Who's cooking with Paula Deen?
Southern cook promotes partnership with Smithfield Foods

by Karen Spaulding
for Virginia Business
May 2007

What does the queen of Southern cuisine have in common with the king of pork? A business relationship, for starters. Now that famed Southern cook Paula Deen has joined forces with Smithfield Foods Inc., its hams are selling on cable television and Deen’s spices, sauces and cakes have been added to Smithfield’s catalogs.

Eight months after Virginia-based Smithfield retained Deen as a marketing partner, it appears to be a win-win arrangement for both parties. For instance, during the past holiday season, Deen introduced Smithfield to the power of QVC, the shopping channel that helped launch her cookbooks. “It was unprecedented,” says James D. Schloss, Smithfield’s corporate vice president for sales and marketing. “Paula got us on there Thanksgiving weekend, and we sold 8,500 of our holiday hams and 4,500 of Paula’s Gooey Butter Cakes in five minutes.”

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or don’t subscribe to cable, you know Paula Deen. She is the grand dame of Southern cooking and one of the hottest tickets on the Food Network.

The courtship between Smithfield and Deen began with a cold call from Pete Booker, general manager of the Smithfield Specialty Foods Group, when they were both in Chicago last year for a trade show. “I’m a ‘foodie’ by nature, and the thought had been in the back of my mind as I’d be watching the Food Network, ‘Who would be the best fit to do a great marketing piece for our company … a Southern company with a hometown feel and great values?’ And there was no question … Paula was it,” Booker says.

Phone calls to her agents inviting her to have breakfast with him brought them together. And the more they talked, the more they realized there was a natural affiliation. As Booker describes it, Deen later went to her refrigerator at home in Savannah, Ga., and found seven Smithfield products there. She also realized that a store where she often shops in Savannah, the Peanut Shop of Williamsburg, is part of Smithfield Specialty Foods. “Then it was kind of an epiphany for her,” Booker says.

Smithfield and Deen announced in September that they had formed a partnership aimed at promoting meals that encourage families to spend more time together. “Research studies have clearly demonstrated that children who eat regular meals with their families are more likely to do better in school and eat more nutritiously,” Schloss says.

Part of the challenge in promoting family meals is convincing parents that food preparation doesn’t have to be an ordeal. “We’re all too busy, and the generation after mine gets overwhelmed at the thought of having to fix a meal,” says Schloss. “People don’t realize it only takes about eight minutes to cook a boneless pork chop.”

Deen has built her national reputation on her ability to whip up delicious meals without much fuss. Her focus is on Southern cooking. “Fried pork chops, fried chicken, barbecue — barbecue pork, potato salad … that’s what I consider Southern food,” Deen says in a phone interview. “It’s full of flavor and makes you feel like you’ve just come out of the farmhouse!”

But don’t be fooled by her down-home manner: Deen’s demographics reach much farther than the South, just as Smithfield products now circle the globe. “At a San Francisco food show, people from all over the country were waiting in line for a couple of hours to meet her, hug her — shouting out where they were from — a line 150 people deep versus other lines with 30 or 40 people in them,” Booker says.

Deen’s popularity was evident earlier this year when more than 5,000 fans poured into the Hampton Roads Convention Center in Hampton for two consecutive cooking shows. Her fans, especially women, love Deen’s success story. Milestones in her journey to celebrity include delivering homemade sandwiches to customers, owning restaurants, publishing several cookbooks and launching a magazine.

Her “Cooking with Paula Deen” appearance in Hampton raised more than $200,000 for the Peninsula Food Bank’s capital campaign. Fans were eager to share stories of how Deen had touched their lives in some way. They appeared to be more interested in seeing her in the flesh than learning how to cook a pork loin.

One fan asked Deen about her worst cooking disaster. “Did you see me on ‘Oprah’?” she asked. She was referring to a mishap in which she dropped a bottle of vanilla into a mixer while making a pound cake. “Glass and batter were flying as I was screaming for someone to turn it off, and I thought, ‘If Oprah gets a shard of glass in her eye, America will never forgive me!’” Fortunately, the incident ended with no injuries.

If Deen needs the public’s forgiveness for anything, it might be for her fat- and butter-laden recipes for such foods as pound cake and fried chicken. “I’m your cook, not your doctor,” she says.

During her five days in Hampton Roads, Smithfield kept Deen busy with private dinners, meetings and photo shoots. More events involving Deen and Smithfield are in the works.

Is this a match made in hog heaven? Consider this suggestion offered by Deen while enchanting admirers at the Hampton Roads Convention Center: “You have to have pork with some kind of sweet potato, y’all.”