Today we’d like to introduce you to Craig Martin.
Craig, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I’m the classic story of the kid standing in a chair at the stove, helping mom with dinner starting from around age four or five. Like any cook worth their salt, I had to prove my worth washing dishes before I graduated to actually learning how to cook. I got no breaks despite not even being able to reach the faucet. But it didn’t take long before I was cooking meals for the family with my mom just watching and offering tips here and there.
About the same age, I began to learn the ways of outdoor manual labor as well. From age four on we lived on about 3-acres and we had a spring and fall garden every year. We didn’t have much money. Gardening was a necessity for us, not a hobby. I remember putting days and days into that garden from sun up to sundown and sometimes well past sundown. I wasn’t much help with a shovel or a hoe at five years old. But I could drive a tractor. My mom would set me up on a couple of phone books so I could reach the steering wheel, get me in gear and moving, and jump off once I was on my way and I would either mow the back 40 or till the garden until I ran out of gas and the tractor died or I needed a snack and drove up to the house, turning the key off to stop because I couldn’t reach the pedals.
With all of this gardening, we only really had to go to the store for the staples; meat, dairy, flour, sugar, etc. We would trade our crops with some neighbors up the road for eggs. But, even giving a lot of our harvests away, we still had more on our hands than we could eat. So, after my dad built floor to ceiling, wall to wall shelves in one of the spare rooms of the house, we starting canning and preserving. We made everything from pickles to beans, peas, tomatoes, sauces, etc. At any given time, we had at minimum a couple of hundred jars of veggies “put up” for the winter. I was quite valuable during the canning season as a child as well because I could get my tiny hands down inside the jars easier and really pack the veggies in there to make good use of what Mason jars we could afford.
Around 10 or 12 years old, my parents got a little cheap plastic framed meat slicer and one of those cheap round tray dehydrators on clearance or open box special or something from the department store. When we had a few extra bucks to spare, we would get whatever beef roast we could afford and slice it up and make jerky. My parents were always in charge of marinating and slicing because my mom was terrified I would cut a finger off in the flimsy slicer. (She was probably right. If it was sharp, I typically found a way to accidentally hurt myself with it as a kid.) But not being able to help much didn’t stop me from eating it. I would often get in trouble in school for “chewing gum” because I would cut up jerky into little pieces and put it in my pocket for snacks throughout the day.
Right out of high school, I joined the Navy and went off from small-town Texas to sail the seven seas. This is when I began to really open my eyes to what was out there in the world, culture as well as food. To say I was a picky eater as a child would be an understatement. But joining the military cured that very quickly. You either ate the chow that everyone ate or you went hungry. And traveling outside the state for the first time and then, outside the country shortly after, I really began to see that it wasn’t all hamburgers and mashed taters. My first stops outside the country were France, Italy, Spain, Dubai, Bahrain, etc. My mind was blown. I saw menus in other languages, smelled and tasted spices I didn’t know existed, ate animals I didn’t know were edible…
When I came home from my first deployment, I brought several pounds of spices and teas and whatever else I could smuggle back onto the ship back with me from the places we visited. I began experimenting with middle eastern spices mostly. This was before the internet was huge for cooking forums and recipe sites and before I even owned my own home computer so I was winging (and butchering) things in the most terribly nontraditional methods trying to recreate some of the dishes and flavors I tasted and already missed from those places. My eyes were really beginning to open.
By my second and third deployment, I had found a new addiction… Cookbooks! I was obsessed. I took several with me when we left but they didn’t last long. I would order them by the box full on Amazon because mail could take anywhere from two weeks to over a month to find us depending on where we were. My shipmates thought I was nuts. “You can’t cook anything. Why the hell are you reading cookbooks?!?” I just couldn’t get enough. I even started to formulate some of my own recipes in my mind and write them down in an old log book I found lying around. I wouldn’t be home for months to be able to try some of these recipes out but I NEEDED to write them down.
Fast forward to being out of the Navy and back in Texas a few years later. I told my mom that I wanted a slicer and a dehydrator like we used to have when I was a kid for Christmas one year when she asked what I wanted. I started playing around with jerky again. In the early days as a kid, my parents just used Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce as a marinade. That was good, but I could do more. I started playing with flavors and experimenting with marinade times, cook times, etc. Friends would come over and after nearly making themselves sick they would beg me to hide the jerky because they literally couldn’t help themselves. I ran the idea of putting it in a bag and putting a label on it past a few friends and they said I was stupid if I didn’t. Wondering to myself if this was the classic case of “oh, your food is so good, you should start a restaurant” and then the restaurant doesn’t make it six months because your cooking is terrible and your friends just couldn’t be mean to you, I was skeptical. But, I reached out to a local tattoo artist friend and got myself a logo, bought a vacuum sealer and set up to sell jerky on the sidewalk outside a barbershop… that first “event” I sold out. Granted it was only about 40 bags of jerky. But, in my book, it was a huge success.
