A hot new product has hit the frozen section at Gelson’s. Shoppers steering their carts down the chilly aisle may want to stop and check out Rice Expressions, a microwaveable organic rice line created by Palisades resident Pete Vegas. “For the first time, people can really relate to what I do,” says Vegas, founder and president of Sage V Foods (pronounced Sage Five), a company that specializes in producing rice-based ingredients for use in processed foods. “The fact that we’re at Gelson’s is a big deal for me.” Rice Expressions is frozen, pre-cooked rice that microwaves in three minutes with no bowl or water involved. There are four varieties: organic brown, organic long-grain, organic Tex Mex and Indian basmati. Each box contains three 10-oz. packages and sells for $4.69. While Rice Expressions represents a small part of what Sage V Foods actually produces, “It’s the most interesting part,” Vegas says, “and it’s what I’d like to see become the biggest part.” A rice expert, Vegas first began developing the concept for Rice Expressions about five years ago. “We had the technology, the equipment and the know-how to [freeze the rice],” he says. “And rice microwaves and heats well, unlike frozen vegetables.” Since Sage V Foods was making enough money selling rice flour and other rice ingredients to big companies, Vegas was able to focus on developing his new product-the only frozen rice sold as simply a packet of rice without any extras. “Rice Expressions was the best little idea I had and I wanted us to do it on our own,” says Vegas, who began experimenting in his Marquez-neighborhood home. “It’s still me usually playing around with something on the weekends in my kitchen or at our lab in Texas.” Vegas has been working with rice for most of his adult life. Before rice, it was soybeans, which he farmed during his college years at Louisiana State University. “My father was a farm equipment dealer so I got the equipment from him.” After graduating with a degree in agribusiness in 1978, Vegas traveled to Panama for a year to work as a management trainee on a Chiquita Banana farm. He then returned to earn his MBA at Harvard Business School in 1982. At the time, a large rice milling company called Comet Rice was launching a joint venture in Puerto Rico, and hired Vegas to manage the operation. “I got to do everything,” he says. He supervised the construction of the Comet milling facility, trained a 200-man work force, and was involved with farming, drying, storing, milling and marketing the rice. When the company began importing instead of farming rice, Vegas learned about shipping, stevedoring and handling bulk rice. “There are few people who know more about rice than I do,” says Vegas, who returned to the U.S. in 1986 to become VP of marketing for Comet Rice. He has become particularly well-versed in the technical issues of rice, such as how you get rice to expand, and about the functionality of rice-how other countries use rice in applications other than table rice. “I’ve been almost everywhere in the world where they deal with rice,” Vegas says. Between 1986 and 1992, Comet sent him to Thailand, India and Japan, as well as Iraq, whose government was the largest customer for U.S. rice at the time. Vegas designed and supervised the construction of a bulk handling facility in Aqaba, Jordan, which incorporated a new technology to allow large volumes of high-quality white rice to be shipped in bulk and bagged at destination. As a result, Comet’s sales to Iraq ultimately exceeded 300,000 metric tons a year. In 1992, Vegas started Comet Rice Ingredients, a subsidiary of Comet Rice, and began focusing on “how to develop new applications for rice.” His experience abroad had made him realize that “the United States doesn’t utilize rice. Rice has the potential of corn [in terms of widespread use] but no one knows that.” He bought out the company in 1998 and renamed it Sage V Foods (Sage V is Vegas spelled backwards). Though his company has grown slowly, reaching $25 million in sales, Vegas predicts that in 18 months sales will reach $40 million. “In the last two years, business has finally started coming to us,” he says. “We’re known in the industry as ‘the Rice Guys.'” Based in Westwood, Sage V’s biggest business is selling rice flour to large companies and showing them how to use the flour to make other products-for example, the coating on french fries and the crisp rice in granola bars. They sell rice ingredients and products to companies like Healthy Choice, Weight Watchers, Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats. “All the products we sell, we’ve developed,” says Vegas, who purposely made the Rice Expressions product organic so that it could be sold in health food stores, which don’t charge slotting (shelving) allowances like the larger companies. The rice is grown north of Sacramento and is cooked in Texas, where Sage V Foods has a cooking plant and a rice flour mill; the company is currently building two more facilities in Arkansas. While developing Rice Expresssions, Sage V tried three different freezing processes, from nitrogen to mechanical freezing. “We literally ripped the [cooking] plant to the ground three times,” Vegas says. “It’s not easy to freeze each grain separately.” However, Vegas believes that his frozen rice product, which has been on the market for a year now, is superior to the taste of dry instant rice. “If we get people to try it, we do well,” he says, admitting that he spent a lot of money on packaging but little on advertising. His initial target market was vegetarians and people who need gluton-free products. Now he’s focusing on food service and retail, including sales to Red Robin, Friendly’s and Ruby Tuesday’s restaurants, plus private labels for stores such as Safeway and Vons. “The Atkins diet has hit everyone who sells starch protects,” Vegas says. While the organic brown and Tex-Mex rices are selling well, he may replace the white long-grain and basmati with a flavored pilaf and organic Thai jasmine rice. Though Vegas says he knows of an even better way to develop Rice Expressions, he does not have the means to pursue it at this point. “I’m three years behind where I want to be, but I have that kind of patience,” he says. “You have to know what’s going to be successful and you’ve got to be trying a lot of things at once.” Vegas and his wife, Jean, moved to the Palisades in 1986. Jean, an Iowa native, earned her bachelor’s degree in microbiology from LSU, and later went back to school to get her teaching certification. She now teaches second grade at Marquez Charter Elementary. They have three kids: Matt, a junior at UC Santa Cruz; Brett, a Palisades High senior, and Scott, an 8th grader at Paul Revere.
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