When Lagniappe Foods Founder Tom Dowd moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A., at 19 years old, establishing a successful seafood company wasn’t his top priority.
Dowd originally moved to New Orleans to pursue a career in music and ended up working in an oyster bar. After six years in the city, he moved back to the Northeast U.S. and kept working in the food industry.
“Eventually, I moved to Connecticut to work with a cousin who owned some bars and restaurants in the Stamford area. I wanted to start my own place, my own restaurant, but it was cost prohibitive,” Dowd said.
Instead of starting his own restaurant, Dowd set about starting Lagniappe Foods – taken from the word “lagniappe,” which means "unexpected gift" in Louisiana Creole. In its early days, he contacted people he knew in the New Orleans seafood industry and would fly up fresh specialty seafood like head-on shrimp, live crawfish, crab meat, and more.
“So, I put together this menu of Louisiana goods, and I don’t know how many items there were – it wasn’t a lot. We started in 1985 – I was 29 – and I was living in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a small apartment, and I just started talking to restaurants in Manhattan,” Dowd said.
To begin with, Dowd said he targeted mainly Creole or Cajun restaurants, which were popular in the area at the time – but soon found a wider market for his products.
“I ended up selling a lot to these high-end places because of the fresh head-on shrimp and some of those other items,” Dowd said.
In the early days, Dowd’s routine was simple: Make phone calls on Monday for orders, fly up the seafood he needed on Tuesday, drive his van down to LaGuardia or Newark airports, and make deliveries to the restaurants across Manhattan, with the goal of having an empty van by the time he returned home to Connecticut.
“I basically started the business with a van and USD 500 [EUR 478],” Dowd said.
Eventually, as business picked up, Dowd was able to get the company’s first big upgrade – a box truck with a refrigerator that could be plugged in at night so that he could store some of the seafood longer.
In 1988, Dowd moved back to New Jersey, and rented a small space that he said “was kind of like a garage” where he continued using his box truck as both a delivery vehicle and as storage.
Soon after that, Dowd said a buyer at a local market asked if Lagniappe Foods could make and supply crab cakes – and that was the catalyst for the company to begin making and selling its own products.
“Eventually it evolved, and now ...
