I've decided that "roll your own" is a reasonable option.

Blondie buys frozen chicken white meat, but it's easy enough to come up with that on your own. Buy some chicken breast quarters and microwave them in a bowl for 4 minutes, flip them and microwave another four minutes. Skin the chicken and remove the big hunks of meat. Toss the skin and bones into a sauce pan and rinse the bowl you microwaved into the sauce pan, trying to get as much of the fat and juices into the sauce pan, then boil the skin and bones for a while to produce some wonderful broth. Skim the scum and store the broth in a mason jar, refrigerated or frozen, until needed for whatever you're cooking. (In our house, that's usually less than a day!) Chunk up the chicken breast meat for your chicken salad.

Chop up some celery. Add some craisins. Add some broken pecan meats.

Then all you need is the dressing. Start off with a homemade honey-sweetened mayo - mix one egg, half a teaspoon of salt, and half a teaspoon of dry mustard in your food processor, then add half a tablespoon of honey, two teaspoons of fresh-squeezed lemon juice, and a tablespoons of vinegar. While your food processor is running you'll add most of a cup of oil as it emulsifies. The dressing in the Costco mix has poppy seeds and paprika in it, and that sounds like a tasty addition to mayo anyway, so I'd add them in at the start of making this stuff, even though I'd be using a lot of this mayo on other sandwiches.

The Costco recipe includes xanthan gum in the dressing, which would make the dressing a little thicker. You could add some corn starch, I suppose, or maybe some tapioca for that. It also has sodium lactate to preserve freshness, but I'd just as soon eat it while it's fresh; the stuff at Costco has to be shipped in and sit on a shelf for a while before it goes home to your refrigerator.

You'll notice that I didn't give proportions for the chicken, celery, craisins, pecan meats and dressing, but that's because this ain't rocket science. You just toss it together by guess and by golly, taste it, and add whatever you think is needed.

It might make sense to "perfect" your recipe, then make arrangements to rent space in a commercial kitchen, and start producing the cape cod chicken salad yourself, selling it to restaurants. Or rent a booth at a farmer's market and offer fresh chicken-salad sandwiches on homemade bread to the shoppers there, as well as iced tea. You'd need to keep the stuff cold for safety, but you can do that with ice and an ice chest. Your reputation will quickly spread, and you may soon find yourself with a dozen chicken salad sandwich stands, staffing them with otherwise-unemployed people working on straight commission. If they take care of their customers, and keep things scrupulously clean, they can make good money!

It had been at least six months since I'd been to Costco when I stopped earlier this month. The packaging is different, and there's a manufacturer on the package, but the food is essentially the same as before.

I believe the correct information on nutrition is shown by this chart. At 300 calories per half-cup serving, the calories aren't appreciably different than those in a quarter-pound hamburger. Tree nuts are an important nutrient for us all, and diabetics especially so.

So what is the recipe for the chicken salad you made? It surely has more to it than just chicken and tarragon. (Please send your recipe to harl at this domain, canthook.com.)

Four ounces of baked, split chicken breast would be 240 calories. The tarragon wouldn't add any calories to speak of, but that's not chicken salad, that's just chicken. Replacing some of the chicken with pecans, at 750 calories per four ounces, or with craisins, at 350 calories per four ounces, would drive the calorie count back up, and at 40 calories per tablespoon for Miracle Whip, that'd drive the calorie count up, too.

An organization like Costco has a fixed facility size. That means X number of aisle feet, y shelf feet of refrigerated space, and z shelf feet of frozen space. They constantly are evaluating products that they carry, eliminating those that generate fewer dollars per unit of space, and adding promising new products.

I suspect that Costco decided the product wasn't profitable enough. They kept moving them around from one location to another in the Lancaster store, making them hard to find, and that probably made a bad situation even worse.

The shelf life of such a product wouldn't be too great. I don't know for sure that Costco dropped the product. It might be that the Costco account was dropped by the manufacturer because of fears that the product was staying on the shelf too long to be a wholesome, healthful food.

It's noteworthy that the product didn't have any company identification on the label except for Costco. My guess is that the manufacturer doesn't have national distribution under their own name.

