Student's salsa a family affair

By Joseph Hollak
The Collegian

When David Flores and his brother Jeremy Flores were kids growing up in Southern California, it wasn’t hard for them to make friends with the other neighborhood children.

It wasn’t the latest video game or a cool new BMX bike that always brought plenty of friends over to their house after school or on the weekends.

It was the food.

Teresa Shepherd, the boys’ mother remembers the days when her two sons were much younger — the three of them would take on new adventures in the kitchen.

“Food is central to our family. It’s a bonding thing to cook and eat together as a family,” Shepherd said. “I had a love of food and I wanted to pass that on to my boys.”

Her plan seems to have worked.

“I always loved cooking as a kid and actually preferred that over restaurants,” David Flores said. “We weren’t the ‘go to McDonalds’ type of family.”

David Flores, now a senior at Fresno State, brother Jeremy Flores and their mother have started bottling some of their family’s homemade salsa creations that started long ago in the family’s kitchen.

Shepherd, who now lives on California’s Central Coast, even named the family salsa business, Two Trees of Atascadero, after her sons.

“The ‘two trees’ represents my two sons and the business is based in Atascadero,” Shepherd said.

The family business is now three years old and expanding out of the Central Coast into the San Joaquin Valley, David Flores said.

“Our main customer base is over on the Central Coast, and we’re now seeing Central Valley residents vacationing over there and bringing our product home with them,” David Flores said.

The family’s gourmet salsa product line consists of three different salsas including a spicy tomato puréed-style called “Chili Nights,” a thicker chunkier style salsa dubbed “Hot Pursuit” and “Tropical Meltdown,” which combines peaches, mangos, pineapples and chilis.

“It all started when I used to make my Chili Nights salsa for friends and family,” David Flores said.

“Then my mom started taking it to work and it was a hit with her coworkers.”

From there they realized that they might have something worth bottling and selling.

As business grew, the family could no longer produce enough product from their kitchen and eventually had to hire a cannery to professionally produce the volume needed to meet demand.

“We insist in the quality of the ingredients that the cannery uses,” Shepherd said. “We have a close relationship and we make sure they are very precise with our family recipe.”

As for their typical customer, the family insists that their salsa will never be a mass-produced salsa that you find generically on the table of Mexican restaurants.

Instead, Two Trees products are geared toward a health-conscious consumer that might enjoy cooking with fresh ingredients.

“Our product is sold mostly through specialty food stores to customers that might be looking for something different or special,” said Shepherd.

For those new to gourmet cooking or looking to try the salsas in a new recipe, the company’s Web site will soon offer recipes to download, including dishes that highlight the flavors and styles of food that often come from the Shepherd family kitchen.

One recipe that David Flores hasn’t tried yet actually came from a customer who bought a jar of his spicy fruit based salsa.

“I’ve heard of people putting our Tropical Meltdown salsa right on top of vanilla ice cream,” David Flores said.

According to their mother, David and his brother Jeremy still love to cook as adults. The brothers are grateful for the diverse cultures and foods their mother introduced them to as they grew up, even if a brotherly competitive streak appears now and again.

When asked who the better cook is of the two, Jeremy Flores offered, “I’d have to say that’s me, and I think [David] knows it.”

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