Ex-SH hoops coach Risen finds new game: salsa production

Sean C. Morgan

Mark Risen’s family salsa reci-pe isn’t a secret to former Husky basketball players Risen coached at Sweet Home High School.

“Love it,” said former player Matt Matuszak, who now lives south of the border. As a player for Risen in the 1990s, Matuszak got a chance to sample early versions of what has become a product on the rise.

Risen, who currently lives in Dayton after moving through a sequence of coaching jobs, says Sweet Home is still home to his family. The retired coach can be found in the local Thriftway market each Wednesday, delivering the fresh refrigerated salsa he used to mix up regularly for team or school events when he was a coach and teacher at SHHS.

His concoction now has a name: Coach’s Salsa, and varieties are on store shelves from the coast to John Day.

Risen had success during his seven years at the helm of Sweet Home’s boys team. He was Conference Coach of the Year twice and state Coach of the Year after his 1998-99 team, which included current SHHS Athletic Director Nate Tyler, lost by a bucket in the state final against Pleasant Hill. He took the Huskies to fourth place the following year.

After the 2004-05 school year, Risen moved on to teach at the Air Force Academy High School in Colorado Springs, Colo., before returning to Oregon at Sheldon High School in Eugene. He spent six years as athletic director at Sprague High School in Salem and then served as principal at Henley High School before retiring after serving as principal at Newberg High School in 2015.

Risen, who began teaching in 1985, continued to coach basketball at different levels, including spring and summer ball, through 2009.

Meanwhile, his family had been developing that salsa.

” (Risen’s wife) Julie is a farm kid,” he said. “She grew up between Albany and Lebanon.”

With her green thumb, the family has always kept up a garden, he said, and “we experimented with some garden salsa.”

They shared their efforts with their basketball team, and “the kids always liked the fresh salsa.”

In about 2005, “I got this idea to sell it as a fundraiser,” Risen said. After a little while, he got it off the ground, and people in Colorado Springs began asking for it.

He offered it under the name “Bad Moon Salsa Co,” he said. He had the graphic designs made, but he wasn’t “done working with kids yet” and went to school to be an administrator. He kept making the salsa on the side and saving money to turn it into a business after retirement.

It took a year after retirement to get the business up and running, he said. Living on a farm between Dayton and west Salem, he converted his pole barn into a salsa factory. Inspections were completed on July 8, 2016.

“That fall, I marketed real hard as a fundraising project,” Risen said, estimating he ran probably 40 fundraisers across the state. “We never saw retail coming.”

A family member from Lebanon heard about the salsa and invited the Risens to attend a food show at the state fairgrounds in Salem.

“It was packed wall to wall with people,” Risen said. His family’s booth was located next to a cheese company and a vodka company during the event.

One guy kept coming back to the Risen’s booth, Risen said. He finally asked, “What stores are you at?”

He started asking about shelf life and more, Risen said. The man, who turned out to be the general manager of Roth’s markets, handed Risen his business and told him, “I”ll put you in nine stores right now.”

Risen’s salsa hit the shelves in the grocery stores in April 2017. Then the Risens really went to work.

“According to the guys at Roths, we reset the bar in terms of the amount of effort that went into getting our product off the ground,” Risen said. They held product demos every week in those stores for the next six months, making sure a representative of the salsa was in every store.

SHHS graduate Tim Matuszak ran demonstrations at the Roths store on Lancaster Drive in Salem.

Facebook friends were also ordering salsa, and Risen was making regular trips to Sweet Home to deliver it. While on a delivery in September 2017, Risen dropped by Thriftway and met with managers Chad and Casey McDonald. They had heard about the salsa, and locals were asking them to put it in the store.

Chad McDonald said Risen was one of his brother’s teachers in high school – and “everyone” knows the former coach. Risen demonstrated his product, and it went from there.

“It’s our No. 1-selling salsa and pico,” McDonald said. The key is “his recipe and him. He’s a local guy, a small business, like us. I’d bend over backward to help him, the little guy, especially in today’s world. And they’re a great family. He’s worked so hard. He’s driven so many miles.”

