Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Bateman.
Hi Michael, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I was born in Pennsylvania but my parents moved to Texas when I was four and this has been my home ever since. I grew up in Spring, watching The Woodlands grow up around us. My parents were always supportive of whatever we did and my mother instilled in us that we could be, or do, anything we wanted if we set our minds to it. In the big picture, I chose to be an entrepreneur. My first “business venture”, if you will, was when I was in about 5th grade. I made small plaster animals from the plaster at my mother’s dental office using some molds they had. Allowing me to make them was a way to keep me busy as she worked so I would make as many as I could, take them home to paint them, then sell them to the kids at school the next day for twenty-five to fifty cents. This was amazing to me, to be able to make something with my own hands and people would pay money for it, I was hooked!
I learned, at a young age, the importance of setting, and reaching, goals and how that helped focus the vision I had for where I wanted to be. At the age of 15, I loved to dance, it was 1983 and Flashdance just hit the theaters. This is where I saw breakdancing for the first time and I was blown away, I had to learn to dance like that and I set a goal to be the best breakdancer in Texas.
When the movie was released on VHS I rented it from Block Buster and watch the breakdance sections of the movie over and over, frame by frame, to see how those dancers were moving. Within a month I was teaching breakdancing at the local YMCA to kids younger, and older, than myself. Within 4 months I was teaching at multiple dance studios in The Woodlands and Conroe Area. It was during this time that I had one of the most rewarding moments in my life, I was blessed with the opportunity to teach a deaf boy how to breakdance. While he couldn’t hear the music, he could feel the vibration of the music on the studio floor which gave him the ability to keep his rhythm, he was a great dancer. What he most likely will never know is what he taught me. Never allow the things that happen to you in life to determine what you can do in life. Within a little over a year, the Texas State Breakdance Championship was held in Conroe Texas. That day, I reached the goal I had set and became a State Championship Breakdancer, as well as, Choreographer and Instructor.
The lessons I learned about goal setting and dealing with adversity, during that time in my life have stayed with me forever and helped carry me in everything I have done in life. As I settled into a career as an adult, I ended up a Technologist and Inventor. I was privileged enough to get the opportunity to write the first Internet-based Home Loan Documentation Transmission System for the Right Bank of Texas which was later approved by the OCC. I won the bid In Montgomery County to design and write a camera management system that allowed Montgomery County to manage the cameras at all the intersections from a remote location. I was awarded a patent by the US Patent & Trademark Office for a technology that was highlighted in Growth Magazine in an article titled “Technology That Delivers”, all of which were achieved by keeping those early lessons in mind.
Now, at the age of 55, I find myself reaching back to my childhood to a beverage my father created. I was just a child and I can remember my father working feverishly in the kitchen on a recipe my mother had, to get just the right taste. I can remember there was a lot of excitement around the house, I am now not even sure why, maybe I was the only one excited. I enjoyed tasting each version he made, it just put a smile on my face. Even today I have fond memories of when I was a child, there was a house full of family, and we are all enjoying the amazing flavor of what has become a family recipe and something that now has been made by several generations of my family. That recipe has been passed up and down through my family and, over decades, I have tweaked the recipe to craft an amazing texture and flavor. After many years of trying to get the product on the market, as a milk-based beverage, and having co-packers ghost me when they found out what it took to make, I started to look at my problem in a different way. If the milk was causing so much of an issue, why not just remove it, that is what I did and Crème-Delish was born.
I removed the milk, and converted the rest of the wet ingredients to dry, using the highest quality ingredients I could find. I was able to duplicate the flavor of the original beverage, only in powder form. My goal was to get my version of our family beverage on the market, and I had finally achieved a way to do so with a business model that was much more scalable than a milk-based beverage business. What I did not realize is that this was the start of what is now our patent pending Culinary Powder that works as a food and beverage enhancer. A friend of mine, who is a chef and loves our beverage, ask me for a little of my new “beverage powder” so I gave him some thinking he was going to do the obvious and make some of the beverage but, that is not what he had in mind. About 2 weeks later he reaches out to me and ask me to come by his restaurant, so I did. He then started to explain how he took the powder I made to a friend of his who is a chef at a Sysco kitchen and they used the powder several different ways, to make ice cream, waffle cones, beverages, and much more. He told me that making the beverage a powder increased the flexibility of the product as it can be used wet, or dry, in the kitchen and the flavor and texture it adds to the recipes is incredible.
