A Saucy Tale: The Bove Family and Bove's Of Vermont

Leo Tolstoy once said that "all happy families resemble one another," but most of them don't work together. Or package and distribute their tomato sauce in 40 states. That's what the Bove family of Burlington does.

The Boves have run their restaurant in the same Burlington location on Pearl Street for 68 years; that, in itself, is remarkable. That the restaurant has remained unchanged since 1941 is also remarkable. Same recipes created by Louis and Victoria Bove in the 1940s. Same Formica booths with chrome coat racks attached. Same padded bar with a small group of brand name whiskies. Same Italian scene on the walls.

In fact, the only change has been in the generations. The restaurant is now owned by Louis and Victoria's son, Richard. He's joined by his wife, Josephine and their two sons, Rick, 45, and Mark, 42. It's the two boys, the third generation, who own and run the sauce company.

"Everything in the restaurant has stayed the same," said Mark, who goes by the nickname "Sauceboy." "No plans to open up a new restaurant. No plans to expand. No plans to change the booths or the color of the walls. Nothing. We all have our duties here. Mom makes all the desserts. My brother Rick works the bar and the front of the restaurant. I cook. And Dad still makes the sauce along with us. Dad learned it from his mother and he taught it to us."

It's hard to separate one member of the family from the others.

"The Bove family is everything," Mark said. "We all work together."

But don't think there's nothing new under the Bove sun. Since 1996, Mark, along with Rick, has been remarkably successful at packaging and exporting his grandmother's sauces, as well as her lasagna and meatballs. These are high-end grocery products in the same category as other famous family-restaurant sauces like Rao's and Patsy's, and a world apart from run-of-the-mill commercial products. And yes, there's a secret to it, which we'll get to in a minute.

But first, we should take note that the dynamic Mark has not only garnered awards, he's become a television personality. And he's also run afoul of the state's strict "Made in Vermont" law.

Bove's Cafe, the heart of all this activity, is a Burlington institution.

"We've known Dick and the family forever, through several generations," said US Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT). "Our wives were classmates of each other. We have long been among the many regulars. When I was State's Attorney we settled a lot of cases at Bove's. It also was a short walk from where Marcelle and I lived, and when you walked in, friends and neighbors were there and you knew everyone."

Bove's brings together students, working people and businessmen, said another high-profile Bove customer, US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

"I've been eating at Bove's for 30 or 40 years," Sanders said. "My wife loves the vodka sauce, and we've been in there a million times. The food is good, the camaraderie is good and it's very affordable. And the other thing I like is that in a world where everything is changing radically every single day, that place stays the same. I know they have been very aggressive and effective in marketing the sauces around the country. And that's not easy in this day and age. And we use the sauce, I have to tell you."

Decades of students at the University of Vermont count on Bove's for inexpensive dinners. Now these UVM alumni are living all over the country and spreading the word about the bottled sauces.

"We've gone to that restaurant for 50 years," said insurance man Ed Ratte. "I went there with my dad, and I went as a college student. People who go to college here always come back when they go to the reunions. They look forward to it."

From an early age, Mark dreamed of bottling the family recipes.

"I figured that if Ben and Jerry could start in a garage over on St Paul Street, and then have their ice cream in grocery stores, then why couldn't I do it?" he said.

When he decided to try, in 1994, he was bankrolled by his father.

"We did it the old fashioned way," Mark said. "And when the sauce company started to do for itself and become somewhat self-sufficient, we paid Dad back. Now we're moving forward on our own. It took a long time to do that. It was a good five years, maybe six or seven to do that, but we believed in the company and we kept on."

As an business entity, the sauce company is separate from the restaurant. It was first incorporated back in 1996 as Two Sons, Inc, doing business as Bove's of Vermont. In 1999, it was permanently changed to Bove's of Vermont.

Mark creates the recipes and acts as the business's spokesman. Rick handles the financials. The brothers are the company's only two employees. The products are made in canneries, and distribution is handled by a network of brokers and distributors who work on commission. Revenues are between $2 million and $5 million a year.

In 2001, Bove's vodka sauce won the Outstanding New Best Seller award from the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT). In 2003, the sweet red pepper sauce won for Outstanding Pasta Sauce. Last year, NASFT awarded Bove's a silver "sofi" for the same sauce. This year, Bove's won NASFT's gold award for its frozen lasagna – taking first place out of 1,200 entries.

