Clarin´s Top 10 - Sugar & Spice Makes the List

Not a bad way to end the year or start a new one. Clarin, Argentina´s largest newspaper, included us in their round-up of entrepreneurs with the most innovative ideas. For some reason, the online article is not complete so you would have to read the actual paper or you can click on the picture above if you can read Spanish.

Another expat (this one from the UK) was also mentioned. His company is 0800-Vino and it is a wine delivery service that promises to have your order delivered to your home within the hour.

Clarin chose among all the companies that they interviewed during the year. This was a complete surprise to me, and I found out about it after a friend of mine wrote to me congratulating me on the article. Thanks Tom!

The article is in Spanish, so what follows is my own personal translation of our part of the article.

Frank Almeida said that he came to this country out of love. He arrived in 1999 with his then girlfriend, now wife, but he soon started to miss some things. "I could not find cookies, like I knew cookies". To satisfy his nostalgia, his wife started baking out of their home. Today they are the owners of Sugar & Spice, a brand of gourmet cookies that invoiced $1,500,000 pesos in 2007.

We first "baked them at home and sold them to local bars and cafés of Palermo Viejo". Later they rented a space, bought an oven and designed their packaging. They managed to sell to Falabella (multinational departement store chain) and that is how they started their relationships with large clients. They also obtained angel investment to the tune of one million dollars. With that money they bought a factory with 800 sq meters of space. Today you can find their products in Jumbo, Disco, Libertad and La Anonima.

Of course we can also be found in many small gourmet shops, cafés, wine shops, cheese shops, video stores, chocolate shops, etc throughout the country from Tierra del Fuego to Misiones.

Argentina´s Best Kept Secret?

I have long felt like my company was one of those best kept secrets out there.

The people that I would go and pitch my product to didn´t know who I was, they never saw my product, they weren´t sure if they could sell it.

The people I would sell to during the holiday fairs had never heard of us, and would not know where to buy our cookies.

The magazine people would often offer us publicity in exchange for cookies. That´s right, I now have an alternative currency.

The TV people would offer me interviews in exchange for money. Yep, I could buy airtime. I tried to tell them that since no one knew who we were, we really could not afford buying air time by the minute.

All of that has slowly, but steadily changed.

I now have little time to go out and look for clients, they are calling me.

I am so busy that I can no longer participate in fairs or expos.

Magazines and Newspapers are calling us for interviews and a couple of TV shows have jumped on the bandwagon as well, and they are not charging me anymore.

I had my first foreign based interview. John Bell from Digital Influence Mapping Project was in town and he was wondering if it was "easier for small businesses to "get" social media?". Here is an article in Apertura (in Spanish) that weighs in with more evidence to the affirmative to his question.

However, I have not had any luck with any of the foreign media that have been lurking along the cobblestone streets of my Palermo Viejo.

This past Sunday an article was published in Clarin, Argentina´s largest newspaper. The article itself will take a while to go on-line. I was also asked three questions by Apertura. This last one will be in print only.

I also have an interview on the radio scheduled for this Saturday morning. The station is called Radio America. The show is called "El Emprendedor Urbano" / "The Urban Entrepreneur", and it will air from 11am to 12pm. No, I am sure my segment will not be an hour long, more like 5 or 10 minutes most likely. They tell me that this is a brand new show so it doesn´t show up on their line-up yet.

Meanwhile, our humble little store chugs merrily along. It´s very quite and does not see a lot of action. However, every month it manages to sell a little more. This is how I am gauging that we are still a secret in Buenos Aires. In fact, the editor of Time Out Buenos Aires did not even know about us. She has not set foot in our little store... yet. If there is anyone out there that should know about us it should be them.

Now that they do know about us and they are visiting us, together with Clarin´s article, I am beginning to feel nostalgic for that time when we were still underneath the radar. At least, for the foreign media we still are Argentina´s best kept secret.