DEL.ICIO.USBuckhead family turns pesto into a thriving family business
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, October 04, 2008
About 10 years ago, when Dave and Leslie Lennox were both around 40, they bought a small house with a huge yard in Buckhead. It was an oddly charming place, painted an unforgettable shade of blue and featuring an unlikely appendage — a 1937 Lord & Burnham greenhouse jutting from its side like an exhibition hall at the state fair. But this house seemed a perfect place to raise their newborn daughter, a child to whom these first-time middle-aged parents had given the name Hope.
Today, the glassy, gabled greenhouse is the locus of activity at the Lennox household. Rows of leafy plants strive upward from their pots to the nourishment of grow lights suspended above. It all looks like something from the Showtime series “Weeds,” except the Lennoxes are growing basil, not marijuana.
JOEY IVANSCO / jivansco@ajc.com
Hope’s Gardens Basil Pesto started as a gardening and cooking project and has mushroomed into a business.
John Kessler / jkessler@ajc.com
Leslie and David Lennox of Buckhead have grabbed a piece of the local gourmet pesto market with a product made from basil grown in their backyard. Now that winter’s approaching, they will be using a greenhouse to try to meet demand.
John Kessler / jkessler@ajc.com
Hope Lennox, 10, places labels on the glass jars that hold the basil pesto. The business is named for her.
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“I go so often to the store that sells us our hydroponics that sometimes I do wonder if there are undercover DEA agents parked across the street,” Dave jokes.
With luck, all the supplies will see the Lennoxes and their fledgling business — Hope’s Gardens — through the winter.
For the past year the Lennoxes have been delighting metro Atlanta fans with pesto made entirely from basil grown in their home garden — a sunny, flat space the size of a goodly croquet lawn completely bordered by trees.
The whole enterprise began rather haphazardly as a gardening and cooking project with Hope that resulted in 15 jars of pesto to sell at the Peachtree Road Farmers Market.
Now the Lennoxes sell their product in gourmet grocers throughout the city, including five Whole Foods Markets. They still sell at the Saturday morning farmers market, but now wheel in cases of product — both the original basil pesto as well as a jalapeño version made from their home-grown peppers.
“Locally grown” may be the new catchphrase for all kinds of foods, but you can taste that just-picked-in-Buckhead flavor in the pesto — that bright essence of greenness that tingles with sunshine and chlorophyll. Leslie Lennox blends it into a chunky paste with olive oil, pine nuts, garlic and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and she has the kind of palate that finds the canny balance of flavors.
“I love the pesto because they make it fresh and keep it fresh,” says Elisa Gambino of Via Elisa Fresh Pasta. “Most of the pesto [in stores] has been pasteurized, so the basil is cooked. They’re constantly on the move. They make it like you would get it in Liguria.”
A rousing start
“Eighty percent of the people who try the product will buy it,” says Dave Lennox, an affable man with an open face who tirelessly encourages shoppers every Saturday at the Peachtree Road Farmers Market to try a sample smeared on a pita chip. When not hawking pesto, he works full time in sales for a technology consulting firm.
The Lennox family business has grown as rapidly as that of the market.
They signed up last year to sell Leslie’s line of greeting cards when the market — now the city’s most bustling weekly source for farm-fresh produce and artisan food products — was but a few stands huddled in a corner of a parking lot. They brought those few jars of pesto as a lark.
“The first three people who stopped by all bought pesto,” recalls Dave.
The next week the Lennoxes tore into their basil patch with new vigor and returned with 50 small quilted-glass jelly jars of pesto.
“It was then some very nice person came up to us and asked if we had a license to sell packaged foods,” Leslie remembers. “Oops.”
It took the Lennoxes two months to get their license and find a commercial prep kitchen. The name, Hope’s Gardens, came to them because their daughter has long been involved in every step of their efforts to turn their once-unruly yard into a tended garden.
“We thought it was a good lesson to grow your own food,” Leslie says.
As they ramped up production, the Lennoxes moved from routine trips to the hardware and garden stores to relationships with primary suppliers. Still, there were challenges. Trucks might make it down their steep driveway but they would never come close to the hideaway garden. So tons of rich soil had to be transferred by wheelbarrow.
A trio of fun
As more stores came looking for the fresh refrigerated pesto, the Lennoxes continued expanding production, each week selling all their pesto within days of making it. They proudly have met demand thus far. But will their greenhouse get them through the winter?
“It is our hope to be somewhat self-sufficient,” says Leslie, “but just in case, we have found a good local supplier of fresh basil.”
But even as the Lennoxes think about expanding their product line and distribution, they want to keep the business in the nuclear family and at home.
Hope, a 10-year-old with lank blonde hair and an observant manner, sees a lot more of her parents than most kids. Dave works from his home office when he’s not gardening. Leslie is an avid cook whose repertoire extends far beyond pesto. Hope likes to help with both. The three have a strikingly close bond that is familiar to all who visit them at the market.
“Dave likes to talk to people,” says Leslie, whose reserve counters her husband’s gregariousness. “I like to talk about recipes, but mostly just like being there with Dave and Hope.”
“The three of us — we are the business,” says Leslie with pride.
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