Nancy Prescott and Corie Greenblatt insist: Call it your casserole

Many successful businesses are born out of someone’s personal experience — good or not so good — that solved a common problem or filled a need with a solid product or service.

Such was the case with Call it Yours Casseroles, which was launched just over three years ago by Nancy Prescott and Corie Greenblatt. The Columbus businesswomen, who met while serving on a local board, jumped into the enterprise with both pots and pans after deciding that time-strapped families needed an easier way to feed themselves.

Thus, their idea was to use some delicious recipes for casseroles, specialty dishes, breakfast items and sides, cook them up in their 5156 River Road kitchen and store, freeze the products, then sell the food to hungry customers stopping by to pick them up.

“Take it ... Bake it ... Call it Yours” was the simple slogan used by Prescott, 56, and Greenblatt, 46, as they began their journey in September 2013. Amid plenty of hard work and hearty laughs from their humble mistakes along the way, the two have opened a second location in Peachtree City, Ga., added e-commerce sales across the U.S., and developed a plan to sell wholesale in small boutique food stores in the Southeast.

Needless to say, the food-loving Prescott and the sales-oriented Greenblatt have no desire to slow their pace at Call it Yours Casseroles. Instead, they will continue testing their dishes on family members and friends and customers, while seeing just how far they can take the small business.

The Ledger-Enquirer visited with the women recently at their business, talking with them about their jobs of helping the masses in the area fill their stomachs with tasty, homestyle food. This interview is edited for length and clarity.

(Click here for Call It Yours Casseroles on Facebook)

Q. So customers come here to pick up their casserole or lasagna or chicken pot pie?

A. Corie: You walk in the door and we have everything all the time.

A. Nancy: We get to know our customers, too. Food is very personal and this is the kind of food that’s going home for a celebration or a new baby or a death or an illness, or just for your family dinner. What’s so wonderful is nothing is gourmet, it’s family dishes, comfort food, that we make just like I used to make in my kitchen, except we use bigger bowls.

Q. You use family recipes?

A. Nancy: Our family recipes, and customers have shared some of theirs, too.

Q. It’s food for all three meals of the day?

A. Corie: Yes. I’m a salesman by trade, and I can always sell a mama on: ‘We feel guilty saying grab something, get in the car, we’ve got to go.’ That’s especially before school, knowing that food makes the brain smarter in the mornings. I always talk to them about our breakfast things. You can even cook them ahead of time and the kids can still have a meal if they cook them in the microwave and get in the car.

A. Nancy: A lot of times our customers will buy enough so that they know they have leftovers, because they can take it to work the next day or have another meal. That happens all the time.

Q. You pay attention to quality, I take it?

A. Nancy: We are very particular about our meats. They’re all hormone-free. We only have white meat chicken breast and it’s very high quality. If I wouldn’t feed it to my family, I wouldn’t expect you to feed it to yours. So the level of the quality is very important to us.

Q. Did you start small and then expand your product line?

A. Nancy: We actually were over-ambitious and at times have had even more on the menu than we have now. And we do try to change things around seasonally. There are some things you don’t mind eating in the middle of the winter that you wouldn’t want in our hot Georgia summers. We also have things, though, that if we took off the menu we would go out of business because they’re popular all year round. There’s even a difference between our Peachtree City location and here. Some of the top sellers up there, all the time, would be chicken pot pie. For some reason they love it up there. Here, we see a decline in the hotter months. I’m not sure why, but that’s the way it goes.

Q. What are the best sellers locally?

A. Corie: I’ll give you four of them. It would be lasagna, an all-time favorite for men because it’s filled with ground beef and Italian sausage. Men tend to like more hearty meat, something real filling, and it has that Italian sausage kick to it. Hands down, women are going to choose the chicken tetrazzini, especially if they’re having bridge or bunco or any kind of group functions. I would say the pot pie is very popular during most of the fall and winter months. And poppy seed chicken is going to be a favorite for kids and parents.

Q. What is that?

A. Nancy: It’s chicken in a cream sauce with a buttery cracker-crumb topping. You just really can’t wrong, and you can eat it with some bread. We also have the same thing (in another dish), but with pasta in it. We will have some holiday items that we will only have between the end of October and January.

A. Corie: We do a ton of Thanksgiving business. We don’t do the bird, the turkey. We call it the feast without the feathers. We do everything else for your holiday meal, even down to the yeast rolls and things.

Q. When will you ramp up holiday production?

A. Nancy: We’ve already started. Our head cook and the kitchen’s been running non-stop. Everything we sell is by net weight, and we seal it and shrink wrap it and freeze it. When we’re making something, we immediately start the freezing process. So it’s freshly made and then quickly frozen.

Q. Why do you enjoy working in the food industry?

A. Nancy: For me, every holiday has a food associated with it. When you think about growing up, there are certain things that occur, and all of my fond memories happened around a table or near one. So it’s something’s that has been important to me.

Q. You two blend well together?

A. Nancy: I have a corporate background. I did business and executive development. She’s an outside salesperson. The two of us together have an interesting business perspective. She’s really interested in convenience, as we all are, but the food and the quality of it is very important to me because I enjoy it so much. Corie is one of the few people that I know who eats because she has to.

