Savory snack: After eight years, pretzel ready for production
Think spicy chicken wings without the fat. That’s the connection Dick Augustine of Addison hopes people will make to his hot seasoned pretzels.
He calls then Snaffles (pronounced snaw-fuls). They are the culmination of an eight-year journey into an entrepreneurial venture shared by family and friends.
Augustine said it began when he bought two bottles of spicy oil at a local closeout store.
Wondering what he could do with the oil, he experimented. “I was at a friend’s house and his wife broke up some hard pretzels for a snack.’
Dipping the pretzels into the oil, Augustine said, “I wondered if I could find a pretzel that tasted like hot chicken wings but without the fat.’
Augustine had what he and his friends thought was a product people would buy.
“Snyders of Berlin said they’d market them. But then I couldn’t find any more of the hot oil. I got in touch with Crisco. They asked me how many tanker trucks I needed. Well, that didn’t pan out, so I gave up on the idea for about a year.
“But my friends said why don’t you make your own hot oil?’
Beginning to experiment, Augustine now has a copyrighted recipe for the dry seasonings he mixes with oil to coat pretzels.
To date, he has given away about two and a half tons of Snaffles.
“My wife asked me if I was ever going to sell any of them.’
Augustine, a painter and jewelry maker by trade, worked off and on trying to interest a snack food company in his product.
He also began investigating ways to market them.
“I did all my marketing before I looked for a factory. I contacted a food representative at Penn State University to help me find a factory. Two days later, he got back to me in an e-mail that listed about 20 factories.’
He called Bickel’s Snacks of York, which operates the WEGE pretzel factory. “I talked to the owner of the company who hooked me up with a sales rep who hooked me up with the factory,’ Augustine said.
Hanover Foods Corp. has owned Bickel’s Potato Chip Co. since 1998. Luther Bickel started teh snack company in 1954 in Lancaster County.
In 2000, Hanover Foods purchased York Snacks and the Bon Ton Potato Chip facility in York, and consolidated the companies into Bickel’s Snack Foods Inc. In 2001, Bickel’s acquired WEGE Pretzel Co. of Hanover, which will make the basic pretzel for Snaffles.
Augustine and his friend, Bruce Cornes, created the Snaffles label. Augustine’s brother, Todd, of Virginia, wrote his business plan, and his brother, Dave of California, who is in business, advised him. Augustine said he plans to create an LLC (limited liability company) to handle the Snaffles business.
Augustine has fed his creative side nearly all his adult life. He served in the U.S. Navy and taught art at Turkeyfoot School District for three years in the 1970s after getting his degree at Edinboro College near Erie. He attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where he met his wife of 39 years, Faye, who was featured Feb. 8 in the Herald-Standard in a story about her tenure with the Girl Scouts of America.
Augustine, whose family settled Addison, resides in his family home, a large brick farmhouse built in the 1840s.
Meanwhile, Augustine makes his Snaffles from a variety of hard, sough-dough mini-pretzels he buys at area stores. He pours excess salt from the snack and dumps them into his mixing bowl, which accommodates 12 pounds of pretzels.
Mixing the dry ingredients with oil, Augustine pours the coating over the pretzels, stirring them until they are covered.
After letting them dry, he bags then in 2 ounce and quart sacks.
Augustine estimates that five pounds of dry ingredients coat about 137 pounds of pretzels. A 12-pound batch fills about 20 quart bags, he added.
“I came up with several recipes. It took about 20 or 30 pounds of pretzels to tweak the recipe to come up with the final version. “I can flavor any kind of pretzel there is,’ he said, adding that he has also flavored soy nuts, sunflower and sesame seeds. “The soy nuts are very good,’ he said.
Augustine has been working with Bickel’s to produce Snaffles since last March. He is also trying to market them to Sheetz, a large Pennsylvania-based convenience store-gasoline station chain.
Did he ever feel like giving up?
“It was the encouragement of my friends and family that kept me going. Finding the factory to make them was the hardest part,’ he said.
But with eight years of work and an investment of $10,000 to $11,000 of his own money behind him, Augustine continues to keep his sense of humor. “I’m hoping that with the first large factory order that I will get most of my investment back. I want to sell a million bags.’
He said of his pretzels, “I tell people these are untouched by human hands. But then I tell them I have seven monkeys working for me,’ Augustine joked.