"It's an international award," Mark said. "So I went up against people from all over the world."

Mark has also gone up against the wild women of the "Today" show on NBC and come out a winner. In a 4 minute and 34 second segment called "Gettin' Saucy," he teaches Kathie Lee and Hoda how to make lasagna. The dismay on Kathie Lee's face as she has to stick her hands into a bowl of red sauce and crumble meatballs ("How long does this segment last" she mutters) is hilarious. Mark more than holds his own, talking a mile a minute and admitting that he gets "distracted talking to two beautiful ladies."

At the end, when the women sample the lasagna, their faces reflect something close to pure happiness. (See it for yourself at http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/28977912#28977912.)

Television, in fact, has been very kind to this small Vermont family business. Mark's first television appearance was making lasagna on "Throwdown With Bobby Flay." It sparked a nationwide demand that forced him to produce it as a frozen product. It also led to a rare major change at the restaurant. Now, instead of Lasagna Wednesdays, Bove's serves lasagna every night because people have seen Mark on television.

The restaurant is closed on Mondays, when I visited, but the whole family was there: Dick, Josephine, Mark and Rick. There are no daughters, but in keeping with the family flavor, Rick's wife is the sister of Mark's fiancé. And Mark has a yellow Labrador puppy named Basil.

It was Josephine who tipped me off to how hardworking and hands-on Mark can actually be. Besides personally monitoring every batch of sauce made at the production facilities and cooking at the restaurant, Mark in his spare time goes around to the grocery stores and dusts – yes, dusts – the Bove jars. Even his mother was impressed.

"People are buying the sauces at the grocery stores," Mark said. "They want a nice, clean shiny jar. Presentation is everything. When they clean the floors at the grocery stores, they kick up a lot of dust. You just want to make sure your product looks great. The grocery store loop takes me two hours a day. So I do all the stores in Chittenden County. And then I'll do the Hannaford Milton and Hannaford St Albans every other week. I do the loop about three sometimes four times a week. In addition to my responsibilities here at the restaurant or at the office."

Josephine is no slouch at promotion, either. Since the restaurant was closed, I naturally asked for samples. Mark gave me jars of vodka and sweet red pepper sauce, but there were no packages of frozen lasagna or meatball at the restaurant – why would there be? The next thing I knew, Josephine had me in her car and was driving me to the supermarket. She disappeared inside and bought me a package of each to try at home. (They are very, very good.)

From Naples To Vermont

The Bove family originally came from Naples.

"Back in the olden days, the biggest thing in Burlington was the railroad, and Alfred Peratta brought all his Italian people from the old country," said Dick. "He brought all these people from Italy to settle here in Burlington. My uncle worked on the railroad. My father decided to go in the store business, and that was in 1896. He opened a grocery store on Battery Street, where the Marriott is now."

Next his father got a popcorn wagon which was drawn by a horse named King.

"We lived on Champlain Street and they used to board the horse down there," Dick said. "They had band concerts at Battery Park. He used to bring his horse and wagon over to sell hot dogs and popcorn. Later he used a bus. They showed the bus on the 'Bobby Flay Showdown.' Then he and his wife decided to start a restaurant. And we moved right in and lived upstairs with the nine kids."

Louis and Victoria opened Bove's Cafe on Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They ran the restaurant together while their sons went to war. When the sons came back, they went to work with their parents.

"My father died in 1946, and my mother was alone with the kids," Dick said. "She cooked in that little kitchen. The main street in town then was Pearl Street, and this is where all the bars were."

Dick started cooking at the restaurant when he was 13 years old.

"That's 59 years I been cooking in that kitchen," he said.

He and Josephine met in grade school; they were high school sweethearts. Her father owned an Italian restaurant in Winooski.

"As I was approaching college age," Josephine said, "My father warned me. 'Jo, don't ever marry a man in the restaurant business.'"

"You're not open every day, but you work every day of the week," Dick said.

