Croutons In Paradise: Francie And David Caccavo, Olivia's Croutons

If someone told you that they were growing a business and an extraordinary quality of life in a place that was "heaven on earth" - and doing it all with seasoned pieces of dried bread - you might think they were a little crazy. But this is Vermont, where whimsical and successful businesses are more the rule than the exception. Olivia's Croutons in New Haven is one of them.

OK. Croutons?

First of all, think about dried bread. Toasted, cubed and turned into croutons, it can be seasoned with butter and garlic or cheese and oil or parsley or a variety of other spices. You can buy them in stores or make them at home. They are useful for salads - you really can't make a Caesar salad without them - in soups, as snacks and as added "crunch" in other recipes. Other than that, they're not on most people's radar. Yet supermarket croutons - think Pepperidge Farm - are actually a $137 million industry.

American taste grows ever more sophisticated, so gourmet croutons are inevitable. And since 1991, Francie and David Caccavo have been taking them to a whole new - and very Vermont - level.

At Olivia's - named after their daughter - they mix their own dough, "proof" it (let it rise), shape it, bake it, dry it, cut it, season it and package it almost entirely by hand. They use Vermont ingredients wherever they can: Cabot old fashioned butter, Cabot, Shelburne Farms or Grafton cheddar. They're growing their own wheat. Then they package the croutons in distinctive white boxes, put them in cartons and ship pallets of them to upscale markets all over the country - they even have contracts with U.S. Airways and Holland American Lines.

But still, croutons?

"Sometimes people go, 'You mean futons. You couldn't possibly be making croutons,'" Francie said. "It would be so easy to get off track and expand. But I learned it from my father. KISS - keep it simple, stupid. Just make croutons, and make the best croutons you can make."

Their effort pays off. A recent Vermont cookbook, "Dishing Up Vermont," devotes a page to Olivia's and includes their Caesar salad recipe. In a random review from the Web, someone who received a free package of Olivia's Croutons with an order of Frontier Soups wrote, "(I) popped the crouton in my mouth and... YUM!!! It exploded with flavor. I was expecting it to be...OK...I mean it's only a crouton. But it was so tasty I immediately grabbed the box to find out exactly what I was eating."

This kind of attention makes sense to Francie.

"'Homemade, wholesome and delicious' is our tag line," she said. "We're croutons for the more discriminating taste."

Francie, 50, and David, 54, decline to reveal their sales figures. But these are significant, and although the company had a dip in the last quarter, it grew 25 percent last year. It saw another dip in the first quarter of this year, but Francie believes it has leveled out; she expects 10 percent growth in 2009. The company employs three full-time and two-part time people in the kitchen besides the owners, and also has part-time office help.

While all companies want to grow, the Caccavos are doing so slowly, deliberately and in keeping with Vermont philosophy. In fact, their growth has been so deliberate that it violates most of the conventional rules of business, according to Cairn Cross of Fresh Tracks Capital, Vermont's leading venture capital group.

"I've watched Olivia's over the years as it has grown and prospered and the company seems able to violate many hallowed business principles," Cross said. First among them is competition.

"Low barriers to entry in an industry usually leads to many entrenched competitors and cutthroat competition," Cross said. "Therefore a new business entrant will have trouble gaining traction and will typically suffer from thin profit margins. Crouton making strikes me as having a fairly low barrier to entry and there are already established entrenched competitors. Yet Olivia's has managed to do very well over a long period of time by making a simple crouton and packaging it in a simple package and selling it in a homespun fashion."

Another principal that Olivia's ignores is "co-packing," or outsourcing some of the production steps.

"Many times, specialty food manufacturers are encouraged to outsource pieces and parts of their process," Cross said. "For instance, a crouton maker such as Olivia's might be encouraged to have a contract bakery bake the bread to save costs. But Olivia's bakes their own bread, in part, I suspect, because they believe the quality is better."

Also, specialty food companies are typically encouraged to watch their fixed costs for plant and equipment and be careful about investing too much capital in "non-core assets" such as real estate.

"So you would expect a company like Olivia's to lease a generic commercial kitchen in a nondescript industrial park," Cross said. "Instead they made a conscious decision several years ago to purchase and renovate an old barn, turning it into a modern baking space and, in fact, on the surrounding land they are growing their own wheat to use in their product. The facility is unique and gives the company an 'authenticity' that other larger competitors will never have."

Another business rule the Caccavos sidestep is the courtship of venture capital.

