When we spoke to Andrew Arbogast, he was in the midst of a journey that had him driving to Tupelo, Mississippi, to pick up a refrigerated truck and then driving that truck to Humboldt, Tennessee, to pick up 1,000 pounds of cheese from a cheese factory, and then back to Tupelo to deliver said cheese.
It’s all for the most noble effort of getting cheese dip into your mouths.
In August of last year, Arbogast quit his job at International Paper Co. to dedicate himself full time to the dip. He’s been pursuing broader distributorships and is introducing two new dips.
Arbo’s Cheese Dip is currently carried in 300 stores, and a new deal with KeHE Distributors — which services such stores as Whole Foods, Schnucks, and Fresh Market as well as the Texas-based Central Market — will put it in 11 locations across Texas.
Arbogast said in the year or so since he founded the company he’s had to learn some hard lessons.
“I’ve had just as many failures as I’ve had successes going through all of this and learning how to be an entrepreneur,” he said. “Things are starting to pay off.”
Early on, he got the dip in such stores as High Point Grocery and Cordelia’s Market, and the dip sold well. But outside of big metropolitan areas, such as Nashville, Memphis, and Little Rock, sales were flat.
He remembered a call he received from a warehouse that alerted him that 60 cases of the dip were close to its expiration date. The warehouse ended up throwing the dip away.
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