"But I've been very, very happy," Josephine said. "There's no such word as retirement. We just like people. I couldn't stay home. I taught school for many years. My mom died at 100, and I took care of her 24-7. And after that, my husband noticed that I was very bored. He said, 'If you want to come in and see what needs to be done, come right in.' So what needs to be done, I do. And I don't know where it started, but they said, 'Let's make desserts.' And it started with rum cake and chocolate. People just love it. They associate me with cakes. And I'm having fun. I think it's hysterical, here we are at retirement age and we're having fun. I don't consider it work."

"If you look at Facebook and Twitter, people post comments about her rum cake and chocolate cake," Mark said. "My mom's desserts blow away the competition."

As a kid, Mark didn't have any of the traditional kid jobs – no newspaper route, no mowing lawns. But he started working in the restaurant when he turned 15.

"I started here washing dishes and I moved up to the grill," Mark said. "I started developing my own niche, tasting sauces and thinking I could expand. My ultimate dream was always to have the sauce on the shelves in the grocery stores. So in addition to working at the restaurant, I started developing the sauces in the jars. I went from 40 hours a week to better-not-count-how-many-hours a week, because it would make people wonder where do you sleep in between. It was a lot of fun, though. I wouldn't change it for the world."

Mark took the time to earn a business degree at the University of Vermont, but his real training was at the restaurant.

"It was great to get that book sense and the degree, but growing up in the business and experiencing it first hand was the best degree in the world to get," Mark said. "By far, it was life-altering."

Becoming Sauceboy

By 1994, Mark was experimenting with bottling. It was a steep learning curve to go from a restaurant kitchen to limited mass production.

"Learning the whole thing, developing the sauces, getting them from production level, developing them through R&D, going through all the rules and regulations, health codes, getting them to grocery store levels, getting them priced effectively for retail, getting labels, getting it ready for the consumer – it all was an incredible challenge," Mark said. "It took me about two years."

He kept the quality of the products high.

"All the ingredients on the label, everyone can pronounce," Mark said. "No sugar. It's gluten-free. Who would have thought about all these food allergies 13 years ago? How would our grandmother have known back in 1941 that her sauce – she didn't use any sugar – how important that would be in today's diet? Who would have thought that what she started with was a recipe for success. That it's what people are looking for today? Go to the market and look at some of the sauces on the shelf. One has 300 percent more sugar than ours has. Ours has 2 grams, natural, from tomatoes. No added sugar."

The main challenge was getting the sauce in the jar to taste like the sauce in the restaurant. Here's Mark's secret: cooking in small batches.

"Small batches is the answer," Mark said. "You have a lot of production facilities out there that cook in large kettles for mass production. And that's great – it's cost effective, the sauce is cheap to buy and people will pay, especially in this economy. But there are those people who don't want that mass-produced taste. For those people, we are hopefully trying to encourage them to buy our products. Those are the people who constantly come to the restaurant and know us, and know we have great meals, very consistent. They know that when they buy a jar of sauce, it's going to taste just like it would if they closed their eyes and ate the pasta in the restaurant."

At first Mark and Rick made the sauces at the restaurant. That's how they got the title "sauceboys."

"We're ladling sauce into 100 glass jars on a table," Mark said. "Think of what we looked like afterwards. We were messy."

They took the jars to small stores for test runs.

"People loved it," Mark said. "They started taking very kindly to it."

By 1996 the company was selling enough sauce to make it impractical to produce at the restaurant.

"We found a plant in Barre," Mark said. "We would actually prep all the ingredients here at the restaurant, then bring them down on a Monday in the morning, make the sauce all day at the cannery, come back with the sauce that same day, get off at the Williston exit, where the Hannaford's is, and actually deliver sauce to each one of the Hannaford stores while the sauce was still warm in the jar. Customers would call us up. 'Hey Mark, is the sauce all right? I just bought it in Hannaford's and it's still warm in the jar.' That's how fresh it was."

As soon as Hannaford's started selling Bove's of Vermont, Price Chopper and Shaw's came calling.

"It was a slingshot effect," Mark said. "If Hannaford's has it, why can't we? But Barre couldn't keep up with the production. It was hard for us to prep all the ingredients and bring them down and only make enough for the Hannaford's stores. It was physically and logistically impossible to make it for the other stores. And then, other stores outside the state started hearing about Bove's."

Word spread. After all, there were all those UVM alumni out there.