"I don't want to give up any ownership," Francie said. "I don't really want money. I could use it, sure, and we could grow faster with it. But I don't know that I need to. It's about the lifestyle for us. It's not about growing the company and getting out rich. So we're not in a real big yank to make everything happen."

The Olivia's factory, a noisy place filled with bread, hoppers, ovens, seasonings, pallets, heat and fans, is in a 1912 barn which they renovated for $400,000 with help from the National Bank of Middlebury and the Vermont Economic Development Authority.

Francie and David also live on the property, in an 1850s farmhouse just down the hill from the barn. However noisy the barn may be, outside it couldn't be more bucolic. In early May the sun was shining on the distant rolling green hills and the dandelion-dotted meadows all around us, ancient lilac hedges were starting to bloom, Francie's horses were grazing, two Labradors were playing, birds were singing romantically and it really was, as Francie said, "heaven on earth."

Francie herself is small, pretty and energetic, with a deadpan sense of humor and a well-developed sense of the absurd which must come naturally to someone whose life is about making and selling croutons. With her long dark braid hanging halfway down her back, she looks a lot younger than 50. Half the time she looks like a farm wife who just stepped out of the famous Grant Wood painting; the other half of the time she talks like a professional food wholesaler. Every now and then as we talked, the scent of garlic wafted over the garden.

"I think the garlic acts as a pesticide," Francie said, pointing to two antique flowering apple trees. "They're beautiful apples and we don't do anything to them. The dogs do not have fleas. There's something about the garlic. We say the scent is better than cow manure, which would be the alternative here. On a light breezy day you can smell the garlic for probably a mile and a half, but I don't think the neighbors mind. New Haven also has the turkey farm here, which has a very different smell."

OK, splendid. But croutons?

Back in 1991, Francie was a new mom working in her family's Burlington business and having nightmares about what the baby-sitter might be doing to the kids while she was gone.

"I was in crazy young mother mode," said Francie. "Then we were at a dinner party at my brother Larry's house, and he served croutons. I don't think I'd ever even made croutons. I knew what they were but I didn't buy them, I didn't use them. And these were really good, a completely different animal. And I said, 'You should make these and sell them.' And he said, 'No, you can't make any money doing that.' But it stuck with me. For months I kept thinking of it. Finally one day, I don't know if I'd had a bad day at work or what, but I didn't want to leave the kids, so I started making some croutons."

Buying day-old French bread, Francie whipped up a batch, stamped a logo on some brown paper bags, closed them up with twist ties and took them to Shelburne Supermarket - co-owned and run by her childhood friend, Steve Clayton.

"When I first heard of it, I didn't think anyone could make money on stale bread with spices on it," Clayton said. "But Francie had a way of being able to turn around it. With her personality and the way she was able to market, she did amazing things. Our store is one of the last of the dinosaurs - the small independents. Our philosophy has always been to give Vermont companies a try. We were the first supermarket for Green Mountain Coffee and Ben & Jerry's and now Olivia's Croutons. We'll say, 'Give it a shot. If it sells, great. And it if it doesn't, we'll let you know.' Our clientele is vocal, and they liked it. It was the right time. There wasn't really a gourmet crouton. She's really excelled."

When she outgrew her home kitchen, Francie moved the business to her basement, then into its own Hinesburg facility, where David joined her. Now they have the farm.

Today Olivia's Croutons come in several flavors, including the favorite seller: butter and garlic. There's parmesan pepper, Vermont cheddar and dill, organic garlic and herb, multigrain with garlic and one that's gluten-free. The company provides private label croutons for a company in Canada and for airlines and cruise lines. It also makes gluten-free private label croutons, stuffing and tostini - a dried and seasoned round, like a cracker. In its down time, it makes cheese spreads for Shelburne Farms.

Along the way the Caccavos have made a ton of mistakes and learned a lot of things - often the hard way. But they wouldn't have it any other way.

"I get up at 5 a.m. and can't wait to start the day," David said. "It is so great. We're in a great spot and everything we do is fun. We're surrounded by greatness."

Before Croutons

Francie Williams Caccavos’ father was from East Torrence and her mother grew up in New Jersey after leaving Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Both parents went to the University of Vermont; her father was an agriculture major and her mother was a nurse.

"My mother married this Yankee and was immediately pregnant with me," Francie said. "They lived in East Torrence, and my mom was stir crazy. She somehow convinced my dad to move to Burlington. So I grew up in Shelburne with two brothers and a sister."

