Trisha Anderson

You might say that Trisha Anderson , founder of Frontier Soups in Lake Bluff , has gone from bags to riches.

With no intention of founding a business , Trisha volunteered 15 years ago to develop a food product to sell at a friend's Junior League fund-raiser.Using a recipe for 11-bean soup from one of the cooking classes she taught , Trisha set up a minipacking plant in her base-ment and loaded tons of beans and herbs into 275 brown lunch bags adorned with handmade labels.

The day of the show she brewed up a batch of the hearty bean soup in a crockpot to serve as samples and proceeded to sell out all of her bags the first night of the four-day market.

It didn't take long for Trisha to wake up and smell the soup.

She developed a second variety of soup-in-a-bag and hit the road , traveling to craft boutiques and Junior League fund-raisers in Milwaukee , Michigan , Mis-souri and Indiana.

I added a soup a year , says Trisha.

With a P.T. Bar-num-like talent for marketing , Trisha focused on her customers' need for speed and nutrition , their desire to serve something at least partly homemade , and their ongoing love affair with regional cooking.

For serious speed , Trisha developed a line of soups called Homemade in Minutes that go from stock pot to soup mug in 30 minutes or less.For those who can wait a little longer , Trisha offers her Hearty Origi-nals , most of which cook in an hour or less.

To provide nutritious meals in a mug , Trisha relies on healthy ingredients such as beans , grains and vegeta-bles.

The all-natural ingredients are low in sodium , fat and sugar and high in protein , says Trisha.

To make us feel like we're preparing something homemade , Trisha devised soups that require simple , fresh add-ins - onions , chopped chicken or broth.

I can't get the same satisfaction out of opening a can as I can from stirring something on the back burner of the stove , says Trisha , who calls herself a crusader for the satisfaction of home cook-ing..

The names of the soups alone are enough to intrigue the tastebuds.Trisha hitched her wagon - or maybe her soup pot - to the popular regional cooking trend , developing flag-waving recipes like California Gold Rush White Bean Chili , Illinois Prairie Corn Chow-der and Texas Wrangler Blackbean Soup.

For cooks who really want to play with their food , Trisha includes an Inventive Variation in each package with suggestions for jazzing up the basic soup with something special like shrimp or sherry.

The tomato soup can be made straight from the package , or you can add shrimp and feta cheese for a gourmet soup , says Trisha.Add a little sherry and fresh mushrooms to the Pennsylvania Woodlands Mushroom Barley and invite the governor of the Keystone State for dinner.

Frontier Soups also transform into other dishes.The Missouri Homestead Garden Gaz-pacho cooks down into a marinara for pasta.Tangle a little with the Texas Wrangler Blackbean Soup and it be-comes a dip.

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In 1991 Trisha gained entree into several national specialty markets such as Whole Foods , which operates stores in Palatine , Wheaton , Deerfield , Evanston , River Forest and Chicago.Today her product line has grown to more than 20 soup mixes , a quartet of pasta salad mixes called I'll Bring the Salad , and most recently , the Colorado Morning breakfast collec-tion.

The breakfast mixes include Cranberry Streusel Coffee Cake , corn-bread and Streusel Oatmeal with dried fruit and cranberries , a hot breakfast hearty enough to power a morning's hike in the Rockies.

Success came as a surprise to creator and CEO Trisha , whose previous cooking experience included a little catering and some teaching in Lake Forest.Now she has all the trappings of a thriving business woman - national distribution , her own Web site , www.frontiersoups.com , an 8 , 000-square-foot warehouse and pro-duction exceeding 300 , 000 packages a year.

I don't feel like an executive because I still have a hand in the soup.

pot , '' says Trisha , who devel-ops recipes and continues to peddle her soups , salads and breakfasts at fund-raisers and folk-art fairs.

Locally , she will be participating in Christmas at the Faire Oct. 25 to 28 at the DuPage County fairgrounds in Wheaton , where the soup will definitely be on.

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Outstanding Pasta, Rice, Bean Or Soup: Illinois Prairie Corn Chowder from Frontier Soups - Contact: Trisha Anderson, 895 S. Northpoint Blvd. Waukegan, IL 60085; 847/688-1200; www.frontiersoups.com

Frontier Soups owner Trisha Anderson of Lake Forest created this wheat berry salad as a summertime extension of her Montana High Plains Wheat Berry Chili.
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Anderson has been running her soup business since 1986.
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"Let's get the population used to whole grains," said Anderson, a Lake Forest resident who started Frontier Soups back in 1986.Anderson, who'd taught cooking classes, brought an 11-bean soup mix to a holiday market and was shocked by how quickly it sold.

Now Anderson sells 33 soups, plus supporting products like cornbread and brownie mix, out of her Waukegan office and warehouse.Frontier's latest venture is a line of whole wheat soups that meet the 2005 Dietary Guidelines recommending 16 grams of whole grains per day.

But this is summer, when cool foods are hot, so Anderson tweaked the whole grains of her soups to create summer salads that are chock-full of the protein, fiber and nutrients that can only come from whole grains.

A whole grain is made of the entire seed or kernel of the plant, including the bran (the seed's shell), the germ (that will sprout a new plant if fertilized) and the endosperm (the germ's food supply, which is the largest portion of the seed and includes carbohydrates and proteins).

According to the Whole Grain Council, refined grains usually include only the endosperm, eliminating 25 percent of the protein and at least 17 nutrients from the grain.The Whole Grain Council has authorized a new food label to mark foods that have good or excellent sources of whole grain.

Trisha Anderson was happy to convert her soup grains into salads, especially since wheat berries are hearty, filling and surprisingly moist.
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"I always put cheese in a salad, with some fresh herbs," Anderson said.
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"In September they fly off the shelves," Anderson said.But for now, her employees are happy to crowd around the conference room table trying the new salads.

"I didn't mean to start a business," says Trisha Anderson, founder of Frontier Soups."I was raising three young children, and cooking was a recreation and a love for me." One day a friend asked her to bring a food item to the local Junior League Fair to spice up the usual offerings of jewelry, crafts and clothing."In a cooking class I was teaching, I was experimenting with a classic ham hock and bean soup recipe," Anderson recalls, "so I happened to have a product when the opportunity presented itself."

Trisha spent the next several days measuring a variety of beans and some well-chosen spices, then packing them by hand into 275 bags.She cooked up a crockpot of Minnesota Heartland Soup and was on her way to Frontier's first product sampling.

"Packaged soups are not just instant, one-dimensional, just-add-water types," says Trisha Anderson, owner of Frontier Soups, Waukegan, Ill.

Trisha Anderson is founder and owner of Frontier Soups of Waukegan.For starters, her Illinois Prairie Corn Chowder won top honors in a 2005 competition