BELFAST - Julie Romano may not have been the first to ink a deal with Coastal Farms Food Processing, but when the facility's commercial kitchen opened last summer, she was quick to get in the door, and quicker to get her products — salsa and tabouli, sold under the brand name Julie Ann's Outrageous! Foods — out to market. 

In early September last year, she delivered her first batch to the Belfast Co-op. It was something she'd waited years to do.

Romano grew up in New Hampshire in a Lebanese-American family and the meals served at home often had a Mediterranean flavor. The food was always fresh, and sometimes labor intensive. A rare treat was the tabouli made by her grandmother, which Romano makes and sells as part of the Julie Ann's line, with due credit: "Sadie's Tabouli."

Romano also makes a gluten-free tabouli with quinoa instead of the traditional bulgur wheat.

Not long ago, adding a South American grain to a Mediterranean dish would have been a rare act of "fusion" outside of a few progressive pockets of the country. But with the creep health food and international sensibilities into big market retailers, the mash-ups and mutts have become the norm. Romano's flagship product, for example, is a Mexican-style salsa, with olives.

That one dates to Romano's post college days. Salsa was big at the time, but nearly all the varieties available in stores were heat pasteurized and doped with vinegar for extended shelf life. The consistency was more like spaghetti sauce than the salsa cruda of Mexico. Romano had tasted the real deal and recalled that it was infused with enough citrus and natural juices that you could drink the liquid at the bottom, and wanted to.

"If you wanted fresh salsa, you made it yourself, so that's what I always did," she said.

The response from friends was overwhelmingly positive. Descriptions of it being "wicked good" and "awesome" informed the name Romano ultimately picked for her business.

Along with the tag line "It's outrageously good," Containers of Romano's salsa and tabouli also bear the boldface slogan "FRESH, ALWAYS!" which probably best describes common theme in the Julie Ann's line. Keeping the products fresh in the store is a challenge that Romano is already considering in terms of distribution, but at a certain point, she draws a line at what's important.

"I'd rather have a short shelf life and have it be fresh," she said.

Ironically, the pursuit of freshness was almost the undoing of her business.

Four years ago her homemade salsa was accepted to the Belfast Farmers' Market. Family and friends had long urged her to "do something" with her great recipes, and she was finally gearing up to go public when she learned that fresh, processed food couldn't legally be made for sale in a home kitchen.

It was a problem the market's purveyors of raw produce and baked goods didn't have. Romano had no way to solve it, so she put the business on hold. Around the same time, her third child was born, and what might have been a brief obstacle turned into a hiatus of several years.

When Romano heard about Coastal Farms in 2011, she saw an opportunity to make her original business plan work and immediately got on the list for the commercial kitchen. In the meantime, she took a "Recipe to Market" course at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension where she learned industry procedures, including tests required during processing and how to have her foods analyzed for those ubiquitous nutrition labels. She also reserved a booth at the Farmers' Market.

"I had everything in the hall of the house, waiting," she said.

Coastal Farms opened in August, and as a result Romano only caught the tail end of the farmers' market season. In an earlier incarnation of the business the delayed start would have meant a lost opportunity, but with Romano's new credentials and a proper commercial kitchen at her disposal, off-season markets suddenly became an option.

In early February, Romano was on the road meeting with various distributors and grocery stores around Maine. She was also looking for a "co-packer" — a large scale food processor capable of doing contract work — who would be willing make Julie Ann's products for larger markets while she builds up her side of the business in Belfast.

Until then, she will continue to work in evenings after her children are in bed, making her products more-or-less the old fashioned way. Her tools are the large mixing bowls, knives and other utensils commonly used in restaurants.

She's also found some efficiencies in the shared tools available through the commercial kitchen.

Using a heavy-duty Robot Coupe food processor belonging to Coastal Farms, Romano found that she could cube tomatoes in a fraction of the time it took her to do the same with a knife. Other time savers like a pneumatic device for picking herbs would have to wait, but Romano wasn't worried.

"I'm pretty fast at it after umpteen years," she said. "I started as a little girl picking mint and parsley."

Several more products are in the works, including what Romano called a "zippy chick pea dip" and also a traditional hummus.

Most of her raw materials are from Maine and she's hoping to make arrangements with more local farmers for the coming season. She credited the awareness in the area of locally produced food with her early success and said Coastal Farms has been an important link in the chain. She's been selling around 25 containers of each product a week and expects that to double when the Farmers' Market starts in May. If she can find a co-packer and a distributor, things might really start to get outrageous.

"It's just like all those pieces fell into place," she said.

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com