Her father started a company, since sold, called Copytek; most of the family worked there.

After taking a degree at UVM in Spanish and secondary education, Francie immediately followed her first love, horses.

"I went off to work as a groom on a horse farm and my parents were thinking they'd just wasted four years of college money," Francie said. "But I came back in October and started working for my family's business. I'd always had horses, and I knew I wanted to keep my horses at home. So I went looking for a place to buy. This realtor took me to a beautiful lot in Charlotte where I could build. I was 23. I said, 'Sure, I can do whatever I want.' I moved in the next May."

Since the house went over budget, Francie needed a roommate.

"David was a friend of a friend, and he came to be my roommate," Francie said. "We were married the next year, about 18 months later."

David, who was from Burlington, was then working for the state lottery. Soon the couple had two little children and both were working for Copytek.

"I could see my brother was going to take over the business," Francie said. "And I didn't want to be out of the house. I had to do something, so I was brainstorming what I could do how I could stay home with them."

The Great Crouton Experiment

That's when Francie started experimenting with croutons.

"In April of 1991, I made them totally from scratch," Francie said. "I went along like that for a few months, and slowly the word spread. By August I went to Hannaford's - it was when supermarkets would buy locally. They don't do that any more. So I went for two days and did a demonstration and handed out samples. And I don't know how many we sold, but it seemed like a ton. Of course I'd do the demo and have to come home and make them so I would have some more to sell the next day. I was doing everything myself out of our own little oven in the kitchen."

Discovering that she could sell croutons at Hannaford's made Francie realize she could ship and sell all over the country if she wanted to.

"I couldn't make too many croutons on a cookie sheet in an oven, so one of the first things we did was buy a used Hobart Convection Cookie Oven for my kitchen," she said. "Soon after that, one of my neighbors would come two days a week and help. I bought baguettes, 2 inches high and about 3 1/2 inches around. I cut them by hand into cubes, six to a slice."

Cutting presented her first technical problem.

"We tried all kinds of different little things to cut the bread," Francie said. "We had a rack that we made. We used electric knives. We had a contraption we made out of Skil saws. Here's where, if you choose to do a business with investor money, you go out and you buy a cutter. But we didn't. We grew a business with no money. So we were totally creative."

That August, Francie quit her job to concentrate on croutons. David was still working outside the home.

"I didn't make money for income, but I could sell croutons and buy the ingredients so I could come out a little ahead to buy more ingredients and more electric knives and cutting boards," Francie said. "Whatever was left I would take. But there wasn't much. People would say, 'Do you keep books?' And I would say, 'Yeah, it's called a checkbook. And it's either plus or its minus, and that's how I know how it's going.' Now we're more sophisticated and we know who we've bought from and who has bought from us. It's more like a real business."

When the kitchen couldn't hold her any more, Francie set up a commercial kitchen in her basement.

"We bought two convection ovens so we could make more croutons," Francie said. "We stayed there until 1999. We were starting to ship product by truck, and trucks couldn't even get down our driveway. It was a shared driveway, and our neighbors weren't super happy about us being too busy. They liked us to be successful, but... So for a year or two we were looking for another place. But again, no money. No financials that we could take to a bank and ask for money to buy a building. They would look at us as if we were crazy." MOVING UP

As luck would have it, neighbors were closing a Hinesburg business.

"They had a great building which was financed by her father when they were starting, and he was willing to finance it for us," Francie said. "So we bought it with private financing. Then we were really able to make a serious quantity of croutons."

That's when David quit his job and joined the business.

"I said great, but you know we aren't making any money doing this," Francie said. "He said, 'I know, but we can. We will.' We talked about it a lot, and we said, 'You know what? If we're going to go for it, let's go for it. Let's jump into it with two feet. You go on the road, you sell, But we have to figure out what the most immediate thing you can do is, so we can eat.'"

Since about two-thirds of their money was going for bread, it turned out that the most immediate thing David could do was learn to bake.

"Within a month he'd learned how to make bread," Francie said. "He'd work two shifts. He'd do marketing all through the morning until two in the afternoon, and then he'd make bread until eleven at night."

David marketed by phone, by letter, by sending out samples, and by working with distributors.

"We realized if we were going to live off this, we needed a bigger market," Francie said. "There aren't enough people here in Vermont. So by then we were selling all over."

Distributors

Many life lessons were learned by working with distributors.

