America's Most Promising Startups

by John Tozzi (posted on Mar. 17, 2009)

Selling Caviar in a Recession
The Little Pearl
Rich Brauman

Think caviar is a tough sell in a recession? Rich Brauman begs to differ. His four-year-old Somerville (Mass.) company, The Little Pearl, moved $500,000 of the pricey delicacy last year, mostly through Whole Foods (WFMI) and his own Web site. A former research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Brauman left in 2001 to pursue his longtime interest in aquaculture, tapping family and friends for seed money. The Little Pearl buys fish eggs harvested sustainably from farms and rivers as far flung as Idaho, Alaska, and North Carolina. Brauman, 33, has a full-time staff of 6 and anywhere from 4 to 10 part-time helpers in his 1,500-sq.-ft. plant. The caviar ranges in price from $12 an ounce for salmon to $70 for the white sturgeon eggs that Brauman dubs Transmontanus Rex. (The company turned an operating profit last year, he says, but recorded a loss because of the cost of developing aquaculture technology that Brauman hopes will eventually boost his operations.) These days, Bauman says that when he offers free samples, people are less squeamish about trying fish eggs for the first time than they are worried that they'll acquire a taste for them: They're afraid, because it's a recession, that they're going to like it.