OUR Story

Our story began in 1995 when I, Senorita Merz created our very first batch of salsa.  That year our family’s small farm in Columbia, IL produced an overabundance of vegetables.  It became my mission to not let any of these crops go to waste.  I began devising my own secret recipe for salsa.  With a little dab of this and a little dab of that and some volunteer taste testing from my husband, I soon created the first jars of what has now become known as Senorita Merz Slow-Simmered Salsa.

To utilize all of the vegetables from the garden, I had to make several batches and bottle hundreds of jars.  Mission number two soon became getting rid of all the salsa I had concocted.  If you were a member of our friends and family you didn’t leave our home without a few jars of salsa.  This surplus of salsa made gift giving easy during the holidays.  The good news is they all loved it and the empty jars left them all saying they “just had to have it.”  Before we knew it, all of the salsa was gone and we needed more to satisfy the cravings of what became our customer base.

Our kitchen was transformed into our production room, where I was SLOW-SIMMERING batches of salsa weekly.  It didn’t take long before we outgrew our kitchen and had to move production to our garage, where we could utilize mega kettles.   My husband and I began hosting garlic and onion peeling parties, in order to keep up with production.  We left our guest in tears, literally!  The business kept growing, and we started renting kitchen space from local restaurants after hours.  In the end we finally had to give up production and get the product bottled for us.  Mission number three became finding a bottler that could meet our exact production standards to ensure the quality of the product would not be diminished.  We got lucky to find a local company, King’s Food Products, who met all of our standards. 

When King’s Food Products went to production, we had built a base of consumers through our friend and family network as well as a network of local stores, restaurants and bars.  All of our free time went to marketing directly to stores in the greater St. Louis area.  In 1998 we added Patricia and Mick Crawford to our Senorita Merz Salsa family.  By keeping our ears and eyes open and acting on any leads, we had phenomenal growth over the next few years.  In 2000 we experienced sales growth of 230% and replicated the increase in the years to follow. 

It is our expectation and our goal to continue to bring this gourmet salsa to as many fiestas as possible.  We thank you for your patronage, and if you have any suggestions as to how we can expand our market or provide better service, our eyes and ears are still open.  Please notify any of us here at Merz Cuisine, Inc.  Please see “where to get it!” for a list of locations!