"Initially, everybody wants to be your distributor," Francie said. "And we kept saying, 'No, no, no.' We didn't know anything about the grocery business. I had this idealistic view that the croutons should be as fresh as they can be and be handled as little as they could be handled and we had no need for distributors. I could UPS directly to the stores, I was dealing with people, I was talking to people on the phone, we had relationships. I knew if there was a problem they could tell me. It was much more direct and interactive."

To grow, they knew they had two choices: hire more people or work with distributors.

"Which meant I didn't know the stores anymore," Francie said. "But our sales are now 75 percent through distributors. It was hard to give that personal contact up, but that's how the numbers have really grown."

The trick is to find the right distributors.

"What we found with a lot of distributors is they try to make as much money off you as they do off selling the product," Francie said. "By the time you've paid the advertising allowance and the slotting fee - paying for shelf and warehouse space - and the this and the that, I don't want to do that."

The best way, Francie found, was to have stores ask their distributors to handle Olivia's.

"That's how we've done all of them," Francie said. "How does that happen? Through trade shows. Our second distributor was a cheese distributor in Virginia that handled super high end food markets around the D.C. area and jut outside the New York City area. The stores said, 'Here, we want this product. You bring it in for us and distribute it to our stores.' No slotting fees, no allowances, nothing. You have some negotiating power if the big guys say they want you."

Mistakes Along The Way

Francie creates all the flavors and is open about the fact that some of them work and some of them don't. Take low-fat gazpacho croutons.

"You know, everyone at trade shows have suggestions about what to do with your business," Francie said. "And earlier on, one year it was low fat. You've got to have low fat. So I goofed around and made one and it was really good. I seasoned it with just a little bit of olive oil with a tomato base, a Mediterranean spice, a little cayenne, a little celery seed. It was yummy. For something low-fat, it was really, really good. The mistake I made? I called it gazpacho."

Francie thought everyone in the world knew what gazpacho was. It turned out they didn't.

"Remember, we don't have art departments and we don't have consultants and we don't do market studies," Francie said. "It's whatever I feel like doing, So I was sitting there looking at the label, and I was thinking I could call it Mediterranean low-fat or gazpacho low-fat. Mediterranean was too long of a word. But I think that's why that one died. People didn't know what gazpacho was. We took it off the market after three years. When we ran out of boxes we said we weren't going to make it anymore. Sales were really slow. But it was an excellent product."

Another time it was organic croutons.

"So someone said. 'You should make organic,'" Francie said. "So in 2002, the USDA was getting involved with certifying organic. We wanted to get certified before that, because we didn't know what was coming, but we knew we'd definitely need an organic product at some point. So we came out with a 2-oz bag with elaborate art work. We loved it. Gorgeous bag. The thought was that we'd hang them on clips in the organic section of produce departments, rather than on a store shelf like the rest of our products. I was sure it would be 90 percent of our business. Also, people said, 'You needed a smaller product with a smaller price point,' because we were up over $3. Here's a thing we can sell for under $2."

What happened?

"It got lost," Francie said. "So lost. I could go into a store and not find it, and I knew it was there. So it really didn't work. Two years ago we took the product and put it in a box on the shelves with the rest of our products, and it's working now. The whole thing is live and learn."

When they started making tostini, the plastic packaging - instead of the customers - ate the product.

"Tostini is a little round slice of bread, like a cracker," Francie said. "We originally made a lemon parsley and a roasted onion. For the lemon, we used fresh parsley and made it into a puree with lemon juice. It was really good, but something in it deteriorated the plastic of the bag. We said it had a three-month shelf life and it really was a three-month shelf life. Because after that, they tasted like you poured gasoline on them. So we discontinued it. Something about the lemon broke down the plastic."

Gluten Free

In 2004, there were very few gluten-free products on the market.

"At one of our trade shows, we were next to Gluten Free Pantry," Francie said. "If you spend three days somewhere, you start chatting back and forth. The woman said, 'You should be making gluten free croutons for us,'"

Again Francie refused. Gluten-free is difficult because kitchens have to be spotlessly gluten-free, so products have to be made and sold in quantity to pay for the "cleandown." But the woman was persistent; she shipped the Caccavos gluten-free brownies and bread mix.

"She said, 'Make some, see what it's like,'" Francie said. "The first ones were really awful. We went back and forth for a while and finally came up with something. I told her what it would cost because of the cleandown, and she said OK. I thought that would have discouraged her. I probably did everything I could to not make gluten-free croutons. And then we started making them for her, and then she got bought out by this really big company. And I said 'OK, we lost that.'"