Q. You live to eat and Corie eats to live?

A. Nancy: Exactly, that’s right.

A. Corie: I’m probably more focused on the advertising and the selling and the website, the legality, all the labels.

Q. So you two are all-in with this? It’s not a sideline at all for you?

A. Corie: Not all all. We have two locations, and our shipping nationwide is growing like crazy. Of course, you’ve got to think about how you promote that. That’s stuff that I do. How do you promote yourself to get people in other states to know what you’re doing? I’ve been teaching myself e-commerce.

A. Nancy: Also, we have to grow smartly. We can’t grow so fast that we can’t manage the supply.

A. Corie: And we’ve changed parts of our business plan as far as what our ideas were to begin with, like franchising.

Q. Is Peachtree City a franchise?

A. Nancy: No, it’s a company store. In order to franchise, you need to be able to run multiple locations and prove that it can be done. We’re doing that now. We just don’t know how many more we want to actually run ourselves, because you can find that you’re getting away from your core customers and your core business. The way we’re looking to grow now is more about we’ll have customers in other cities, but they will be our retail partners instead of running an entire shop.

Q. You’ll be putting products into a supermarket?

A. Nancy: Not in supermarkets, but maybe in boutique food businesses.

A. Corie: But we don’t want to get away from making our food by hand. When you see Call it Yours Casseroles, you know that it’s all made by hand.

A. Nancy: We really make it all by hand. It’s stirred by a human. We have specific recipes to keep quality consistent, but we still have somebody going, hmmm, this doesn’t look just right. Sometimes even the weather can influence something.

Q. How do you perfect the dishes and final products?

A. Nancy: Everything we ever do, we sample batch it, and then we test it. Like I’ll do a small batch of something and see if we like it and go, hmmm, that’s good, or it could be let’s add this to it or that. Then we have to make sure you can freeze it and it tastes like you just made it when you heat it back up. I’ll give you an example. We get asked for this every once in a while and its Country Captain. You’ve heard of the Columbus dish with tomato sauce and curry and fried chicken. I cannot (develop) one that I would sell because I can’t make the chicken still taste crispy after it has been frozen. That’s a personal standard of ours. It just begins to taste soggy to me versus when you’ve freshly made it.

A. Corie: The same thing with an eggplant parmesan dish we did. We tried it and it was mushy. One of the last things we just added came from my child, who’s a foodie and asked one day: What do you have new? I went to the freezer and took out our triple mac and cheese, which is to die for. And we have our buffalo chicken wing dip, which is also good. I thawed them out and put them in a bowl and mixed them together and he came in there and tried some. Oh my gosh, my family went crazy over it, and I brought it into the shop.

Q. What do you enjoy most about doing this?

A. Corie: I love the customers. I’ve got one, a man, who every time he gets in an argument with his wife he comes in and buys food. So the funny thing is I have his wife’s cellphone number now and so I’ll text her: Isn’t it time for y’all to argue? And she’ll say, it is. I think I need this and this and this. (laughs)

A. Nancy: Our customers, the people, really are quite amazing. We’ve made good friends with some of our customers. We did not know them before this and only knew them from coming in here.

Q. This is a passion for you, it sounds like?

A. Nancy: It’s kind of become a passion that I wasn’t expecting. It’s been a lot of work and lot of heartache, but it’s a lot of fun.

A. Corie: There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t believe in our products, and that other people need this service. You know it’s a good thing. You know that people enjoy it.

Q. But there have been some humorous moments?

A. Nancy: Oh, yeah. We have vendors who all of a sudden can’t get a supply of something in. Like last year, there was a squash shortage. Whoever thought we would be worried about squash. That’s the kind of humor that we come up with. Right now, there’s a particular bean we use for green bean casserole and all of a sudden that’s an issue. It’s like, who knew? We’ve learned to start enough in advance to make sure we’ve got everything.

A. Corie: Nobody bothered to give us heads up on that until they were out of squash. It was a crisis. And we do just have to laugh about the fact that we’re chasing green beans all over town.

Q. It’s also a learning experience in general?

A. Corie: You don’t know a business until you do it yourself. You have to be involved in every aspect of it. So if somebody comes in here and they have some brilliant idea, we generally laugh because it’s not like we already haven’t tried it 18 different ways and finally, go, heck, this is actually working. Our failures have been the best thing to happen to us, I would say. Now it would be nice if the failures didn’t cost money.

Q. This almost appears to have been life changing of sorts for you two?

A. Nancy: There’s something very satisfying about watching an idea grow and really doing something about it. There are hundreds of ideas that Corie has or I have. But this is one that we actually put some action behind. I have learned so much not only about myself and the business, but I don’t know that I’ve ever truly respected the small business person in terms of what it takes to start and open a business. It’s huge. My hat’s off to these people who run these restaurants, because I don’t know how they do it. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m happy that I get to continue to learn.

A. Corie: It’s been fun. I probably have taught myself more, read more, and invested more time in this than I have anything else in my life.

This story was originally published October 15, 2016 at 6:38 PM with the headline "Nancy Prescott and Corie Greenblatt insist: Call it your casserole."