It's 8 a.m. Do you know where your taste buds are?

If you're one of those dozen or so people at Martin Gillet & Co. Inc., in Highlandtown, whose tasting skills are on record as acute, you'd better have them in the lab, ready to sample a sesame-ginger salad dressing, or a mayonnaise sauce that's deeply redolent of horseradish.

And if everything comes together, you just might find a product that will take off into the stratosphere, as the company's Parmesan Pepper salad dressing did in 1985.

Josie Cooper, vice president, research and development, remembers that day: "I was working on two products for two different people, and I thought, these would taste good together."

The rest, as they say, was condiment history. Today, virtually every major producer of salad dressing makes a Parmesan pepper variation. That's life at the 187-year-old Baltimore firm of Martin Gillet, which entered the commercial fray just a few decades after the American Revolution, importing tea from the Far East and packaging it for sale in the new United States. By mid-century the company was also producing mayonnaise, and by 1960, the tea business was dropped in favor of the condiment business.

Since then, Martin Gillet has concentrated on condiments, preparing its own (including Bright Day, its original cholesterol-free mayo, launched in 1975 and still bearing its flower-power label), and packing products for the food-service industry and for other companies.

These days, however, the rising star at Martin Gillet is Our Family Recipe, a line of a trendy products that are designed to function as "home meal solutions" -- that is, products that are more than single-purpose flavorings, that can be used to flavor all sorts of foods in all sorts of preparations.

This spring, for the first time ever, the company had a booth at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. The show, sponsored by the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, based in New York, is widely recognized as the place where new food stars go to be born. The development of Our Family Recipe is a good illustration of how an old-line manufacturer has kept itself up-to-date by divining taste trends and putting them to work.

Baltimore grocery executive Nancy Cohen, chief executive officer of Eddie's of Roland Park, called Martin Gillet "a well-known, solid, respectable company" that's paying attention to the latest trends in food to keep the company growing.

Attending the Fancy Food Show, "where people believe they're going to see hot new items" is "wonderful marketing," said Cohen, whose two stores on Roland Avenue and North Charles Street stock some of the Our Family Recipe products. (As do Graul's, Giant, Safeway, Mars, Gourmet Again, Klein's and Weis stores, and multiple other stores and chains nationwide.)

Staying current

Rebecca Katz, Martin Gillet's director of marketing, attributed the company's modern outlook to her father, Joseph J. Katz, 72, who bought the company in the mid-'50s.

"My father, the quintessential entrepreneur, is constantly reinventing Martin Gillet" to keep it current, said Katz, 36. "He's always been ahead of his time." (He was considering bottled tea products in the late '50s.)

Rebecca Katz, who spend 15 years in various public-relations positions, joined Martin Gillet just two years ago. Friends, she said, warned her against going into "the family business," but, she said, her father "is the best boss ever."

Katz said her father likes to run "a flat company" -- meaning there aren't people at the top giving orders and people at the bottom taking them. Both people and ideas are allowed to emerge from the ranks, so employees like Josie Cooper, the research and development VP who's been with the firm for 23 years, and like Grover Alexander, vice president of quality assurance, a 40-year veteran who oversees the company's pristine production facilities, have day-to-day input.

And people like Rebecca Katz can develop new products, run marketing programs and be on the factory floor in a moment if a problem requires attention.

"What's allowed things to evolve with Our Family Recipe is my father's commitment to 'thinking out of the box' and to never giving up," Katz said. "And to the way we work: My father says, 'If you listen, you'll get the answers to the quiz.' "

The quiz, in the case of Our Family Recipe, was finding out what tastes today's increasingly sophisticated consumers were craving.

"The [American] palate has really changed," in the past eight to 10 years, Katz said. People are more accepting of new flavors, and more interested in exotic flavors; Mediterranean, Oriental, Pacific Rim -- these are all tastes that have become popular just in the past decade.

"People want robust flavors -- things that tickle their palate," said Clayton Shelhoss, a vice president who deals with sales of the company's branded products. "They want a certain uniqueness of flavor."

"The specialty food business is like the fashion business," Katz said. "You have to be on top of the latest cultural trends -- because you have to take those cultural trends and make then accessible to someone who is standing in the grocery store, and has maybe 20 minutes to make dinner."

Today there are more than two dozen products in the line, including salad dressings, mustards, seafood sauces and barbecue sauces -- and more on the way.

Ideas from the 'family'

And -- starting with Cooper's inspiration for Parmesan pepper dressing -- product ideas really do come from the Martin Gillet "family."

For instance, the company's Orange Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing came from Katz's observation while traveling and working in Italy that Italians often marinated fruit such as strawberries and blood oranges in balsamic vinegar, to extract and deepen the flavors.

So she whipped up something in her kitchen with olive oil, basil, garlic, balsamic vinegar and the juice and zest of a blood orange. "I brought it into the lab the next day in a yogurt cup, and Josie [Cooper] tasted it. She said, 'H'm, this is a good flavor.' "

Cooper and Katz broke down the ingredients and formulated a recipe that could be produced in large batches. Then, with technical services director Elaine Herlocher, they called in the tasters, wanting to know not just how does it taste, but how does the mouth feel, how is the viscosity, how does it look in the bottle? Many of them are questions that home cooks don't need to ask and condiment entrepreneurs live and die by.

"We have about 15 people here who have great taste buds," said Mary Jane Knight, company president. "We really rely on the input of a lot of people, to find what tastes right."

With tasters who run "the full gamut from sophisticated to people who like things less spicy," there's enough diversity to help shape a widely appealing taste, she said.

But finding a felicitous taste and getting it into a bottle -- difficult as that may be -- is not all it takes to get a product into consumers' hands.

For one thing, the packaging has to be appealing enough to stand out on a shelf of similar products.

Martin Gillet had originally called its own label "Old Family Recipe," and packaged it in rather traditional fashion. Katz engineered a name change to "Our Family Recipe" and worked with Santa Fe artist Debby Lee Cohen (who's originally from Baltimore) to develop new packaging. Cohen had the idea of portraying a family of contemporary farmers, working in the fields to produce foods used in the products. Label colors are bright primaries on white backgrounds, designed to pop out on grocery shelves.

But once the products are packaged appealingly, there is still a need to convince retailers that they deserve a stretch of coveted shelf space. For instance, Shelhoss said, it would be difficult to market yet another raspberry vinaigrette, one of the most popular of recent dressings. So Our Family Recipe gave it a slight twist: cranberry vinaigrette.

And finally, then there is product support.

"You can't just put the product on the shelf" and hope customers will go for it, Shelhoss said. "Retailers rely on us to have the appropriate support materials. We need to be able to show the consumer how to use the product." That means recipe suggestions and other aids for harried consumers. And you have to do all this while the product is still hot.

Katz likened the process to the exhilaration -- and potential disaster -- of surfing: developing and packaging a new product is like being at the crest of a wave, she said. "You're right up there." And then you have to get it on the shelf "before the wave crashes on the shore and you've lost it."

There is, of course, always another wave. Our Family Recipe is developing three new salad dressings and a new line of marinades. "We're working on flavors that are international," Katz said. "We think of it as taking the 'family' around the world."

Pub Date: 6/03/98