In 1997, Michele Hoskins was nominated for the BE Emerging Company of the Year award as founder and owner of Michele Foods Inc. She took a generations-old family recipe and turned it into a multimillion-dollar corporation that produces Honey Crème Syrup. The story behind the recipe is almost as intriguing as the story behind Hoskins’ success as an entrepreneur. The tradition in her family, as set by her great-great-grandmother, America Washington, was to pass down a syrup recipe to the third daughter of each generation. Hoskins, the only girl born to her parents, persuaded her reluctant mother to give her the recipe for her own third daughter, Keisha. This beloved family recipe would become Hoskin’s saving grace. In the midst of a bitter divorce, a custody battle, and a part-time teaching career that left her financially strapped, Hoskins decided to create a business around her great-great-grandmother’s syrup recipe. This excerpt, from Hoskins’ recently published book Sweet Expectations: Michele Hoskins’ Recipe for Success, chronicles the story of a woman who looked to a family tradition for inspiration and found success and self-determination as an entrepreneur.
A EUREKA MOMENT
While I was going through the divorce and working one part-time job after another, I made a discovery that would be extremely important in shaping my destiny. I read in an article that the ’80s [was] the decade of the woman. The article said that the decade was going to turn out independent, successful women. Corporate America was going to open up. Women were going to be CEOs of companies. Women were going to be entrepreneurs. It was a time when, if you were a woman and you were going to be something, this was it. There were a lot of resources available to women. The article was right: By 1992, a third of U.S. firms would be woman-owned (according to the U.S. Census Bureau).
I thought about it. I was going through divorce proceedings. I had three small children. I did not like any of the part-time jobs I had held. I did not like working for someone else. I was at a point in my life where I was saying, “What do I want to do with the rest of my life?”
I decided to become an entrepreneur. I did not even understand what an entrepreneur was — I had to look it up in the dictionary — but I could get enough from the article to know: I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I wanted to be independent. I wanted to be able to raise my children without always struggling for money. I wanted to be able to control my own destiny. I wanted to join these powerful women who would dominate the ’80s.
If you’re like me, and you’re unhappy living in the confines of what someone else thinks you should be, and punching someone else’s [time] clock makes you crazy, you have to be grateful that you live in a world with expanded opportunities. Because this is the least you need to remake your life.
So now all I had to do was come up with how I was going to use this entrepreneurial energy. Whatever I was going to do, I had the urge for it to be remarkable. I needed it to be extremely different from all that I had experienced thus far — and all that had been expected of me.
THE DISCOVERY OF MY MISSION
More than anything else, I believed my daughters — my three baby girls, who weren’t such babies anymore at the time — needed a mother who was doing remarkable things. I grounded my efforts in this belief. My girls were at very impressionable ages back then. I detested the idea of them coming of age believing that they always had to make their desires subservient to someone else’s — even mine.
Thinking about my girls in this way, wanting to be the best role model I could be, it occurred to me the answer to what I could sell was right here in my family.
MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER’SUNUSUAL LEGACY
I come from a family of cooking women. I mean they really cooked. I was the only daughter and was around my mother a lot. So, of course, I learned to cook, too. From early on, I had one of those little Easy Bake Ovens. (In fact, I had all the girlie, domestic toys.) I didn’t particularly like cooking, but it was definitely something that I was destined to learn. I didn’t have to cook for the family when I was growing up. My mother took care of that. But she made sure that I learned.
My mother had this recipe that had been handed down in our family from my great-great-grandmother. The recipe was for pancake syrup — we called it honey cream — and the tradition was that the third daughter in each generation would get to have it. It was to remain a secret to everyone else.
My great-great-grandmother was named America Washington, and she was born a slave in the 1860s. She worked for a family that did not like molasses on their pancakes. So she created a syrup for them. The syrup was made of churned butter, cream, and honey. America decided, for some reason, to pass down the secret recipe to only the third daughter of each generation. No one knows why she picked the third daughter — I imagine that maybe her third daughter was her favorite. Maybe she was a third daughter herself.
My mother was a third daughter, so she ended up with the recipe. When I was growing up, I thought that it was the only syrup around because that’s all we ate. We didn’t eat Mrs. Butterworth’s or Log Cabin. Nor did we eat any prepackaged pancakes. My mother was the type of cook who made everything from scratch. The pancakes were from scratch. The biscuits were from scratch. And the syrup was from scratch.
In fact, back then, probably most of what crossed the table was from scratch — breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You have to understand, my mother is in her late eighties. She didn’t have a lot of the convenience foods that we have now.
And our family traditions of having fresh, hot, honey cream syrup went right along with
that. It was just something that was always there. When I was growing up, my grandmother was alive. We would go to my grandmother’s house, and she would talk about her mother giving her the recipe. So it was a family tradition. And being a family tradition, it was often talked about.Everyone talked about honey cream syrup. As I grew, I came to take great pride in this family recipe — not a lot of African Americans have anything from their ancestors that far back. But like most of the family, I had only consumed the syrup over family breakfasts. I didn’t know how to make it. My mother had gotten the recipe from her mother because she was the third daughter. Well, I was the only daughter in my immediate family. I was not supposed to be let in on the secret. But for a long time, I was curious about that recipe. I would always ask my mother to share it with me. She would say, “I’m still alive. I’m cooking with it. Don’t worry about it.”
I had eventually persuaded her to let me “hold” the recipe for my own third daughter, Keisha. So I was accustomed to making the syrup, too. I would make it and invite people over for breakfast. They would always say how good it was.
THE START OF MY OWN LEGACY
So after I had read this article that said women would rise in the 1980s, and decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur, it occurred to me that the syrup was good enough to market. The tradition had been to pass down the recipe to every third daughter. I thought, “I could hand my girls a business instead. That would be a better legacy than a recipe.”
