[Cover Story] Industry Advocate

If you ever question whether or not one person can truly make a difference, consider the unlikely professional saga of Rowena J. Fullinwider, owner and president of Rowena’s Inc., a producer of gourmet foods in Norfolk, Va.

Fullinwider never intended to pursue a career in the food-processing industry. "I got involved in the food industry 25 years ago purely by accident," she observes. The wife of a Naval officer with a degree in chemistry from the University of Delaware, Fullinwider worked full-time as a medical technologist at a local hospital while caring for three daughters and managing a home. In her spare time – what little she had – Fullinwider enjoyed baking, a skill passed on by her mother, who was a talented baker.

"And how do Navy wives help raise funds for various civic organizations?" Fullinwider asks. "They bake, which is how I got introduced to the field," baking wonderful almond pound cakes and creating holiday gift baskets filled with a variety of tasty treats for friends and colleagues in the Norfolk area.

Soon her cakes and jams became a favored donation for fund raising at local charities. As word spread about Norfolk’s beloved "Cake Lady," requests for Rowena’s specialty foods exceeded the capabilities of her small home kitchen. "I helped to raise thousands of dollars for various service organizations over the years, but it was taking up so much time it began to impact my family," she recalls of those early days. "I had to decide if I was going to go into business full-time or step back and do something else."

Fortunately for the food-processing industry she chose the former, and the rest – as they say – is history. "Once I decided to go into business for myself, the business started growing like crazy," she says. The orders quickly outstripped her ability to produce a sufficient number of cakes and jams for her rapidly growing customer base, so she rented a commercial kitchen for several months before moving into an old warehouse in the historic Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk in 1983.

Rowena’s Inc. now occupies a completely renovated warehouse and production facility, as well as operates a modest retail store and English tea room that has become a popular tourist attraction. In fact, the tea room, retail store and food-processing facility have been featured in such noted publications as Southern Living, Redbook, The Ladies Home Journal, Bon Appetit and Gourmet as well as on The Today Show and the Food Network’s "Food Finds." "We’ve become a destination spot for many people in this area," she says.

The company employs 25 permanent and 110 seasonal workers during the busy holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when approximately 50 percent of the company’s revenues are generated. "We process so many cakes and baked goods over Christmas that we shut down the tea room for 30 days to concentrate on our wholesale and catalog sales," she says.

A GROWING MARKET. Rowena Fullinwider, a quintessential Southern belle with a "Type A" personality and a highly competitive approach to business, describes Rowena’s as a producer of "high-asset" baked goods, one of the fastest-growing segments of the food industry. "People don’t have time to bake during the holidays anymore, so there’s a ready-made market for baked goods," she says. "And while store-bought cakes and pastries are fine for some, others are looking for more unique products, the kind of high-quality baked goods we produce at Rowena’s."

One of the reasons Fullinwider enjoys baking so much is "there’s hardly any way we can hurt anyone." Baked goods typically aren’t as susceptible to food-borne pathogens as meats and prepared foods, thereby posing less risk to consumers and less liability to food processors. That doesn’t mean, however, that Fullinwider ignores her QA responsibilities. "We go to great lengths to make sure our plant operations are spotless," she says. "We wash, scrub and inspect all food-processing areas daily, as well as work with city and state inspectors to make sure the company meets or exceeds all necessary food quality standards."

CLAIM TO FAME. While building a successful business would be reward enough for most people, Fullinwider is probably best known in the food industry for the key role she played in taking on the powerful Food and Drug Administration (FDA), despite the overwhelming odds … and winning.

It was the 1990s and the FDA was considering legislation that would require all food processors – including producers of gourmet foods like Rowena’s – to add nutritional labeling to their products. The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 included a requirement for laboratory analysis of food products, and associated labeling, that would add 18% to 20% to Rowena’s cost of doing business. Claiming the legislation was "anticompetitive," Fullinwider said it would have a disproportionate cost impact on businesses like hers versus the big food companies, while offering only "a miniscule health benefit."

"We already provided voluntary nutritional labeling, but the proposed bill would have required additional nutritional labeling that would have been very costly to small food-processors," she added. "We didn’t have the financial resources of some of the large food processors, so it put thousands of companies at risk of financial ruin."

Instead of passively accepting the FDA’s recommendations, however, Fullinwider "got involved." But when she initially contacted key members of her industry for regulatory relief they said there was little they could do about it. "I said that was unacceptable. It’s going to put us out of business. And even if you’re not successful, you can always do something," she said. "Since I was both a chemist and an entrepreneur, and I knew both sides of the business, I knew something needed to be done."

