‘Salsa Man' trades bathroom for kitchen

By Andrew Dys - adys@heraldonline.com

YORK -- Take a guy in the construction trade all his life in South Carolina whose name couldn't be anything except Everett Turbeville. Throw in a plumber whose name must be Bob. What do you get? Salsa.

Not the dance done by snake-hipped lovelies, but the condiment. The stuff with the tomatoes and peppers and spices. There are hundreds, if not thousands of salsas in stores, restaurants, gourmet shops and online. Yet it is doubtful that any have a four-person company/board of directors from a tiny place outside York with a drywaller who is the master cook, his teacher wife the taste tester, and a plumber and his wife who loved the salsa so much that they urged the drywaller to start a business with them.

Yet that is exactly who make up Second to None Salsa. Turbeville, the drywaller, is one of those guys who cooked a lot — enough barbecue to feed an army, and homemade salsa — but always liked to go out to eat with his wife, Charity.

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“Every place we went, no salsa was ever as good as Everett's,” Charity said.

So in Everett's words, “I just started piddlin' around with different recipes until we found one that tasted just right.”

They gave the salsa to friends and took it to church, to rave reviews. He would get calls on job sites for orders of his homemade stuff. When a kid at a rodeo called out to Everett, “Hey Salsa Man,” he knew that he had some kind of future in salsa.

A couple years ago, Everett took a quart jar of his homemade salsa to Gateway Supply Co. in Rock Hill. In tradesmen terms known to people who work for a living and have rough callused hands and drink plain coffee during work and beer after work, the “supply house” is where plumbers get their materials such as pipes and sinks. It is a tough place filled with guys who work hard and kid each other hard and talk about sports and hunting and which politician is not worth a darn — which plumbers usually say is all of them.

It is not a place where gourmets normally ply their wares. But the trades are a tight community, so the guy at the supply house left Everett Turbeville's salsa on the counter with some tortilla chips. In minutes, the burly plumbers of York County had eaten every last drop and were begging for more as they grabbed lengths of PVC pipe.

Word got around among the guys who build stuff for more salsa, including from plumber Bob Merwin. Merwin and his wife, Barbara, got hooked on the salsa. One time, he went to the supply house, and who does he run into but Everett Turbeville, the salsa man.

“We ought to start a business,” said Merwin at that time. “You should be selling this stuff. It's the best I ever had.”

After months of researching how to start a food business, having the salsa tested by a lab for nutrition, and finding a bottler in North Carolina to make the salsa commercially to meet food safety regulations, Second to None Foods was born.

Merwin took his pickup truck up to the North Carolina bottling plant near Raleigh in November and had the pallets of pint jars of mild, medium, and hot loaded into his truck. He drove home with the cases of salsa piled eight feet in the air.

Now they had 1,800 jars of gourmet salsa — it retails for $5.49 a pint jar — and they had to find customers. They set up a Web site, secondtononefoods-.com, and business phone.

Barbara Merwin handled the phones and much of the design of the logo and labels, and Charity Turbeville handled getting the salsa on Facebook and other Internet places.

Everett got a convenience store near his house to sell the jars first. Since then, he has been able to get a few retailers, including the Peach Stand in Fort Mill and Rock Hill Farm Market, to sell the product. He gave out free samples at a flea market.

But still, six weeks into the salsa business, it remains a tough hustle.

“We just want people to try it and see that this is superior to anything else,” said Bob the plumber. “I sell my plumbing business to customers on providing top quality. This is no different. Except, of course, it's not drains, but salsa.”

His buddy/partner, Everett Turbeville, the drywaller/kitchen cook now entrepreneur in the salsa business, put it this way: “Maybe we should say, ‘Plumber raises good stink over salsa.'”

For more information, go to secondtononefoods.com, or call 803-980-8800.