As part of its USD 250 billion (EUR 232 billion) commitment to increase the amount of American-made products featured on its shelves, Wal-Mart will soon be carrying an assortment of seafood dips developed by Big T Coastal Provisions – a one-woman owned operation.
Approximately 1,000 Wal-Mart locations along the East Coast will have the seafood dips available for purchase, which will serve to more than double the number of retail storefronts that sell the South Carolina-developed products, reported The Post and Courier. If the dips are successful for this first rollout, they could potentially make their way into all 4,618 Wal-Mart stores in the United States.
“When you see your hard work and determination turn into tangible benefits, it’s very rewarding,” she said company owner Tracy Blanchard to The Courier. “As a woman-owned business, I’m proud of myself for doing that. It’s a fun job. I get to travel a lot, but it’s scary, too. I’m a one-person company. I do all the marketing, sales, logistics and accounting, though I’m about to pass accounting off. At some point, I will have to bring someone else on, especially if we expand into all the Wal-Mart stores.”
Blanchard and her husband Tony first considered transforming his mother’s Sullivan Island recipe into a marketable dip product back in 2002: “We thought about it and researched it for about 10 years,” Blanchard – who worked for a long while at an audio-visual company before focusing on the by Big T Coastal Provisions business – revealed. All the while Blanchard’s husband ran Blanchard Seafood Co. until 2011, when it went out of business; the couple also raised clams for a brief period nearby Folly Beach at Atlantic Little Neck Clam Farm.
By 2012, the Blanchard’s launched a dip product line featuring crab dip, jalepeno crab dip and shrimp dip. The products were first picked up by Piggly Wiggly locations in the Carolinas and Georgia. Soon after, Harris Teeter and Publix began stocking the items.
New dip products developed by the company currently feature whitefish and grilled salmon.
The dip is packaged in Easley at Duke Food Productions. Last year, the company shipped and sold 200,000 8-ounce packages.
“That could double now that Wal-Mart will carry it,” concluded Blanchard to The Courier.
