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Schers sauce it up
By Kalea Hall
CHAMPION
Let’s get saucy.
Grow some Hungarian peppers, experiment in the kitchen with pepper-mustard recipes and taste-test, taste-test, taste-test.
That’s what Karen and Jim Scher did.
And today they have a top sauce product that all started with a garden behind their Champion Township home and Jim’s love of peppers and oil.
“If it wasn’t for ‘mustard heads,’ we wouldn’t be in 80 stores,” Karen said.
To explain, a “mustard head” is someone who is obsessed with the Uncle Jim’s products.
The Schers began to cater to the mustard heads with their product, Uncle Jim’s Pepper Mustard, after they had an overgrowth of giant Hungarian peppers.
Jim needed to do something with the copious supply of peppers he had falling out of the fridge, so he started to dabble in pepper mustard. At first, the consistency of the sauce was poor. He worked with it until he got it right.
“We made it and gave it away for 10 years,” he said.
Jim, a lawyer, was a little apprehensive about selling his sauce from the kitchen.
But Karen, a marketing professional, persuaded him to proceed.
“We had 200 orders in an hour,” Jim said. “I thought, OK, maybe we can sell this.”
He met a manufacturer in Cleveland and decided to give it a shot. At first, the original pepper mustard didn’t taste quite right. He sat down and figured out what was wrong with it and sent a note back to the manufacturer.
“They listened, and it was perfect,” Jim said.
He brought a batch of his homemade sauce and the manufacturer-made sauce to his office and had everyone give them a taste.
“They chose the manufactured one,” he said. That was enough to convince him to go for it.
By November 2009, the Schers had 1,800 pounds, or 1,800 8-ounce jars, of Uncle Jim’s Pepper Mustard in stock — at their house.
If they didn’t sell it, they would be eating it.
“We made our marketing plan in a truck,” Jim said.
They went to food shows to promote it, and they were able to have it placed in some restaurants and stores.
“No one is going to sell your product like you are going to,” Karen said.
The 1,800 pounds of mustard was gone within a few months. They had to order more. By the next year, they had the product in 15 to 20 stores and that number has continued to grow. The Uncle Jim’s products can now be found in Ohio, Rhode Island, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Frank Occhibove , owner of Jimmy’s Italian Specialities on Belmont Avenue in Liberty, wanted to be the first with the Uncle Jim’s Pepper Mustard because of the great taste.
“I have tried other pepper mustards and this one is real crisp,” Occhibove said. “It is not bland, and some of them can be very overwhelming.”
But not this one. Jimmy’s makes a chicken salad with the habanero pepper mustard. “People ask for it regularly,” he said.
The dedication the Schers show to their product makes it even better, he said.
“They are just awesome people to work with,” Occhibove said.
Danny Catullo, owner of Catullo Prime Meats on Tiffany Boulevard in Poland, is happy to have a partnership between the locally-operated Catullo and the owners of the locally-made Uncle Jim’s sauces.
“For us, it is really great to support a wonderful product, and the people who understand what it is like to be high-quality food producer,” he said.
After the products hit the shelves, they went viral. Some people started to ask for a hotter version. So the Schers added habanero peppers to the sauce.
Jim is a big fan of wasabi sauce, so that became the next battle of the taste test. “I was fixated on it,” Jim said. “It took us awhile to do that.” Two years, to be exact.
Through the years, people have sent the Schers the recipes they concocted with the Uncle Jim’s sauces.
Sloppy Joes, salmon dishes, kielbasa and chicken salad are just some of them.
The Schers kept on getting the same request for a pepper-mustard-based barbecue sauce.
Jim didn’t think he was ready to compete with the big-time barbecue sauces, but he was told, “that’s one thing that anyone will try.”
He had some samples made up and took them around. “Everybody loved the samples,” he said.
The newest Uncle Jim’s products — Classic Barbeque and Wild Habanero Barbeque — rolled out just in time for the Super Bowl.
Within the last year, the Schers also introduced their product to some ballparks and created a distributor relationship with the John Zidian Co. in Boardman.
“It spreads and gets bigger and bigger every year,” Jim said of the family-run business.
The Schers, including their sons, Adam, 21, and Zack, 11, still have fun with it.
“We always say, ‘There’s no stress in mustard,’” Jim said.
What’s their goal?
World domination of the pepper-mustard world, of course.
“We would love to see Uncle Jim’s on everyone’s table,” Karen said.
For information on Uncle Jim’s sauces, go to unclejimsstore.com.