This is where the process of Michele Foods Inc., started. It started at one of the lowest points in my life. I was going through divorce. I was unhappy in my job. I had three small children to care for. I was young — just going into my thirties. I didn’t know anything about what I was about to do. But I was going to be doing what I wanted with my life finally. I had done everything everybody else wanted me to do. As a child, I had gone to Catholic churches and schools. I had gone to college. I had gotten married and had children. I had
worked jobs that were unsatisfying. And all the time, I had felt that I was in bondage. So it’s ironic that the legacy started by a slave woman, my ancestor, would help to liberate me. But at this point, all I had was this recipe, the passion to do this, and growing faith in myself. I did not have the business experience to go with it. I did not know anybody who had started a business. No one in my family had been an entrepreneur. My father had been a butcher, and my mother had been a postal worker…
I didn’t know much, but I knew one thing. I was going to do this. No one was going to stop
me. America Washington, a woman born a slave, my great-great-grandmother, was calling out to me. It’s like she reached out from the past and said, “I’ve been waiting for somebody to realize that this is more than a recipe.”FROM BONDAGE TO LIBERATION
I had my mission. I had set my sights on being an entrepreneur with the family recipe. I began to get glimpses of the vision. Early on, I started to visualize my dream. From my raw thoughts, I could see the bottle of syrup, and I imagined all of the stores. … Little did I know, growing up and even throughout my marriage, that it would become key to my personal emancipation. …
I know mine is an unusual situation. Most people can hardly point to anything that was left to them by their ancestors, let alone a recipe for a marketable product. Most African Americans, in fact, can’t even claim to have gotten their own names from their ancestors. But you see, my great-great-grandmother left us a recipe. I began to see that it was up to me [to] turn it into a different legacy: a formula for success.
You could be missing a gem gleaming right before your very eyes. Someone may have left you a powerful legacy that you can’t even see. They may have left you with the byproduct of a bad situation, for instance, like my great-great-grandmother having to keep a plantation owner’s family happy — and that might be a potential gold mine.
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR:MICHELE HOSKINS
By tradition, Michele Hoskins wasn’t supposed to have possession of the recipe left to her family by her great-great-grandmother. She was not the third daughter born of her generation. In fact, she was her parents’ only daughter and that didn’t qualify. But Hoskins was determined not to let a little technicality get in the way. She had read, at the time, that the 1980s was going to be the decade of the woman, with more becoming executives and CEOs of major companies.
“So I needed to position myself for this growth,” she recently told BE. “I decided to become an entrepreneur.”
It took a lot of persuading to convince her mother to give her the recipe, especially because she was tossing around the idea of creating a company to market the syrup. Her mom, who is the third daughter of her generation, vehemently resisted.
“She thought this was the most absurd thing she had ever heard,” Hoskins says. “And when I started to talk about it, [my parents] said, ‘Oh, no. We don’t need to give this recipe to her.'”
It was a difficult time in Hoskins life. And most of her family thought she had really lost it. The thought of marketing the syrup was “wrong,” they told her, because someone might steal it from the family and, until the 1980s, no one in the family had thought to publish the secret recipe. Hoskins eventually convinced her mother to share the recipe so she could keep the tradition going by passing it down.
“Why don’t you just give the recipe to Keisha?” Hoskin’s mother asked, referring to Hoskin’s third daughter.
But for Hoskins, handing down a business was more appealing than handing down a recipe. “It was a really strange transition, but after many conversations educating my parents about my future, they decided to let me go at it. My mom came on board and said, ‘Well, if you’re going to do this, then let’s do it right.’ Since then, she’s been my support.”
Hoskins first shared her story to the public when she spoke at our annual BLACK ENTERPRISE Entrepreneurs Conference in the mid-1990s. She told her story from beginning to end, and the audience loved it. Shortly afterward, someone called about possibly doing a book.
“But I didn’t feel I had enough of a business story to talk about, so I put the idea under my pillow, believing one day I would write a book,” she says. “Then, about a year and a half ago, after appearing in [a national] magazine, a small publishing company out of Boston reached out to me and the rest is history.”
In her book Sweet Expectations, she writes of her obstacles, including a battle with a life-threatening brain tumor that temporarily blinded her. She shares her basic principles that have helped her to grow her business, principles that have helped her to connect with family, and to connect with people.
“What I tried to tell in the story is that everything we go through in life is a lesson,” she explains. “God pushed me to the very edge, but he didn’t push me off. … Anything the mind can conceive, you can do with hard work, perseverance, and faith. I tried to tell people that whatever the obstacles in life, we all go through them.”
When Hoskins was pushed to the edge and facing a life-altering disability, she says the lesson she learned came from a question she asked herself: “If I fall, what’s going to happen to the legacy?” As an entrepreneur, she learned that she was not properly protected. “I came back from that ordeal with the desire to restructure my company by buying a home and getting insurance, and at that point, that’s when I became a businesswoman as opposed to someone selling a product on the market.”
Today, there’s only one lesson she wants readers to take away from her book: “I want people to know that there is an African American woman who started with no education in business, with no money to start a business, and with a product that a slave great-great-grandmother gave her. And I took all that, with all the obstacles that I faced, and started in an industry that didn’t know who I was. Whenever I knocked on the door to sell a product, they would send me to personnel. But I got through all of that and still managed to grow a business, bring my daughters on board, give them positions, and have a product in 10,000 stores across the country. And I’m still able to talk about.”
— Kenneth Meeks
From Sweet Expectations, Copyright © 2004 by Michele Hoskins. Used with permission of Adams Media. All rights reserved.