January 10, 1998
Former executive lands smoked fish venture
By Eric Dick
Herald editor
After spending most of her 22 years with Procter & Gamble designing new products such as Pringles potato chip and Folgers coffee flavors, Jill Bentgen wanted out. Her husband had just retired as a psychology professor at the University of Cincinnati. Together, they had just adopted two Guatemalan girls. They wanted out of Cincinnati. They wanted a smaller town to raise their family. They wanted a simpler lifestyle.
They chose Traverse City. For work, Bentgen wanted to buy an existing commercial bakery. She had co-owned a bakery once with her sister in their hometown of St. Ignace. Bentgen loved the bakery business and she loved fresh-baked bread. So, too, did her husband, Will Poland.
Trouble is, a bakery never came up for sale. But while hearing about Great Lakes commercial fishing woes from an old high school friend, the product-development light bulb popped. "I had no intention of going into the fish business," Bentgen says, noting that her husband, a Kansas native, "loves bread but he doesn't like fish."
This is a tale of entrepreneurship, of niche marketing, of quality product and quality jobs. This is a tale of smoked fish, where Bentgen's rich professional background and unique pool of resources have proven the backbone to her success.
What she discovered in that conversation with her high school friend was that the commercial fish market is drying up. The number of Orthodox Jews in New York City, who eat Great Lakes fish as a staple, are dwindling. And nationwide, family eating habits now look for convenience; fish requires too much preparation.
Commercial fisherman and processors have furthered gutted the industry by low-balling prices to make a buck. Little money remains for new product development.
Bentgen learned of a local industry reeling, then she looked for opportunity. In her research she found that of the 10 million pounds of Michigan whitefish exported each year, more than three million is smoked in New York City to sell worldwide. That meant smoked whitefish for sale in St. Ignace from New York City originated a week earlier in St. Ignace.
Click! "I realized that I could make a better product cheaper and put more jobs back into this community," she says.
So she set out to develop smoked whitefish like no other. She wanted filets: no bones, little fat, easy to eat. She researched existing smoking techniques but found they produced less than optimum results.
Experimentation proved necessary. Bentgen is a 1972 chemical engineering graduate from Michigan Technological University. And she stayed in close touch with her food scientist friends at Procter & Gamble, who were willing to help out.
Yen Hsieh, a Procter & Gamble research fellow, would visit from Cincinnati. "She would come up and bring her kids and the nanny and we would smoke fish until 1 in the morning," Bentgen says.
While burning the midnight oil to smoke the early morning fish, Hsieh marveled over Bentgen's determination. "You have to love food to know what it takes to make it the best," Hsieh says.
"It's really interesting," Hsieh says. "She did everything in one shot: She quit her job, adopted two kids and moved to Michigan. I thought, 'Oh my God, how is she going to do all this?'
"She has a very loving husband who takes everything in stride, but," Hsieh notes, "he doesn't like fish."
For a year beginning December 1995 Bentgen perfected her smoking technique. She smoked about 100 pounds of whitefish each week, experimenting with heat, humidity, amount of smoke and the balance of each. "There was the good, the bad and the ugly," Bentgen says. "Well, actually there was no bad, but the ugly always went into the (whitefish) spread."
Early on in the process it became apparent that her technique would require lower temperatures and salt content than standard smoked fish. This proved a problem because her technique violated state safety regulations.
So, before she could sell her product she had to change the laws to make her product legal, a rare obstacle for most entrepreneurs to encounter.
"That's not something many people are up to. That was a real barrier for entry," says Justin Rashid, president and co-founder of American Spoon Foods, a 16-year-old business that began with Rashid foraging for wild foods and now sells about $6 million annually in specialty foods. American Spoon Foods in Petoskey was the first retail outlet for Bentgen's Mackinac Straits Fish Company.
To legalize her product, Bentgen met with the Department of Agriculture to ask for leeway for her smoking process. Bentgen brought along world-renowned Procter & Gamble microbiologist and author John Troller to explain the technique and to testify as to its safety.
The Department of Agriculture said it had no authority to grant a leeway on the state law, so Bentgen approached Attorney General Frank Kelley with her request, to no avail.
But then her unique pool of resources paid off again. While hearing of her regulatory barrier to the smoked fish business, Mackinaw County Prosecutor Jim Brown, Bentgen's uncle, called his old friend - Frank Kelley. Kelley met with the Department of Agriculture, and a bill later was introduced amending the state law to allow for Bentgen's smoked fish technique.
By June of 1996, Mackinac Straits Fish Company was selling smoked whitefish fillets, smoked whitefish sausages and smoked whitefish spread to American Spoon Foods. Last May Bentgen landed a contract with "a large international airline" for five tons of smoked whitefish annually.
Her unlikely venture into the fish business was succeeding. She had invested $125,000 of her own savings into research, labor and product development. But the value of the support from her colleagues, friends and family proved far greater. "In terms of technical experience, it was close to $1 million," she says.
Her success is not surprising. Bentgen drew on years of experience with Procter & Gamble on how to create, sell and make money from a new product, though her personal conviction cannot be dismissed.
"She's a woman who is very determined, very goal oriented," says Hsieh, the research fellow from Procter & Gamble. "If she set out to do something, she's going to get it done. So I had all the confidence with her wanting to do this business that she was going to make it happen."
"I think what motivated Jill (Bentgen) is what motivates many entrepreneurs," says Rashid of American Spoon Foods, "and that's a belief that she can do no better than to follow her own vision. ... She believes she will be most successful if subject to her own abilities and own talents rather than when she is under anybody else's control.
"I think she revels in the freedom and the challenges."
Indeed, small-business ownership differs greatly from the comforts of a corporation. Gone is a guaranteed salary. Gone is the pool of experts at her fingertips if questions arise.
"This is you," Bentgen says. "Every time the phone rings you have to deal with it. ...
"With me, the burden of responsibility of handling everything is a little scary."
She alone must make the decisions.
"In some ways it's very refreshing," she says. At Procter & Gamble, committees, teams or vice presidents would pore over every aspect of her product inventions. "You have to relinquish some of your ownership," she says. "Sometimes it gets very fuzzy because it gets so bogged down with details."
At Mackinac Straits Fish Company, she alone makes the call. "There is no energy lost in the decision," she says.
Now she faces another major decision: expansion. Sales have increased tenfold over the last year, and she believes sales 40 times as much as that are attainable. Mackinac Straits Fish Company has created three jobs, and she believes it could create as many as 50 year-round quality jobs in St. Ignace, which would welcome employment in a region so reliant on summer tourism. She also is looking for a partner who can "bring something to the party," she says.
Primed for expansion "is right were I have it," she says, "and I'm exhausted."
She splits her time now between Traverse City, her home, and St. Ignace, home to her business. In Traverse City she maintains the small-town lifestyle that she and her husband wanted to raise their two daughters, Consuelo, 9, and Sara, 8.
And while the unlikely fish venture is not the commercial bakery they originally dreamed of, it still affords Bentgen a challenging career. She is thankful for the support of her husband, the retired psychology professor who grew up in Kansas. And he is happy to help out.
But his support only goes so far. Growing up in Kansas, he grew to hate the fried stench and poor taste of bad fish. He now eats fresh fish and smoked fish - sparingly. "She would like for me to eat fish," he says of his wife, "but if had a choice between chicken or pork or a good steak or even a hamburger, I'd take any of those before I'd eat fish."