About Us
Learn more about The Pickle Patch LLC.
Meet the CEO
My name is Doug Zonner and this is my journey. I started my first job in foodservice as a 10th grade high school student in 1978. I was hired as a dishwasher for a national restaurant chain. I was amazed watching the line cooks work their magic during rush hour service. After much prodding and promising, the owner gave me a shot at the cook’s position. This would be the corner stone to the rest of my foodservice career. It taught me how to manage my time, meet deadlines, multiple task, and still produce a quality product. After 6 years with the restaurant I changed course and went to work for a commercial food distributor as a salesman. The training was intense and continuous. It was the salesman’s job to learn everything from food purchasing and preparation, presentation with tableware and disposables, to utilizing the correct equipment and refrigeration for proper cooking and storage. Throughout my career in sales I have worked with literally hundreds of Chefs and Restaurateurs developing menu’s and suppling the products to produce some amazing culinary experiences. This has been my passion for the last 34 years.
In 2015 my son gave me a pickling kit for my birthday. My family knows the love I've always had for pickles. The first few months were amazing working on recipes with my father-in-law. His 20 years of culinary training in the Navy and then his knowledge from being a dietician in the medical industry was priceless. We initially thought that fresh homemade pickles would be a great Christmas gift for our friends and fellow church members. We really had no idea of the response we would get when we started giving them out. Friends wanted them for friends and we quickly ran out of room in our home to be able to produce enough for all the requests....
The story continues...
In 2017 we secured a commercial kitchen with more equipment and increased storage space and moved production out of our home. This is when the Pickle Patch was officially born. We only wanted to utilize the freshest produce. I started developing partnerships with local farmers to keep our product fresh and locally grown. We also wanted to be good stewards of our environment. We encouraged all who bought our pickles to bring back the empty jars so we could recycle them. Fresh produce, combined with our Zonner secret family recipe, gives our pickles the crisp fresh flavor that you can’t get in a commercially made product. Our simple hobby and gift giving has turned into a thriving demand for our hand packed pickles and okra.
Our ultimate goal is to be able to open our production facility to the public. To create a place for education on the rapidly fading art of canning. It was not that long ago that canning was one of the primary sources for food preservation prior to refrigeration. My father in law still has vivid memories of his mother canning every season on a wood burning stove. We want to teach this process to our students as part of our great history. We also want to allow creative minds from all ages to come in and try to create or bring back to life their own special family recipes. With Gods blessing and the support of our friends and family, we will work hard to make our dream a reality.