"They shop in different areas all over the country," Mark said. "So the word got out. We had to find a facility that allowed us to bottle all our sauces to keep up with the demand. And unfortunately, I had to go outside the state to do so."

The sauce is now made in Rochester, NY.

"Every time we make sauce – every month – I go down there and make it with them," Mark said. "It's got my name on the jar. My philosophy is you can't run a business without being there. So I take a day off from the restaurant – my brother's here – and I'm down in New York making the sauces."

The frozen products, the lasagna and the meatballs, are made by hand in Middlebury. All the tomatoes come from California.

"I don't think Vermont is conducive to producing tomatoes all year round," Mark said.

The lasagna is a result of Mark's television appearances, which I'll get to in a minute. The frozen meatballs are a result of the success of the sauces.

"People wanted the frozen meatballs when they started learning the sauces were available in the stores," Mark said. "So we thought how can we do that? We started making our meatballs. We've put all the logistics together and the recipes and went down there and nailed it and started selling and it caught on."

Television Star

Two years ago, the director of the Bobby Flay cooking show was shopping in the Whole Foods store in Columbus Circle, NY, and bought a bottle of vodka sauce with a yellow label on it.

"She loved the vodka sauce so much that she Googled the name," Mark said. "She found out about us and sent her scouts out two years ago. They came on lasagna night, which was Wednesday night. But since the lasagna was featured on the program, now every night is lasagna night. It has to be. People come from all over to have our lasagna. Burlington, Vermont, of all places! We're the place people forget to look at when they drive through to Canada and Montreal."

Mark's television persona sparked a nationwide demand for the lasagna.

"People from all over the country wanted it," Mark said. "And those people couldn't fly here to the restaurant. They said, 'How can we get it?' And I said, 'I can make you a small pan and ship it to you.' And I couldn't keep doing that. Now we make it down in Middlebury. I was blessed that the Food Network recognized the importance of what our family has done throughout the years, and how they recognized this great dish that my grandmother created, and as a result I was forced to replicate that and get it ready for retail. Incredible."

State Vs Bove

It was the "of Vermont" part of the "Bove's of Vermont" on the label that attracted the unwelcome attention of the state. About a year and a half ago, the Vermont Attorney General's office accused the Boves of consumer fraud.

In the first case of its kind since the state's 2006 Consumer Fraud Rule 120 went into effect, the Vermont attorney general's office charged Bove's of Vermont, Inc with mislabeling its pasta sauces.

Rule 120 prohibits the use of a company name containing the word "Vermont" to advertise or market a food product made outside of Vermont or containing non-Vermont primary ingredients, unless the product label clearly discloses its out-of-state connection.

"Whereas while some of Bove's products are manufactured in Vermont... and its sauces were originally made in Vermont, all of the company's packaged sauces have been made in Rochester, New York, since 1999 or 2000," says the 2008 Assurance of Discontinuance that Mark finally signed with the state. It goes on to point out of the ingredients, mascarpone cheese is the only one made in Vermont.

Eventually, Mark and the attorney general's office reached a settlement.

"The state was going to fine me $50,000, which would have gone into the general fund," Mark said. "I wanted the fine to benefit Vermonters in need. That's an important part of Bove's corporate mission – giving back to the communities we do business in. So I worked with the AG's office to direct the $50,000 fine to the Vermont Foodbank, as a food donation in the value of $50,000. Then, voluntarily, we doubled that food donation, adding another $50,000, to make it $100,000. This was the single largest food donation that they have received in recent years from a local company. I wanted to increase and double the donation because I knew going into the winter last year would be a hardship for some Vermonters."

Mark disputes the ruling.

"So, is it a Vermont product or not?" Mark said. "We challenged them on that. We never said 'Made in Vermont' on the label. In our logo, it said 'Bove's of Vermont,' and the name of the sauce was 'Bove's of Vermont.' We know it's not made in Vermont. But that's the name of our company. We're not the Bove's of New York or the Bove's of Mexico. We're the Bove's of Vermont. My grandparents settled here back in the early 1900s. We pay taxes and we bled and were born and died here at the restaurant over the past 70 years. I think we have some kind of heritage claim to the state of Vermont. We're proud to be Vermonters. We work hard and strive for success. We're the Bove's of Vermont. We're always going to be Bove's of Vermont. So we had to take "of Vermont" off the label, which cost thousands of dollars."