Well, being the IT professional that I am I had no idea what he was talking about but I could see he was excited about it, enough that I knew I needed to learn more about what he was telling me. I also needed to know if the public thought of the product so I started doing taste tests at local Farmer’s Markets and trying to sell the Culinary Powder as a Cottage Food Business. The next thing I know a wonderful couple, the owners of La Quinta at Shenandoah, offers the use of their commercial kitchen to help a small Cottage Food business become a food manufacturing company. Today, we still manufacture our Culinary Powder there but have already secured relationships with co-packers who approached us and are capable of fulfilling much larger orders as we continue to grow. This was great but still left me far from where I needed to be. While I knew people liked the beverage, based on the taste test, I knew nothing about cooking or baking, and selling bags of powder nobody had heard of at the farmer’s markets was tough. This led me to evaluate the markets and what I was doing there, which lead to me purchasing a waffle machine that makes waffles on a stick and I used the Crème-Delish Culinary Powder in the recipe. Well, week after week people would come up to the booth and tell me how their friend told them about our waffles and they just had to try one. It changed the game for me and helped me realize that I could be doing much better if I had more than a 10 X 10 tent to sell from but by this time, I was knee-deep in building our warehouse, and where was I going to get the culinary training I needed to pull this off. The realization was that I was not. There is not enough time for me to get years of education in the culinary arts and run a food manufacturing company, not if I wanted to do either well, so I found an Iron Chef contestant, Chef Steve Smith, who has over 22 years experience as a chef and I reached out to him.
I explained that I was an IT guy with a new food product that people are going nuts over and I would like to have his opinion. Chef Steve has a charity stream on a platform called Twitch where he cooks for a community of followers and subscribers and to date has raised over $300,000 for St. Jude helping cure cancer in kids. Chef Steve agreed that he would try it but he wanted to do it on his live stream so, over several months, I watched this chef make everything from cookies, cakes, beer-battered fish, boba, French toast, and even cure bacon with the Crème-Delish Culinary Powder, just to name a few things. He helped me reach out to several other cooks, chefs, and bakers on the Twitch platform who all loved what the Culinary Powder did for their recipes. Over 10 months of this live product market test there was not one person who used it that was not blown away by what it did for them and even better people were purchasing the product even though that was not my goal at that time, I was still trying to get my arms around what I had been blessed with.
My understanding of what this Culinary Powder can do was starting to grow and the realization for me was that not only can this one powder be used across all the culinary arts but it can help to reduce, even eliminate, ingredients used in recipes, such as the donuts we have sampled at the farmer’s markets that are made without cracking a single egg, and people love them. I realized that I needed help, I had to improve my situation at the farmer’s markets but, even if I knew how to cook, I could not cook anything in a 10 X 10 tent. Not knowing anything about the food service industry was going to make it hard but I now knew of a chef who did so I reached out to Chef Steve again and ask him if he would be interested in partnering with Crème-Delish in a Food Truck. He loved the idea and now we are currently building “More Than Pasta”, a Live Stream, Charity Based, Multimedia Food Truck that will stream live to help raise money for St. Jude, Starlight Children’s Foundation, and Stack Up, a foundation designed to help veterans. The food truck will display videos of people using, and tasting, the Crème-Delish Culinary Powder along with ads for local businesses and products we recommend, which will sit on one end of the food truck while, on the other end, will be an additional television that will display our live cooking stream of what is taking place inside the food truck. Consumers who have Amazon Prime will be able to subscribe to the stream for free and Amazon pays the stream a small amount each month which goes to support our charity efforts. When a consumer does so, they get a 10% discount every time they come to eat and are subscribed to the channel that month. The food truck will offer food made with Crème-Delish Culinary Powder and will also offer the Culinary Powder for sale to consumers who wish to have some at home.
