| Millie's
soup is a natural
R.I. woman mixes love of cooking with natural ingredients to create
commercial success
BY GAIL CIAMPA
Journal Food Editor
SMITHFIELD -- Millie's Meals is the perfect all-American success story.
| Enough packages of Millie's Meals, including Italian Garden,
have been sold on the QVC Shopping channel to make 7 million servings
of soup. |
Journal photo / Sandor Bodo |
An Italian-American mother inherits a passion for cooking from her
mother. She's busy in Cranston raising a family but starts a sales
business with a catalog of Italian foods including cookies, biscotti
and lentil soup. The lentil soup is a huge seller, and a grocery store
finds a spot for it on its shelves and a soup company is born. Twenty-five
years later, enough packages of Millie's Meals have been sold on the
QVC Shopping channel alone to make 7 million servings of soup.
And our thoroughly modern Millie's company keeps adding new varieties,
has a Web site, and no MSG, trans fats, meat or cholesterol in any
of her soups.
Millie Pezillo, along with husband John and sons John and Michael,
have made their Westfield Foods company a shining example of American
ingenuity. Plus they make a nice bowl of soup.
They include a hearty bean and pasta soup, pasta e fagioli, split
pea, garden vegetable, lentil, five bean, vegetable rice and pasta
and peas. Tortellini soup comes with the cheese-filled pasta as does
ravioletti soup.
A lovely red lentil and spinach soup with ginger is the newest to
the line, prompted by Millie's knowledge that ginger, an oriental root,
is considered a useful aid to digestion.
"Mom is always coming up with new ideas," said John Pezzillo.
"She reads a lot and has come to believe that ginger is healthy
and soothing to the body."
But Mom, and Dad, are also leaving more work to their sons as they
walk each day before arriving for work at company headquarters in an
industrial park. Then they have soup for lunch.
With a name like Millie's Meals, the company does more than sell soup.
The line includes a variety of rice mixes, a mix of herbs and breadcrumbs
for making meatballs, handmade torrone, Italian nougat candy, and even
hot stuffed cherry peppers.
You can find the soup in many Rhode Island markets, including Stop
'n' Shop, Dave's Markets, Hi Lo Markets, Tom's Market in Coventry,
Greg's Garden Hills Deli, Whole Foods and the Christmas Tree shops.
But it's the soup sales on QVC, with John Pezzillo in attendance,
that have boosted the company to once unimaginable proportions. QVC
launched a promotion back in 1997 to offer products from each of the
50 states. Millie's sold out of soup on their first appearance.
It's the convenience of a dry soup mix, and a price per pack under
$2, that one imagines that helps sell the soup. For most varieties,
all you do is add it to boiling water and simmer for a few minutes.
While there are national soups offering similar convenience, few of
them are all vegetarian as are Millie's.
Only vegetarian stock is used in all the soups, giving them a clean,
low-fat flavor. There are no preservatives; salt is only added for
flavor. There is a free recipe book with instructions on how to add
meat or cheese to the soups. Some folks just add fresh vegetables from
their garden.
But even served naked, the soups offer a hearty meal in a bag.
"What it boils down to is it's a real product," said John
Pezzillo. "It's right from my mother, not a lab or a focus group."
Millie grew up in the food business. Her mother was a single mother,
also named Millie, who ran Millie's Coffee Shop on Plainfield Street
in Providence.
"She was ahead of her time and cooked all natural foods,"
said Millie.
When the younger Millie started her little catalog of Italian foods,
it wasn't yet trendy, she said. While lentils today are considered
a valuable, healthy nutrient, it was a surprise in those days of the
early '80s to see it be such a big seller.
Journal photo / Sandor Bodo |
The Heartland grocery store in Seekonk was the first to stock the
soups and that's when she and her husband opened the shop in Apple
Valley for cooking, packing and delivering and were joined by sons
Michael, who handles production, and John, the public face of the company
on QVC, and salesman.
| A Pezzillo family portrait at work,
from left, husband John, Millie and son John.
|
Millie shuns the spotlight, admitting to being shy. But she's proud
of her product.
"It's soup even babies like," she said.
And the secret of success: "Everyone eats soup," she said.
Originally published in the Providence
Jjournal Wednesday, June 29, 2005
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