Rob Bowman and Matt Burns are two supremely creative individuals who are building a salsa company in addition to their respective acting and music careers. Why salsa? Why not? With a focus on using healthy, high-quality ingredients as well as giving back to the community that inspires them, this is a brand that everyone can get behind and support. (If only for the hedonistic reason that it tastes incredible.) www.bksalsa.com



You've recently been speaking to the buyers of certain large supermarket chain about carrying your salsa. How did that come about?

Matt: This girl moved into our building.

No. Really? What!

Rob: We are not even kidding. It's a great story. Matt and I have been creating this company for the past 6 months. About 2 months ago, these girls moved in to the second floor of our building. We were constantly hanging out with them, and partying with them, because this entire building is a community. Everyone is always hanging out, people are always throwing shows downstairs, people are always drinking together on the weekends. A month or so ago, we finally started talking about what we do for a living. And she said, "Oh, well I'm a buyer for this company." And I said, "What?! Guess what I do!"

Matt: So that's been really cool, because they've been so supportive. They know what the product is and how it can be sold and what its potential is. They've been able to give us a better idea of how to approach the market we're going into. They've also given us pointers about how to approach our packaging, which is so important. We originally wanted a very short, wide jar, but we can't have shelf space for that. Because we have five salsas that have to be lined up next to each other.

So let's go through your five salsas, which are named for the boroughs of NYC.

Matt: Manhattan is the most traditional of our salsas. Manhattan is really the salsa that I would expect to go to Mexico City and find from the street cart. And Staten Island is the green. It's a tomatillo-based salsa, it's made with these tiny fresh tomatillos, which are just hard green tomatoes.

Rob: It's very limey. Very American flavored, too. One of the things we're going after is, every single other salsa company goes for the Mexican style of flavor, branding, and everything else. And we're trying to go the complete opposite direction. We're trying to say, "Listen, we understand the influence, but we are an American salsa." Staten Island... The only other thing that can be said for it is its our salsa verde, you know, the green.

Matt: Really wild, new flavors that we're introducing into the salsa market.



Rob: What you'll move on to... This is Queens. Everyone has their own personal favorite; Queens has always had a key to my heart. This is the tropical.

Matt: I just love the smoothness of it. I like the textures that we've been able to find.

Rob: A concept that we're trying to bring to the forefront is that the latin meaning of salsa is simply "sauce." That's what it is, it's sauce. It's not just for chips. The fact is that if you try, what you're about to try right here which is the Bronx, if you try that on a burger or on a hot dog, it is one of the absolute most delicious things you'll have.

Matt: Exactly. They also make really good marinades. We want to create a product that can be used for everything. You can add rice to one of these salsas, and another can of tomatoes, and turn it into something different. It's a product that is so multi-faceted. It's just a flavor-maker.

Rob: So this is the Bronx. This is our eggplant curry salsa.

Matt: All of the peppers in this one are roasted over a flame, to make them black, and we keep the charred skins on. It basically is a bangbarta curry. But now it's cold, and it has a lot of citrus so it tastes like salsa. But you can heat it up, and you can add it to a burger or to rice or to quinoa or to anything else. You can have it as a main dish just by adding some more of your own sauteed vegetables and water and turning it into a sauce.

Rob: Let's go ahead and let you guys try Brooklyn. Here's the thing with Brooklyn, which I absolutely love. It's our hottest salsa. But you can taste it, and then the spice sneaks up on you. Give it a solid five seconds.

Matt: It's really an interesting way to spice a salsa, because you get the flavor and then the heat is a background to it. It's a salsa for spicy food lovers. It's a delicate spicy flavor, but it's also very intense.

Alright, that was amazing. While we continue to stuff our faces, onto the next question... How have you gotten your company into the press?

Rob: Basically I am our own PR department. I'm constantly reaching out to different publications. BushwickBK.com is a local website here, and contacting them was our first step. We wanted to see if we could get on there and spread the word. We did end up getting a write-up there, and after that, we had a girl come to us and ask if she could write about us in the NY Press.

Matt: And already we'd gotten some coverage on Yelp from when we were doing a month of taco delivery in the neighborhood, when we were just starting out.

Rob: Our first marketing idea was, hell, let's spread the word by delivering tacos for a few weeks. So we actually, for a solid 2-3 weeks, had this taco delivery service. It was a standard vegan taco that we made. And the concept was, you chose what salsa you wanted on it.



Why didn't you deliver to us? We didn't know there were tacos going around!

