It’s been a quarter-century since Bradley Bennett started pickling vegetables as a hobby to give out as holiday treats, and more than a decade since his Pacific Pickle Works (PPW) started kicking out countless jars from a warehouse on Santa Barbara’s Eastside.
His creatively named pickled veggies — from tradition-touching cucumbers like Mother’s Puckers to spicy green beans like Jalabeaños and palate-pleasers like Asparagusto!s — became immediate hometown heroes, as did his drink mixers, especially the Bloody Mary elixir. After early debuts at C’est Cheese and Tri-County Produce, PPW’s tart treats took over the shelves of Whole Foods and other high-end grocers as well as restaurants and bars around the West Coast.
Despite such distribution and critical praise, success in the consumer packaged goods industry doesn’t come so easily. “It’s a tough business to make any money in,” said Bennett, who admits that his desire to stay in Santa Barbara doesn’t help. Being in our relative backwater makes it hard to work with bigger supply and shipping companies, yet the costs of real estate and living are higher.
“It’s a very hands-on business with very low margins,” he said. “I’m not just gonna build a facility in Arizona and staff it without being there. It would be hard for me to do that.”
So, in 2023, Bennett launched a new line of more affordably priced pickles and condiments called The People’s Provisions, which is made with natural ingredients though not officially organic (hence cheaper). The brand features four flavors of pickles (garlic dill, spicy garlic, bread and butter, and sweet and spicy), a pickled carrot-onion mix, and three condiments — ketchup, mustard, and relish — with a McDonald’s-inspired secret sauce still in development.
The pickles are a bit more familiar in name and style than the PPW creations, and the sauces use less sugar than big brands while offering more mouthfeel. The ketchup employs real tomatoes, the mustard gets kick from “flecky” mustard seeds, and the relish relies on spinach-based coloring for its green hue, rather than the artificial dyes that so many top brands use.
Sales in regions such as the Pacific Northwest and Northern California are increasing, but Bennett worries that his first and most loyal fans have no idea that People’s is part of PPW. “As we’ve started to bring it around to accounts here, we realized that no one sees it as a Santa Barbara brand,” he explained.
A major force of Provisions is the private label part of the company, which produces pickles for other brands and restaurants from Australia to San Diego. “Forty percent of our business is manufacturing for other brands,” said Bennett. “We do some products that we don’t even make for ourselves.”
PPW, meanwhile, continues to push the briny envelope, releasing new flavors regularly, such as the excellent Kimchi Meets Pickle, Pickles Under the Ginfluence, and Stokra (yep, okra). That means their small space down on Union Avenue by the MarBorg waste processing center is pumping out pickles all the time. A recent order involved receiving 10 palettes of cucumbers and then pumping out 20,000 pounds of pickles in a matter of three days.
“People can’t believe we’re doing all of that here, especially when you look at the size of our facility — it’s super tiny,” said Bennett. “We just have every little inch optimized to crank out what we can.”
See peoplesprov.com and pacificpickleworks.com.
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