Fullinwider began alerting people in government and the gourmet food industry about the problem, pushing for a small business exemption to the proposed regulation. She traveled to Washington, D.C., presenting her case to an Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget, as well as FDA officials. In addition, she testified at public hearings on behalf of the industry. She also corresponded with a member of the President’s Council on Competitiveness, the Virginia Congressional delegation, and members of the House Small Business Committee. The National Association of Specialty Food Trade (NASFT) responded with their governmental resources and legal know-how and joined forces to craft the appropriate resolutions. The result? FDA presented a small business amendment to the legislation, which eventually was passed by Congress.

By securing a small business exemption to the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, Fullinwider gave Rowena’s Inc. and her colleagues in the food-processing industry some breathing room before they had to comply with the legislation. "What it changed was that you if you were a small company you had an opportunity to grow until you had to comply with the nutritional labeling act," she says. "What it comes down to is how many gourmet foods do you eat every year? It doesn’t affect your diet like food that may be consumed more consistently throughout the year. That was the logic behind my position. All gourmet food companies start out small. At the time, most of them wanted to comply with the act, but they didn’t have the financial resources available to them to comply. The amendment gave them some time to grow into the Act.

"For companies that were already working on very tight margins, it meant the difference between staying in business and shutting their doors," she adds. "They swear it saved 8,000 to 9,000 small businesses."

While some may have been surprised by Fullinwider’s tenacious response to potentially business-threatening legislation, she wasn’t. "If I get my dander up I’m not able to sit back and do nothing," she says. "And this one really concerned me. I felt like we were really being unfairly overregulated, so I decided to get involved."

Fullinwider also attributes her passion on this particular issue to her growing maturity as a businessperson. "I think that as you get older you gain self confidence, and are less likely to accept what you know is wrong. I feel that government is meant to support as well as regulate us and that if I could gain access to decision makers, reasonable people would listen and act. I felt like the FDA was taking what was intended to be a good law and over regulating it to the detriment of small business. To the government’s credit they did respond with an excellent amendment to the law."

Since that time, Fullinwider has seen a change in the way the FDA responds to the food-processing industry. "The reason people didn’t get involved in those days is that the FDA could be very rigid," she says. "That’s no longer the case today. I think the FDA takes a much more realistic, collaborative approach to the food-processing industry now."

The person who was least surprised by Fullinwider’s commitment to such a "lost cause" is husband Peter, a retired Naval officer. "She gave voice to an important issue for producers of gourmet foods," he observes. "She’s not opposed to government regulation. She believed in what the government was doing, but she felt it had become so large and impersonal that they didn’t have any idea of how it was impacting the small businessperson.

"She believes in people and she believes that the system will work if only people have an understanding," he adds. For her efforts, Fullinwider was honored by being elected to President Clinton’s Small Business Conference in 1995 where she co-chaired the Regulation and Paperwork Reduction Committee. "It was gratifying to work on something that impacted so many of my colleagues in the food-processing industry," she says. "I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. If the cause is right and the legislation is wrong, a determined effort orchestrated by or participated in by even the smallest of us can make a difference."

THE FUTURE. An ovarian cancer survivor now approaching the third anniversary of her diagnosis, what does the future hold for Rowena Fullinwider? "I think every entrepreneur’s desire is to keep growing," she says, "and that’s certainly true of Rowena’s." And the engine for that growth is likely to be the Internet, which currently accounts for approximately 30 percent of the company’s sales. "We were the second Virginia food company to be on the Internet," she says. "We were probably a little ahead of our time, but it’s paying off now."

"Our customers tell us that they love the ease and convenience of shopping online with our secure ordering system, any time of the day or night without having to bother mailing an order form or phoning in an order," says General Manager Joan Place. "Everything except the actual shipping of the product is now done automatically, so the Internet provides significant cost savings to the company. It also means the company prints and mails fewer catalogs, resulting in additional cost savings."

With Internet sales growing and 100,000+ names on its customer database, business is booming at Rowena’s Inc. Ultimately, however, it’s not the number of cakes and jams she sells that Fullinwider finds most gratifying about her job; it’s the lives she touches that makes it all worthwhile. "The bottom line is you go down this road once, and you have a choice," she says. "You can get involved or be a passive observer of life. Ultimately, the only thing left when it’s all said and done is what you’ve been able to do to improve the lives of others."

And whether succeeding generations of food-processing professionals know it or not, Rowena Fullinwider has made a positive difference in the lives of thousands of employees, customers and colleagues alike, thanks to not only her drive and ambition but her commitment to a cause, a cause she believed in regardless of the odds of success. Fullinwider is living proof that one person can make a difference.