The next thing Francie knew, she had a purchase order for thousands of bags of private label gluten-free croutons.

"So I think it was between 2005 and 2006, gluten-free increased 500 percent in sales for us," Francie said. "Just that one product. All due to going to a much bigger company and mainstream distribution. And we still do it for them. That's been an education, too."

Flour for gluten-free products is ground from chickpea and tapioca.

"You use egg for leavening and some yeast," Francie said. "It's the egg that gives it the structure. But it's very finicky. Two batches ago we had about 10,000 bags of croutons that were so hard. The bread would rise beautifully - it was gorgeous - and then it wouldn't hold its structure. There's a company in Brattleboro called Against the Grain that makes gluten-free bread. I called them and asked, 'What am I doing wrong?' It turns out that with gluten-free there's no standard. So every time you get a new batch, it may come from China or from South America, and you have to completely redo the recipe. They coached me through. I spent a whole day testing and the next day I'd figured it out. It was really generous of them to give me that information."

But still, there were those 10,000 bags of rock-hard croutons.

"I had six pallets of finished product," Francie said. "I didn't like it, but they said they'd take it. Then I was really intent on speaking to their R&D. They said, 'We don't care. We're happy.' I said, 'I'm not happy. It's me, it's my product.' So I fixed it. But that's a lot of energy for something that's not your label."

The Farm

So yes, croutons. Now it was time to expand again.

"We knew we had outgrown our Hinesburg property, which we owned," Francie said. "We knew we could grow, and we couldn't make any more in that space. It was 2005 and 2006, things were booming, real estate was hot, everybody was getting maximum price for everything. I would have preferred to buy so we were building equity. But we just weren't finding the right thing. At the same time, we were anxious to find another home. In a perfect world, we would love an old farmhouse. I think we could renovate it. I don't think we'd kill each other or get divorced. So we had these two things floating around. You only get to live once. What do you really want? In a perfect world, I would like to have my business and my horses on my property - not commuting, not dealing with other people. Having it all here."

The couple spent months search for farms, but most of them were unaffordable or in land trusts that made them unadaptable. Pressure started building to first find a new place for the business.

"So we found a place in an industrial park," Francie said. "Totally not what I was dreaming about, but OK. 'Francie,' I said. 'You've got to grow up. You've got a business and you have to run it.'"

The Caccavos made an offer on the property before Christmas of 2005, but Francie remained unhappy.

"I was not wrapping myself around this thought," she said. "It was 35 minutes away, a metal building, industrial park, lots of money, more than $500,000, needed renovation - just not warming up to it. Finally they get back to us and counter-offered. And I'm sitting at my desk and David's at his desk and I'm saying, 'I can't do that. I don't care if we're not growing. I don't want to take that kind of risk.' And the Realtor is going, 'I've got to get back to them today.'"

As the tension mounted, David went for a long drive and Francie went riding. Three hours later, David called and said, "I've found it,"

"He'd driven all over - Middlebury, Orwell, Route 7 - and something made him turn around and come down this road," Francie said. "He came over the crest of the hill, saw the barn, and said, 'Something like that would be just perfect for us.' He got a little closer and saw the farmhouse and said, 'Francie would love that farmhouse.' And then he saw the 'for sale' sign on the lawn. So I drove down here and looked at it. I knew we got to have it. Got to have it."

The property had been on the market so long that the owners, desperate to realize some income, had already sold the barn for scrap for $12,000. The Caccavos made an offer anyway, contingent on zoning. While they were waiting for their petition to reach the zoning board, Francie's brother came down.

"He looked at me and said, 'You have to do everything you can to save this barn,' Francie said. "This is the same one who said you couldn't make money with croutons. He said this would be a crime to take this down. So I called the realtor right away and said, 'We want the barn. See if we can buy it back.' He called us back in about an hour - we'd never gotten an answer in an hour. He said, 'They've bought the barn back and it's yours.' 'Well, how much?' 'They're so happy that you're going to use the barn that it's free.' We just had to pay a $3,600 photo fee."

As it turned out, New Haven folks had been deeply concerned over losing the barn. So when the Caccavos went before the planning board with a plan to save the barn and convert it into a factory, the use was approved.

The farm has a long history - it had been in the Bothum family since the New Hampshire Land Grants - before Vermont was even a state.