That was about three years ago and I haven’t looked back since. I’ve changed packaging, gotten a new logo, replaced the little plastic slicer with a big commercial one, added two large high capacity dehydrators (I keep the small ones around for experimental test batches). I’ve gotten into hot sauce the last year and a half as well. I have made and sold a couple of thousand bottles now. I started by fermenting a small batch in a gallon glass jug for a month, graduated to fermenting for upward of a year in larger 7-gallon jugs and just made a 20-gallon batch last week.
My mom and I also rekindled our love for canning recently as well. We got our old groove back and got our pickle and okra recipes nailed down again. It had been more than a decade since either of us had canned anything. Like everything else, I’ve gone off the deep end and am trying to push the limits with every new flavor, process and ingredient I find.
I’m up to about 15 jerky flavors now. I’ve done five or six hot sauce flavors and have a couple more fermenting now that will be ready to bottle in a couple of months. I have a couple of jams and jellies nailed down and more on the horizon as I work with what’s in season. And the pickled goods I can’t keep more than a couple of days after people find out we’ve made them.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Not at all. I’ve never been in a great place financially my whole life. Finding the spare money to buy ingredients to cook or experiment with, the equipment I needed, etc. had been challenging. But my wife and I managed to put away a few bucks here and there to make it work. I have some incredible friends that bought me equipment in exchange for a couple of bags of jerky every time I make a batch. And most recently, I’ve been able to combine efforts with my good friends Ryno and Justin from The Bucking Pig BBQ. We found a space in a strip mall that already had a vent hood and gas lines and whatnot for kitchen equipment. The price was something we could afford split 3 ways so we jumped on it. I don’t think any of us were ready. And it’s still a struggle every day. But what great success story ever started with no effort and no struggle?? I’m still holding down a full-time day job as well to make ends meet. I haven’t quite made it to the point of being able to support myself in the kitchen. I’ve learned every single piece of red tape there is to know about jerky making along the way. But things are getting better and better every day. More people are trying my products and becoming permanent customers. More events are popping up that I can either afford to get into or will have me because of my reputation. More opportunities are opening. It’s growing and I’m very happy about that. But I’m also trying to be selective and make sure everything happens organically and isn’t pushed or overexerted. I’m in this for the long game and want to make sure I’m here to stay and not flame out like so many small businesses do. This is my first experience with a small business and I intend to make it my only.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the High Seas Provisions story. Tell us more about the business.
The business definitely started out with and has it’s rooted in jerky. And I obviously love jerky and love making jerky and experimenting with new flavors but, I’ve started trying to branch out into a few other things that I also enjoy and some that aren’t quite as time-consuming as jerky. From start to finish, a 75lb case of meat takes me the better part of two weeks torn into bags of jerky. I’ve found a lot of joy in learning to ferment peppers for hot sauce and how to turn fresh seasonal fruits into jams and jellies. But I don’t want to just be another housewife selling jam at the local farmers market. What I pride myself on and what I take the most joy in is creating things that have never been done before. Take for example Crunchy Taco Jerky. Have you ever heard of, seen, or tasted Crunchy Taco flavored jerky? No. No, you haven’t. Because no one has done it before. I have a list of a couple of hundred lines long of ideas that come to me for new flavors and products. I get ideas in the middle of the night, while I’m driving, while we’re at a fancy restaurant for a special occasion dinner, etc. and I have to write them down or I forget them. I will pull over on the side of the road to write something down. Cooking and creating is incredibly enjoyable for me. But where I find my real passion and satisfaction is watching people try my products and seeing the smile and looks of perplexion cross their faces when the flavors hit them right in the feels!
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I’m not much of a lucky person. I don’t give much thought to luck. I think we as people create these constructs of “luck”, religion, superstition and other things that we perceive as being out of our control so we don’t place too much blame on ourselves for not putting in enough work. I don’t want to build my success on good luck and I don’t want to blame my failures on bad luck. I just work hard. And then, when I’m tired, I put in some more work. One day when I’m successful, I’ll keep putting in work. Then, maybe I can someday consider myself “lucky” for the life and business I’ve built.
Contact Info:
- Address: 401 W Bedford Euless Rd
Suite 401 C
Hurst, TX 76053 - Website: highseasjerky.com
- Phone: 7576131177
- Email: info@highseasjerky.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/highseasjerky
- Facebook: facebook.com/highseasjerky
- Twitter: twitter.com/highseasjerky
Image Credit:
First 2 hot sauce images: Paul Pizana
Products on checkerboard: Shawn Brewster
Jerky against mountain: Dan Hardick
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