SOMETHING STIRRING:
Sandra Price and Phyllis Cline stir dough at Forty Carrots. The East Memphis store provides accomplished cooks with the gadgets they need and the kitchen-challenged with shortcut dishes.

The freezer inside Forty Carrots growls like a hungry stomach, and no matter how hard the employees of this business try, they can’t keep it completely full.

Customers raid it for the ready-made casserole creations of Phyllis Cline. She and her staff are the secret kitchen helpers for households all over Memphis. Besides offering prepared foods, Forty Carrots sells every kind of culinary gadget imaginable.

This is the place to buy bagel guillotines, vertical turkey roasters and tartlet tins. For the less adventurous cooks, it’s the stop-off on the way home from work to grab a chardonnay shrimp casserole, chicken enchilada soup, corn pudding, spinach Madeline or a dozen rolls.

“The smallest part of my store generates the largest amount of revenue,” Cline said. “That would be the food part to it.”

Growth, changes

Right now, Forty Carrots is gearing up for the holidays.

“Year before last was our largest, largest year,” Cline said. “We did part of 600 Thanksgiving dinners. That was all the way from everything-but-the-turkey to some of the customers just picking up a dozen rolls.”

She bought the business 25 years ago. Since then, she has shepherded it through four locations and adapted its stock to the changing needs of customers.

Forty Carrots was in Overton Square when Cline bought the business in the summer of 1984. Today, it is in the Sanderlin Centre at 5101 Sanderlin Ave.

“The business has evolved over the years,” she said. “It was heavily, heavily ensconced in not wedding china, but what I would call the upper-tier kind of breakfast-room, casual entertainment-type of dinnerware. That takes an enormous amount of stockroom space.”

Cline switched the focus to kitchen gadgetry and basic bakingware. An avid cook, Cline said she wanted to offer food but do it on her own terms. She had no intention of taking short orders or serving dinner plates.

Cline had been there, done that. Working in the side deli of another kitchenware store spurred her to buy her own business.

“I wanted to be involved in food without being in the restaurant-deli, feeding-people business,” she said.

Forty Carrots already had a successful 15-year track record when Cline bought it from the prior owners, who were retiring.

Learning on the move

One of her first major decisions was to open a satellite store in East Memphis while using the Overton Square location as her base of operations. She had the new store built without storage space because she was planning to warehouse stock at the old location.

However, she wound up vacating Overton Square because new out-of-town owners weren’t managing and maintaining the property to her liking. Three years after buying Forty Carrots, she moved the whole operation to a new location with no storage space.

“I never made that mistake again,” Cline said.

NEW GADGET: Cline, the owner of Forty Carrots, shows off a Jamie Oliver kitchen gadget that can be used to crack coarse peppercorns. – PHOTOS BY TOM WILEMON

The fourth and current location for the business has plenty of storage in back. Inside the retail area, dozens of cookbooks line a couple of high shelves, but they’re only for reference. Cline isn’t about to divest any part of her cookbook collection.

Besides the kitchen gadgets and bakeware, she sells flavoring extracts and exotic coffees with names such as African smoke, orange Seville, Sumatra mandheling and Honduran Cosagual.

She stays current with trends by keeping an eye for new products through buying trips to events such as the Atlanta Gift Show. Products she ordered from her most recent trip include kitchen scrubbers made from recycled plastic and environmentally friendly cleaning solutions without perfumes and dyes.

Cline said she has the items in stock that people need during the holidays, including candy-making kits, wine accessories and cooking thermometers.

“Anything in turkey preparation land is always a big seller both at Thanksgiving and Christmas,” she said.

Forty Carrots is based on providing superior service to its customers, and that takes employees who know their way around a kitchen.

“We try to be very service-driven,” Cline said. “We try to accommodate a lot of special requests. Nobody who works for me does not know how to cook. When the phone rings and somebody wants to know the difference between baking powder and baking soda and if they are interchangeable, they can get an answer. We get a lot of interesting questions.”