The More Than Pasta Food Truck is Cuisine For A Cause where we will be live streaming globally to help raise money for several charities throughout the year, as well as, build consumer awareness of our Crème-Delish Culinary Powder. We expect to have construction done by the end of February at the latest and are looking forward to serving The Montgomery County area with some incredible Italian food. Additionally, we are currently in negotiations for Crème-Delish UK which will allow us to establish manufacturing in Europe and help reduce the costs of shipping the Culinary Powder to our European customers.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Building a business is never a smooth road, regardless of the type of business. When the business is based on a new product nobody has even heard of it makes it even harder because you have to educate the public on what the product can do for them and why they should buy it. I have to fall back on one of my first lessons, never allow what happens to you in life determine what you do in life. There are hurdles to overcome, you just do it. One step at a time, one hurdle at a time, one solution at a time.
Becoming food manufacturer required a lot of education, licensing, certificates, and research. Going from IT to food manufacturing is a big step and I feel I will be learning for years to come but I look forward to it. I love learning new things, expanding my knowledge base, and finding new ways to introduce new, quality products to consumers.
We’ve been impressed with Crème-Delish LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Crème-Delish LLC is a food manufacturing company that crafts a Culinary Powder with a subtle cinnamon and vanilla flavor, it is The Food & Beverage Enhancer. It enhances the texture, as well as the flavor, of the dish and provides a creamy gourmet flavor to home-cooked recipes it’s added to. That’s the marketing side of it anyway, but it’s much more than that. This product comes from a recipe that has been made by generations of my family and when people try it, even just as a beverage, you can see the joy it brings to their faces, it’s the craziest thing I have ever experienced in my life. I have experience clients who were excited about the products or technologies I have had the pleasure of delivering over the years but it’s a totally different feeling to see people enjoy eating something you made.
Don’t take my word for it, I am the manufacturer, I am going to tell you it’s good or I wouldn’t be a good entrepreneur. Anyone can see it for themselves though, we have tons of taste test videos on YouTube that were filmed at the farmer’s markets. Just go watch a few, it won’t take long for you to see what I mean. People will smile really big, or giggle after they have had a taste and I mean big burly, bearded men who can’t keep the smile off their faces or couples, even families, that just bust out laughing together. Many of them actually look down at the little empty sample cup with a look on their face like, “was that real?” … or the way people lean their head back as their eyes slightly roll back in their head when they taste Crème-Delish cheesecake. This is one of the things I am most proud of in our brand, we provide a product that just makes people feel good, and puts a smile on their faces. My way of being able to share the joy that my family has shared with friends for generations and now I have the opportunity to share that on a global level.
We are still a small company, to date still less than a year old, but we have made some great strides in a very short period of time. We can only attribute this to the choice to use high-quality ingredients to create what ended up becoming much more than was planned and I feel truly blessed to have such an incredible product to introduce to consumers. It’s very exciting because there is no other product like this out there. It’s able to be used wet or dry, for sweet or savory, to cook with, bake with, make beverages, and even frozen and refrigerated treats. To see how people use it in their recipes never stops amazing me.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out.
There are going to be obstacles in every venture, things you just can’t plan for. Don’t let the obstacles get in the way of your success, find solutions! If you don’t know how to do something you need done, research and educate yourself.
You may find out, you got this! In some cases, you may have to find someone who knows how to do what you need done and compensate them well. Create a team of people who share your vision and want to help build an organization they can be proud of.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://GetCremeDelish.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getcremedelish/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GetCremeDelish
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CremeDelish
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1gSBvOKAig-Juhecqf2f-Q
- Other: https://www.twitch.tv/getcremedelish