There are a lot of small companies making deli salads. There are also some large ones. Bob Evans, for instance, was in that business for a while. I gather that the companies typically make a large number of different products in relatively small volume and distribute them in generic form to supermarkets in a very small geographic area.

Because the products are generic, it's a relatively easy business to enter. Find a closed restaurant in a bad location, start making the product in their kitchen, and you can start up with a single supermarket chain as your customer. It takes a lot of labor, not much equipment, no real investment to amount to anything, which means it's pretty easy to make a little money, and almost impossible to make a large one.

It's quite possible that the company making that salad decided to go out of business, you know. If you don't have a lot invested in a business, and you get noticed, someone may offer you a decent job working for them, and you may decide that you'd rather have a steady income instead of all those constant worries.

So my recommendation to you is to take a look around for a closed restaurant, possibly one that went out of business because it was near a big factory that moved to the orient. The landlord will rent to you cheap if you negotiate very well, and the kitchen will have sanitary working surfaces and refrigerated storage areas.

Develop a recipe in your own kitchen, and start making sales calls. You probably would do best to start with independent delis. As they introduce the product to their customers, your sales volume will slowly rise for a while, and reach a steady state. Once you know what the steady state is, you'll be able to predict how much production capacity you need to be able to handle, say, a chain of thirteen supermarkets. You don't want to sell a chain on your product, and then find yourself without the capacity to fill their orders.

For every $100 of monthly sales, you will need to have $X in ingredients, $Y in completed product ready to be delivered as soon as you get orders, and you'll end up with $Z in invoices you've sent out but haven't been paid for yet. You'll also need a certain amount of storage space for packaging materials, a certain amount of refrigerated storage, a certain number of weekly manhours of production labor.

Once you know what you're doing, you can expand your operations without the risk of bankruptcy. You obviously can't afford to buy and warehouse 20 years worth of packaging materials - nor can you afford to pay the delivery charges to have packaging materials delivered every day. Grapes, on the other hand, are something that will need to be purchased frequently, because they go bad quickly.

And when you get set up in business, let us know. There are a lot of people who visit this page, and they'd be interested in knowing that you're now producing a product similar to what Costco used to sell.

Chairmans Foods LLC
1725 Elm Hill Pike
Nashville, TN 37210

email: [email protected]

I got this off another product they make... SOO good!

It's so easy to make at home:
Buy rotisserie chicken at Costco or BJ's, let it cool then dice it.
Add diced celery,
dried cranberries
toasted and chopped walnuts or pecans
halved seedless grapes
Salt and pepper to taste
Mix with real mayonnaise.
Let it cool in the fridge for few hours.
Enjoy!

It doesn't say who manufactures it. Like many private-label products, it says who distributes it - which is Costco.

I've been buying too and now it's gone! Please if anyone knows, let me know.

I went to Costco in Fort Myers, FL today just to buy this chicken salad and there was none on the shelves. I asked a customer rep, they looked in the computer and said it had been removed from their distribution centers and would no longer be available. I had bought it a couple of months ago on our first trip to this Costco store and was eagerly looking forward to having it again. So .... since its not available, I just looked for recipes for chicken salad w/craisins and think I will probably find something we will like. I had never had such a good tasting chicken salad, and I am a chicken salad afficionado.

I don't know anyone else making the original product.

Last time I bought it, I was less pleased with it, although I was unaware that the recipe had changed. I figured my "taster" was off. It's been a while.

It shouldn't been too difficult to make this on your own. It's basically chicken, celery, nuts, cranberries, and souped-up mayo. There's a lot of difference in mayo recipes, and I do NOT like Hellman's recipe. One of my goals is to develop a recipe that has the zing of Miracle Whip without the trans fat. I think this would be a fantastic basis for a business, but so far, I haven't gotten off my butt and actually done anything. I'm still working on a recipe for a salad dressing powder that is as good as Good Seasons. I'm getting closer and closer, but no Kewpie yet.

If anyone comes up with a good recipe for any of these products, I'd certainly be happy to have them post it.