Matt: We flyered anywhere we could in our neighborhood, to get the word out. But then we couldn't really meet the demand.

Rob: And I think that speaks for itself. We have seen something that a lot of companies in the startup phase don't have, which is a ton of demand.

Matt: Yeah. We run out of the salsa immediately. We just made that whole refrigerator-full of salsa, and it will definitely be gone by the end of the week.

What's your next step?

Rob: That's a great question, because there are so many different phases. The next step is finding investment.

Matt: Which is actually not a step that we are very afraid of.

Rob: I never would have hopped into this concept if I didn't think we had a solid business model. There's $646 million dollars worth of salsa sold in the US every year.

Matt: And that's just the US. Imagine the international potential.

Rob: So far we've invested a certain amount of money, and that amount has gotten us farther than our wildest dreams. So now it's a matter of, what could we do with much more than that? I had a really great conversation last week with an old co-worker of mine, who's now working for a start-up company that has had several rounds of venture capital come in. They're now on their third round of funding and they just got $8 million.

It's out there.

Matt: It's totally out there. These people are just trying to find new ways of making money.

Rob: We're looking for a very small number, compared to that. basically, that's the phase we're in now. The last few months have been constant brainstorming. And then it's about constantly promoting. Every single week, we're reaching out to get more press, or dropping off salsa to anyone we can think of. And it's fun. it's exciting. It's creation.

Matt: And we're doing this on top of pursuing acting and music. This is such a fun and cool way for us to release energy, make a livelihood for ourselves, and also promote and give back to the communities that give us inspiration. This salsa is a wicked mixture of eclectic flavors that together make a good thing. And that's how we feel our lives are. And we want to sponsor artists, athletes, humanitarians, everyone. Give back to as many people that need nourishment or need life or music or culture or anything.

Rob: Here's the key aspect that I feel completely differentiates us from every other salsa company. We're trying to define a lifestyle behind this. We've been sponsoring music shows, so it's The Brooklyn Salsa Company presents this band, this band, this band... And we just did a fundraiser last week for a youth center called the Misled Youth Network. We did a fundraiser to help them pay their rent, and it was great. We've also reached out to local artists and asked them to play around with our logo. Our good friend Matt Craven did this really intricate, interesting piece for us.



Matt: And now we can use it as a logo, but we can also spread his name and his work. We've noticed so many companies doing this recently, too. Ed Hardy's doing it, 1800 Tequila's doing it.

I think companies are now starting to really participate in the cultures or subcultures they try to align themselves with. It's no longer enough to advertise and forge some kind of bullshit connection.

Matt: Exactly. Also we're not trying to create any type of new lifestyle with all of this. We're trying to expose a certain kind of lifestyle that is, I think, extremely important. The whole world is watching right now to see what our generation is going to do with ourselves, and how we are going to turn things around.

Hell yeah! Do you have any advice for other entrepreneurs starting out?

Rob: I think the best advice is to completely believe in your idea.

Matt: Yeah, you have to really trust your idea, once you have it. And you can't let anybody sway your vision. So many people will be like, "This is how you should do it," or, "I don't connect with that," and you have to know what YOU connect to and what the heart and soul of what you're doing is. Eventually, everyone will re-imagine their thinking about it. They'll come around to your side.

Rob: Along with believing in the idea is knowing how to take constructive criticism well. We've been big on constructive criticism. Especially with taste testing; that's how these salsas have been honed over the last six months. We've done probably a total of 10 sponsored parties, and every single one led to revisions.

Matt: We're always asking ourselves, what can this be? What should this be? Since it is still in the idea stage, we can dream as big as we want.

I think you have to.

Rob: You have to think big.

Matt: How do we take over, literally, the world. And really be the best.

Rob: World domination, via salsa.

Matt: It's not like we think, how can we put more salsa on the market and make a little bit of money? We think, how can we make the most money of any salsa company, doing it the best way possible? It's so ridiculous, that when it actually is on shelves, people are going to say, how awesome! Everybody is going to tell the story and everybody is going to be behind it and everybody is going to think it's the greatest thing in the world because everybody thought it was totally crazy in the beginning. Every company is crazy in the beginning.

Rob: Ben and Jerry's was just two guys that liked to make ice cream. And they turned it into this huge thing, and they also have one of the best company ethos and give one of the highest percentages of their profits to charity. We're not starting a bank. We're not starting something that has the potential to become corrupt. We're starting a salsa company. This is something that's going to be able to have a positive vibe, a positive influence. Something that can make us money, but is still fun.