"We're the first family besides the Bothums to own this property," Francie said. "Justus Sherwood married Sarah Bothum from Shaftsbury. But then they left for Canada. He was a loyalist and lost the property temporarily to the Green Mountain Boys. But somehow, they made a deal and got it back. Then they deeded it over to Sarah Bothum's father. Her brother or her brother's son built the first Bothum farmhouse in 1810. Then the next generation built the one we live in, in 1850. It's 50 acres we ended up with, but at one time they had thousands of acres."

The Caccavos now had equity and a track record, so bank financing was not a problem. They worked with Sarah Cowen of the National Bank of Middlebury.

"In general, the profile of the company fits very very well with what we do as a community bank," Cowen said. "The project they presented to us was a combination of a home finance and a business renovation and we do a lot of that. We can look at a property and figure out how to make it work. Who they are and their energy and what they bring to the table helped. They're very resourceful and they work very very hard and we like that. It's a work ethic that fits well with who we are. So it was an immediate attraction."

VEDA was happy to help the couple renovate the barn. The Caccavos worked with commercial loan officer Marie Dussault, whom they already knew.

"The first time I met with Francie it was in this unbelievable small facility in Hinesburg," Dussault said. "I was amazed at what they were able to produce. She knew she had to move. Then they found this current facility. It's everything she's looking for - it ties everything in her life into that one location. What a great business this is. Great product. Francie's had the ups and downs. She's had to learn about managing growth. As the business grew, she was able to reach out to the right people. And again, there were times she had setbacks and had to figure out how to get from here to there. She's not afraid to ask for help. She's clearly got a lot of energy. She was driven when she made this move to expand, and had the vision to see that this property could be both her home and a place for business. She's clearly a good communicator, because she had to communicate this to her lenders."

Dussault believes that Francie is a role model.

"She was a stay-at-home mom," Dussault said. "Right now, where people may be out of jobs, or spouses are looking to take on extra work, she started making croutons in her kitchen. To see that she started selling them in brown paper bags and built up the business she has today - what a great story!"

The Future

The future looks like more of the same - controlled growth in paradise. Francie is happiest when her product line grows organically. Take the stuffing, for example.

"A few years ago, Associated Buyers called us in a panic in October," she said. "'Can you make us some stuffing?' 'Well, probably.' So I made stuffing for them, put it in a clear bag with our logo on it and people really liked it. So the next year we bought packaging film, put the yellow logo on a white bag, and it was problematic. The film was defective when we got it, and by the time we got the batch that worked it was close to Thanksgiving. So it was a short run. Last year, we got a nice heavy bag and got a pretty nice run of it. We sold a lot of it down in Texas. This year we'll get it into distribution."

Cheese spreads are also an area of potential growth.

"When we started out, we did anything we could to make money," Francie said. "I made sandwiches for Shelburne Farms, cookies for them, soup in the fall for them, and it all started with this cheese spread. They take their ends and pieces, mix it with sour cream, cottage cheese and flavorings and make this cheese spreads. It's one of those things we've still hung on to. We make them in small batches, but it's about to expand. Now they want to give it to all their distributors. It's very much a handmade product, and if it gets much bigger, we have to mechanize or not do it."

Francie would like to add bread crumbs to the line.

"That's because we have so many crumbs that we really should sell them," she said. "But we haven't don't it yet. Maybe some kind of a tin? But it's silly, the amount of bread we throw away or feed to pigs. We should turn into something profitable."

The Caccavos are also considering taking on full-time sales person.

"We are not actively looking for a sales person yet, but acknowledge that this position is the next one we need to fill to continue to grow at the same rate," Francie said.

The kids are grown now. Olivia, 21, is an art major at UVM, and David is 20 and a business major. Neither is leaning toward a career in the crouton industry.

Olivia's is an only-in-Vermont kind of company, Francie said.

"We would not have done this if I had to have taken out a big loan, rented space and made a strong go of it from Day One," she said. "We were able to evolve constantly into what we are today. Not in every state can you do that. We're not going to go public. We're not looking for investors. We're looking to grow organically from within. We're happy with our rate of growth. It's comfortable. It's manageable. We don't need to make croutons for everybody. It's a select audience. As long as we can make a living and enjoy it - not that we're always trying to sell croutons, because we are - but we don't need outrageous growth. We'll go until we don't want to do it any more and then we'll sell it."

Joyce Marcel is a freelance writer and author from Dummerston. Her new book, a collection of her columns called, "A Thousand Words or Less," is now available. Learn more about her and how to order the book at her Web site: www.joycemarcel.com.