Commercial

I started looking around the internet for a place to get my questions answered about particular food products and the cottage food industry. I hit upon this thread and figured it might be a good place to expand upon this question about cheese with my own question rather than starting a whole new thread.

I already figured that what I would like to sell would be a “no go” under the “hazardous foods” because it contains mayonnaise. However, it also contains cheese. And, with those two clues it may have become obvious I’m talking about a pimento cheese mix. My mother makes the absolute best pimento cheese I’ve ever eaten. When she makes it, she makes a huge lot of it and I literally cannot stop eating it for days until it is gone. It’s just so “wow!” it’s unbelievable.

I already figured I’d need to approach commercial facility about having it prepared and sold. However, I have absolutely, positively ZERO idea about how to go about this. I’d want to make sure, of course, that I did not give away a family recipe that someone ended up profiting from, slightly altered or not, and taking the idea right out from under us. But, it is my understanding recipes are NOT protected under law unless there is a concerted effort to keep it secret; witness Coca Cola, for example.

So, I guess my question is, where do I go to start learning about how to protect this recipe and the entire idea while at the same time getting it out there to market. Obviously, I’m going to have to sell someone on the idea of taking it up and making it for us since we have no way of raising the capital for this. My mother is extremely timid of the idea of engaging this as a business and I don’t have the credit to do it myself. She’s not timid about the idea of seeing her recipe take off somewhere she just will not engage the idea of getting her own resources involved in a business idea. She’s retired and lives on a small social security check. My credit went down the toilet thanks to a car accident that caused head injury and being disabled for quite some time, unable to work and drowned in medical bills to boot.

Any ideas about how I might go about getting this off the ground, protect the trade secret of the recipe and find someone willing to package and promote it in a retail environment? Seriously, every time she makes this stuff and I eat it for two or three days straight, I say over and over again to my mother, “you really should sell this stuff”. And, I was never even a pimento cheese fan.

Anyhow, I think any respondents to this should have the picture by now. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Angela