and a half months because it was not insulated; it was just an open pit."

"Everything was cooked on wood, and the cole slaw was from scratch, and the biscuits were from scratch, and there was corn on the cob," Backman said.

"And it was so popular," Christopher said.

To make a sign for the new business, Christopher went to her good friend, the freelance illustrator Barbara Carter, who still does all the illustrations for the labels of Annie's Naturals.

"She showed up here with a big prepared piece of plywood," Carter said. "We put a sign on each side that said Annie's B-B-Q with a graphic of the statue on top of the Capitol Building holding a platter of chicken and ribs. We gave her chicken feet that were holding onto the golden dome. That was the beginning. I must say we've had a lot of fun together. Whenever people ask me what I do, it's easy now to say I do the labels for Annie's Naturals. Everyone knows them, and I get an immediate response which always seems to be favorable."

During the summers, Christopher ran the stand and lived on the farm. Backman, who was still working in New York, would drive up on weekends.

Christopher was pouring her creativity into condiments. First, of course, she created her own barbecue sauce. People liked it, and soon she was bottling and selling it at the stand. Then she moved on to mustards and salad dressings.

"Annie did the first bottled raspberry dressing in the country," Backman said. "That was her first dressing. She did the first bottled balsamic, and the first Goddess - which is our best seller. She did the first shiitake, the first roasted red pepper. Annie was really careful in the beginning to do things that we're not 'me too' products. In this business, 'me too' means things like Ranch or Italian, things that have already been done."

The Goddess dressing, which Christopher says "came out of the old hippie days when tahini was a way to dress salads and rice," is a combination of tahini and green goddess. It's the company's biggest seller; they have sold 300,000 cases - six bottles to a case - in the last 12 months.