At the popular seafood restaurant Yasmin Curtis Two Fish Crab Shackit wasn’t unusual for people to wait two and a half hours to enjoy seafood cooked à la carte style. The restaurant, which opened in 2016 in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, was inspired by the Seafood Fridays concept that Curtis introduced at her former sports bar just a few blocks away.
Photo credit: courtesy of Two Fish Distribution. Yasmin Curtis.
Unfortunately, like many small businesses, Curtis’s Two Fish found itself in trouble in 2020 due to the pandemic.
“Everyone thought we were definitely going to be down there for two weeks,” Curtis said. Entrepreneur“So I thought to myself, Okay, great. So we’ll be away from home for two weeks. In Chicago it was open, closed, open, closed. And when everything started happening with the media and everything, I thought, This will be something completely different.“
“We wanted to make sure they just got it and left.”
Curtis wanted to adapt Two Fish’s offering to the ongoing challenge. Plus, she was convinced that even after the pandemic subsided, customers wouldn’t be waiting in line for hours for seafood. The solution? Two fish foodsa frozen product that customers should purchase in the store and prepare at home in a matter of minutes.
“Some people didn’t even trust food delivered to their homes,” Curtis recalls, “so we wanted to make sure they just got it and went.”
Two Fish frozen seafood bags, which include shrimp, snow crab legs and a special sauce, were an easy hit at a trade show hosted by local grocery chain Mariano’s, a Kroger brand.
To promote her salty career for success, Curtis slapped the Two Fish logo on the side of a rented ice cream van, filled the van with 100 bags of the frozen product and arrange shop in front of a fitness center. The whole thing sold out in just 20 minutes.
Naturally, Mariano’s was intrigued by the success of Two Fish and wanted to sell the brand.
“The Kroger employees at Mariano’s played a very necessary role in our decision [to] proper packaging and labeling, and finding a distributor so we could distribute to Kroger,” Curtis says. “From there, the product just took off. It was a good product. People liked it. They saw it in stores and wanted to buy it.”
Kroger began selling Two Fish products in five Chicago-area stores; the entire product sold out the first weekend it was available.
Photo credit: courtesy of Two Fish Distribution
“To be honest, it wasn’t a smooth operation.”
From there, Two Fish expanded into a few other local stores and continued to see strong sales. That’s when Curtis decided to hire a sales team and look at out-of-state markets. Two Fish then partnered with other retailers, including Harris Teeter, Safeway, Phoenix and others. Through those retailers and nationwide distribution through Kroger, Two Fish is now available in greater than 5,000 stores, Curtis says.
Next up is retail giant Walmart. Last summer, Curtis learned that Walmart could be looking for local, made-in-the-U.S. products in Chicago. Although she was interested in the opportunity, her operations manager warned against it, because the young company was already struggling to sustain with growing demand. “It wasn’t a smooth operation, to be honest,” Curtis says.
But one other retail opportunity could be the Open Call Small Business Pitch program, which invites entrepreneurs to pitch their products made, grown or assembled in the U.S. for a probability to appear on Walmart or Sam’s Club shelves or online. Curtis applied, knowing full well that “it might be a long shot.”
Then she got an email saying she had been chosen to participate in an open recruitment process. Out of 20,000 applications, only one,000 candidates were invited, Curtis says.
“I am glad that Two Fish has become a household name.”
Two Fish went out and pitched the idea to a category manager and even built the product for them to experience—and they loved it, Curtis says. Now fully integrated with Walmart, Two Fish expects its products to hit shelves in about 500 stores in October.
Sometimes Curtis still cannot imagine that Two Fish has develop into a national product in such a short time. “I’m glad that Two Fish has develop into a household name and synonymous with a seafood cooking company like Van de Kamp’s [is] with fish fingers and SeaPak [is with] “Fried shrimp,” he says.
Of course, Two Fish’s wildly successful turnaround — which was entirely self-funded — hasn’t come without its challenges.
The move from restaurants to consumer packaged goods (CPG) involved a “completely different learning curve” and one other set of food regulatory guidelines. While a restaurant might know where its fish comes from, a packaged goods company “has to know the pond where the crab legs come from” to meet sustainability and traceability standards, Curtis says.
The distance between CPG corporations and their customers also introduces one other obstacle, Curtis notes. If a customer has a problem at a restaurant, the business owner can go to the customer’s table and fix it; that’s impossible when they buy a product and take it home.
“The level of precision that has to be maintained with each product is much greater than people realize,” Curtis says.[It’s not]“’Okay, we will just throw it in the bag.’ That’s a huge misconception. When you are shipping 1000’s of products a month, you have no way to make adjustments if something’s incorrect.”
“You want people to ask about you, so you have to create buzz.”
Any entrepreneur pondering about producing consumer goods should keep in mind that the industry comes with its own set of challenges, even if they have, like Curtis, considerable business experience.
Curtis also suggests really getting to know the specialty products you’re trying to sell—and building customer enthusiasm and support for your product. “I know it’s so cliché, but I remember years ago when I was in sales, they said you want people to come to you, however you have to do it,” she says. “Because you would like them to ask about you, and you have to create that buzz yourself. [People have to] I actually like your products.”
This article is a part of our Women Entrepreneur® series, where we share the stories, challenges, and successes of ladies running businesses.