Since then, the Boves have been lobbying to change the rule.

"It affects other companies here in Vermont and will affect other people down the road," Mark said. "We're already in the midst of changing that rule."

A Few More Bumps

The road to success for specialty food companies is lined with mistakes made and products discarded.

For the Boves, their first mistake was the original label. It was a dull green and brown and had a picture of the restaurant building on it – although it looked more like a warehouse in a railroad yard.

"We started with the label pretty much for around here," Mark said. "For people to recognize, 'Hey! Bove's doing their sauce!' But when we started selling outside the state, no one knew what that picture meant. People were saying, 'What's this building?' That was a mistake, or a failure. We redesigned the labels."

Bove's now has bright yellow labels featuring cartoon-y drawings of what's in the sauce, i.e. basil leaves for the basil sauce, red peppers for the sweet red pepper sauce, and tomatoes, garlic and cheese for the vodka sauce (but not a bottle with a few XXXs on it?).

"Maybe someone hasn't eaten at the restaurant, but they'll be attracted to the yellow label," Mark said. "Take your eyes and let them roll down the aisle. See where your eyes stop. You see this big bandwidth of yellow and it just stops you in your tracks. And you're interested."

One time the plant mislabeled a run and put basil labels on the marinara sauce.

"That was a huge mistake, so we called that back and gave it to the Vermont Foodbank," Mark said. "But we haven't had any major mistakes or recalls. We've been lucky."

Only one of their products, a gourmet dessert pizza called SweetZa, has been less than a sterling success.

"Mom developed this flatbread crust, and on top we had almond extract with fresh roasted almonds, fire roasted apples, organic cinnamon and sugar. It was a great product, but we launched it at a bad time in the economy. We discontinued the SweetZas back in 2007. It was hard for a dessert pizza at $9 frozen – and frozen is premium real estate in the grocery stores."

The Future

The future for Bove's remains small batches: ie, slow, controlled growth.

"My goal is to have our lasagna be the number one selling lasagna in the country," Mark said. "That's my future goal. And my other goal is to have as many people in this country taste the sauce from Bove's Restaurant as possible. We're up late hours, but when I see people come into the restaurant and see the expression on their face when they taste our lasagna, I know I can replicate that expression at home. I'm that confident, because we're making all our products in small batches and I know I can control the quality. Even if we get big."

Mark has thought about taking the company public, but now is not the time.

"I always thought that going public would be a cool idea, and having all the people who have supported us over the years grow with us," Mark said. "But we're not at that point yet, to grow faster than what we're destined to be. Down the road, if we want to really compete and get aggressive against the big guys on a national scale, going public would give us the equity. But I think right now slow controlled growth in today's economy is what we want."

Given his recent dustup with the state, Mark is also mulling the possibility of making the sauces in Vermont.

"Ultimately, I would like to bring it back slowly to Vermont," he said. "But if I suddenly switch, there's going to be some downtime. And in that downtime, I might lose some shelf positioning in stores. I don't want to do that. I would have to almost simultaneously create that plant here in Vermont while I'm still producing in New York."

If and when Mark is ready to look into building a plant, he said he will be happy to talk to the state about assistance.

Recently, Mark started a nonprofit called Community Conscience.

"It is core to our mission at Bove's," he said. "We are committed to giving back to the communities that we do business in. In the last year, we did this by actively participating with the Red Cross, donating over 1,000 jars of pasta sauce for their blood drive, and by donating sauce to state and local food banks throughout the year, not just during the winter months. Hunger happens all year."

Work remains a 10-day-a-week life for Mark, who believes success depends on passion.

"We believe in our product," he said. "Walk down the supermarket aisle and there are hundreds of pasta sauces on the shelves. What makes us different from the next guy? It's the quality. We're putting out a premium pasta sauce for a reasonable price – $3.99, $4.99. It's a great deal. People know who's making it. If you told me back in 1996 that I was going to be on the Food Network, I would have been saying, 'Whatever.' But when we started, we said let's do this and see where it takes us. We kept true to our mission, and what we wanted to do with the sauce, and what we didn't want to do. And it got some really good recognition."

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.