Rachel Willoughby can’t remember when or where, somewhere along the way, she first had a taste of life-changing, mission-giving salsa.
“Before, I’d never really liked the stuff,” she says, “but after eating that, I knew I had to have some more.”
Once back home she went through bottles of store-bought. “It was all the same crap, disgusting and bland” she says. “I decided to challenge myself.”
Willoughby made a batch of tomato salsa every week, took meticulous notes and refined it until she hit the right recipe.
She shopped it around to friends and family. “It didn’t take very long for me to develop a cult following,” she says.
The final recipe has tomato, onion, garlic, cilantro, some heat and lime and salt. But what makes it work—the essential element in any art form—is balance. She named it RAW, her initials.
Willoughby grew up on the banks of the Black River in the “Conjuring House,” the star of the 2013 scary movie The Conjuring. It’s an antebellum house “in the middle of nowhere near Currie” that still gets tourists.
After avoiding demonic possession, she went to Eastern Carolina University to study sculpture, where balance counts, too. She moved back to Wilmington and by 2017 started the process of turning her recipe into a product, which requires approval from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The process started by sending a sample to NC State with the intention of finding a co-packer to make it. She was advised, were she to do that, the salsa would have to be pasteurized to make it shelf stable. Heating the salsa changed it for the worse.
She decided to make it herself and package it to sell refrigerated, which is considerably more work. Unable to make it at home, because she has pets, she went to an incubator in Burgaw, which has a rentable commercial kitchen that complies with all safety protocols.
Once a week, she started spending 16-hour days—10 of them in the kitchen—loading and unloading enough ingredients to make 60 gallons, which then had to be packaged and labeled.
The rest of the week she delivered to retail outlets and set up stands at farmers markets.
By the next year she added a pineapple salsa, followed by queso then verde and mango. The latest is cheesy jalapeño corn dip.
Seasonal salsas followed: strawberry, blueberry, watermelon and one batch of cranberry right before Thanksgiving. The fruit is sourced from local farms, including Alter Cross for organic blueberries, Farmage for organic strawberries and Eden for watermelon. A cantaloupe salsa was a one off.
“We did peach for a little while,” she says. “It was so labor intensive. Imagine having to peel 100 pounds of peaches.”
To expand her product line, she tried freezing it in order for it to be delivered; it was a bust. Willoughby’s now thinking of making kits for people to make the salsa at home.
Three years ago she bought a food truck and named it the Nacho Wagon, which will be used … someday. “The issue with the food truck,” she says, “is how to make the best use of it, and it kicks me over to the health department. I’ll figure it out.”
She’d like to turn her kitchen into a commissary, to no longer need to rent a space.
In the meantime, she’s working the markets, sometimes up to three a day, from Ocean Isle to Cedar Point on Bogue Sound. Her team consists of four full-timers and three part-time workers.
As it is with farmers markets, vendors get to meet their customers face to face and receive feedback in real time while hearing about their lives and watching their kids grow up.
In addition to locals, summertime farmers markets attract a lot of tourists, and Willoughby, now known as the salsa lady, sees them once a year.
The biggest compliment she ever got, she says, was one day when it was so busy the line was 20 deep and no one was pausing to sample. “I saw a family I knew and the mother told me she planned their vacation menu around my salsa. I really do appreciate my customers.”