When the McDonalds told Risen they would carry the salsa, Thriftway became the Risen’s first store outside of Roth’s markets. The business started taking off, and Risen temporarily hired a buddy, who had lost his job, to help open stores.

“Now we’re at 30 stores from the coast to John Day,” Risen said. Coach’s Salsa can be found up and down the coast, in Sweet Home, Albany and Corvallis. “We have stores waiting, dozens and dozens.”

“The challenge we’re running into in this economy, we can’t keep people,” Risen said prior to the recent COVID-19 shutdowns. He has had 14 different people working for him. Though the majority have moved on for more hours than Risen could offer them, the business is running with a total crew of five, and he says he can’t physically supply every store that wants the salsa at this point.

The biggest job is demonstrating the product, he said. “As we go into new markets, we’ve got to have people giving out samples of our products.”

Either he or Julie demo every new store at launch, he said.

The family protects the recipe, so he has just a couple of employees working with him on production. Risen said he can make about 500 containers of salsa in a two-day process by himself.

The business gets busier in the summer, he said, and on holidays and for the Super Bowl, he’ll get extra help.

Coach’s Salsa comes in five varieties: mild, medium, hot, pico de gallo and verde, which is delivered to bars and restaurants, Risen said, and “we’ve got a bean dip coming.”

“Our business model has been really relational,” he said. They get to the customers and staff at the stores they supply. In Sweet Home, they are already well known in the community, due to the fact he coached so many of his children’s friends and hundreds of other students, all of whom are now adults.

“Sweet Home is home,” Risen said. It’s home to his children, Alyssa, 30, and Darrell, 29, who attended school in Sweet Home during their formative years and who also both pitch in with the family business.

People say, “Hi, Coach,” he said. “That’s provided all sorts of dividends,” including a big one, the name of the product.

He changed the Bad Moon Salsa name after learning that the word “bad” in the product name might not be the wisest choice.

“We were trying to come up with a name,” Risen said – instead of “bad,” and they were looking for a one-word “simple” name, like Heinz or McDonald’s.

Julie came up with the name that stuck, Risen said, noting that’s how people know him and how his former players still talk about team dinners with his family.

It’s helped differentiate the product and develop a brand, where staff and customers all over the place call him “coach,” and with that, “we’re just kind of feeling like we’ve arrived,” Risen said. “Brand identity is there. People recognize us and trust our brand.”

As the salsa’s original purpose was fundraising for students, “we consider it to be a tribute to anyone who’s ever helped kids: Everyone has a little coach in them.”

The Risens have taken a “blue-collar approach,” he said. “If we just try hard enough. Now we’re just seeing it swell in every store.”

Risen said he never saw this coming, and he’s been a little surprised at the effort it takes – in retirement.

“I never in my life would’ve imagined I would own a salsa company at any point in my life,” he said, adding he’d always thought he worked hard as a coach and teacher, organizing and planning lessons. As a small business owner and salsa producer, “I have never worked so hard in my life.”

But it comes with an irreplaceable reward, Risen said. “You see your name on the container – a 1 million percent game changer. You’re the one doing it.”

Whatever he ever felt as a coach or educator, “it’s different than that,” Risen said. “It’s incredible.”

He credited families like the McDonalds at Thriftway, and Roth’s, Oregon companies, for making it possible. The McDonalds have been particularly helpful. Mary McDonald has dispensed advice Risen has heeded in bookkeeping and business growth. Chad and Casey McDonald have given advice on marketing and pricing – and provided ad space for the salsa.

“It’s a 360-degree support system,” Risen said. “I’m a career educator. I don’t know anything about grocery. It goes without saying how impactful it’s been for us.”

Even south of the border.

“I’ve had it delivered to me here in Southern California and I proudly wear my ‘Coaches Salsa’ hat out all the time,” Matt Matuszak said.

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