Business Spotlight: Sweetening Up Small Business

Colleen Sundlie’s search for the perfect date – the fruit, not the romance – stretched across 2,000 miles, from the United Arab Emirates to the tip of north Africa.

In the country of Tunisia, she found the right mix of sweetness and caramel flavoring. Sundlie launched Date Lady in May 2012 as one of the only U.S. companies importing organic, kosher syrup made with Tunisian dates, which can be used in baking, on pancakes and ice cream, and even to glaze meats.

It’s a niche market, and the company still packages the syrup one 12-oz. jar at a time.

With a unique product, vigorous demand for natural foods and sweeteners, and Sundlie’s aggressive marketing, her small-time operation is playing a big-time game nationwide.

“Right now, we’re just trying to keep up with our orders,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, wow, this is starting to take off!’ We’re going to have get more equipment, we’re going to have to hire more people.”

From Date Lady’s home, a small warehouse in northwest Springfield, Sundlie, her niece, Clarissa Young, and three part-time employees ship date syrup, bagged dates and date-based caramel sauce to some 150 stores in more than 20 states – from MaMa Jean’s Natural Foods Market in Springfield to Whole Foods Markets on the West Coast spanning Los Angeles to Seattle.

“We’re adding stores almost on a weekly basis,” Sundlie says, standing in the warehouse, where a pallet of syrup was being prepared for delivery to eastern Canada on Nov. 1. Young says it’s the biggest order yet.

Date convert
Why dates? Sundlie says three years living on the Arabian Peninsula, where her husband taught at a United Arab Emirates university, made her a date convert.

“We were just investigating everything in the Middle East good to eat, of course,” she says. “Dates are one of those things that are just kind of in your face wherever you go.”

Coffee was flavored with dates. Health clubs laid out date bowls for snacking. Whole shops were devoted to the fruit. So when Sundlie and her family moved back to the states in 2009 – first to Idaho, before returning to their Missouri roots – something was missing.

“We just kind of started longing for date syrup and date products, and you can’t really find them here,” Sundlie says. “I have a background in marketing and advertising, and my husband and I just started talking about maybe we should start selling date syrup.”

Some test marketing in the Northwest convinced them it could be done. Next, they searched for the right growers, with an eye on U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations.

“Over there, you just never know what’s going to be in it, and so it was very important to find one that had been certified by a USDA-approved organic certifier,” she says.

Egypt looked promising, even after a mugging and near kidnapping, Sundlie says. But testing found lead in the product. Next she looked to Israel, where the grower’s price suddenly skyrocketed. She settled on Tunisian dates for the syrup; the bagged dates are grown in California.

“It’s exciting that we’re first to market here in the states, that we’re still first to market,” Sundlie says, declining to disclose first-year revenue. “With all the interest in alternative sweeteners and that type of thing, I thought someone would surely catch on to date syrup by now.”

On an Amazon.com search for “organic date syrup,” Date Lady’s jar is first out of only 50 results, and most of the others are products containing date syrup, as well as granulated date sugar and date jam.

Standing alone
Local vendors say Date Lady remains peerless.

“We sell quite a lot of dates around here,” says Cher Piche, co-owner of Down to Earth Foods on East Grand Street, who keeps a few jars in stock at all times. “(Customers) also like it when they know they support a local business.”

Autumn Whitaker, a spokeswoman for MaMa Jean’s, pointed to Date Lady’s high quality. The store’s East Republic Road and South Campbell Avenue locations carry Date Lady products.

“It is kind of a specialty product, but that’s kind of what we cater to over here,” Whitaker says. “She definitely is the one if you want to get a product like this.”

Whitaker notes Sundlie has made a point of attending in-store events, drumming up interest and offering samples. Sundlie says she’s echoed the same at Farmers Market of the Ozarks, off Glenstone Avenue and Republic Road.

“We test market products there,” Sundlie says. “So we’re hoping to do a bar of some sort, we have a chocolate sauce that we’re really close to getting ready for retail stores, and we’re working on a raw brownie, which was really a hit there. Everything is basically sweetened with dates.”[[In-content Ad]]