A HURRICANE. A JAMBALAYA MIX.
A FOOD COMPANY IS BORN!
IN EARLY 1992, we opened our Real Cajun Cajun School of Cooking in rural Iberia Parish and were fortunate to have great early success!
We slowly began teaching cooking classes for international and statewide visitors… before the winds came.
IN AUGUST of that same year, Hurricane Andrew-a powerful and destructive Category 5 Atlantic hurricane-struck the
Bahamas and Florida with 175 mph winds before it headed towards Louisiana!
Most people don’t remember that the eye passed right over Iberia Parish! Everything around Acadiana was affected.
Many houses were severely damaged or flooded; power lines and poles covered the roads which were impassable;
part of our cooking school was damaged; must have been almost two weeks before power was restored;
can still recall our five kids eating meals from Red Cross trucks.
As we slowly began to realize that because of the destructive aftermath:
tourists were not coming to visit Louisiana for a long time! Our future was in jeopardy.
Somehow, we had to support our family. But how?
TWO MONTHS later, we found ourselves at a craft show in the Lake Charles Civic Center,
selling our first JAMBALAYA MIX in a plastic bag with a paper header at top. As we began serving samples,
we were ‘unsure’ if our Jambalaya was going to be a ‘hit’ and would customers buy it!
But they did!
And twenty-eight years later thousands and thousands of customers are still buying our products more than ever!
Based on the success of that first craft show we never did reopen our cooking school.
Instead, we continued weekend craft shows across the country and eventually began to add to our product line.
We have traveled across many of the southern states for the last 28 years sharing our products,
our Cajun culture, our Boodro-Thibodeaux jokes, stories of our Atchafalaya ancestry and
thousands of conversations about how to cook a Real Cajun Gumbo, Jambalaya, Etouffe, Pralines or Koush-Koush.
Today, we are still a family owned and operated business. As we look back, we are so thankful
for all of the support and positive comments from faithful customers all across America who
steadily purchase our products in retail stores, online and especially at craft show events.
WE THANK YOU!
M/M Louisiana Crawfish-Man