When Bruce Hams came to America, he quickly learned that the All-American hotdog has very little in common with Australia’s favorite stadium snack, the FourNTwenty meat pie. What’s more, hot dogs did nothing to satisfy his yen for the Australian snack. “In Australia, FourNTwenty pies are as well known as Budweiser Beer is here,” Hams said. Hams knew what he had to do: Convince the entire U.S. population to switch from the beloved ballpark wiener to the warm, savory sausages and minced-meat treats wrapped in the golden, crusty pastry shells he was raised on Down Under. “They produce over 70 million pies in Australia,” Hams said. “In Australia, when we watch Australian-rules football, we eat a FourNTwenty pie.” But just in case his plan to change America into a meat-pie-loving nation, Hams had a Plan B: He would take over a failing importer of Australia’s FourNTwenty brand of snack pies that another Australian expatriate had started in Florida. After acquiring the Florida firm, Hams version of the Aussie Import Company was born in 2007 in Winnetka. “It’s hard to have a plan,” Hams recalls the earliest days of his still-young company as he strategized how he would succeed where his predecessor had failed. After all, selling a completely unfamiliar food item to a country already brimming with every imaginable ethnic, fusion, gourmet, vegan and other category of food from around the globe wouldn’t be easy. “What you do next depends on the response you get at first,” Hams said. “You’ve got to get people to try it. Give them samples.” At first it seemed getting a contract with major grocery stores would be a good place to start. He would pass out samples on cocktail sticks to eager, would-be meat-pie lovers as they wheeled their shopping carts to the freezer case and loaded them with all the varieties from the entire FourNTwenty line. “We’ve done samplings at supermarket,” Hams said. “Yes; people get to try the product. No; you don’t make any money. The supermarkets all want it for nothing, but you can’t give it away.” Costly endeavor The problem for Aussie Import Company in going to the largest supermarket chains was that the cost of doing free-sample promotions was high, while the margins required by the stores was too small in comparison to the initial quantities of product Hams would be selling. “The samplings are absolutely necessary,” he said. “You can do all the advertising in the world, but without putting the pies into the people’s mouths, they’re not going to buy it.” Deciding that for the time being he was spinning his wheels with supermarkets, Hams took the company in a different direction. “We decided to concentrate on the Australian population living in the U.S.,” Hams said. “Once they knew it was here we would have a strong base.” With the revised strategy in place, the fledgling company was in the black by 2008, pulling in a modest but respectable $50,000 in revenue last year. Hams is sure there would not have been any profit left over if he had not decided to change course from his original business plan early on. This year, Aussie Import Company expects to double last year’s numbers, bringing in $100,000 in revenue by the end of December. By word of mouth and attendance at as many Australian-themed events Hams could find, he feels confident about having made a lasting mark on the Australian expatriate market. “It continues to grow,” he said. “And now we’re working on breaking into the mainstream American consumer market.” Other avenues Still, Hams is not ready to return to the big supermarkets. “We’re looking at amusement parks, airlines, cruise ships, sporting events, universities,” he said. “We wanted to go to the farmers markets, but it turns out that only food grown or made here in California is allowed by most of them.” But, said Hams, street fairs are the next best thing. “And we have a lot of them here in California,” he said. The first street fair Aussie Food products participated in was in Lakewood, where he ran out of product after a couple of hours, Hams said, thanks to people “coming back for seconds and thirds” of the FourNTwenty cocktail sausage rolls and party pies. The latter is Aussie Imports Company’s smallest offering, and is a pastry shell with seasoned sausage, grated vegetables and gravy, while the party pies are “premium chunks of beef tenderly cooked and blended with FourNTwenty’s specially seasoned gravy, encased in a delicious golden pastry.” Hams said he started the business with about $15,000. His products come from his island-nation homeland via cargo ship. Aussie Imports Company leases warehouse space near LAX, where he meets the challenge presented by dealing in perishable, imported frozen-food items by keeping his stocks fresh and rotating product out of storage and into the hands of consumers as quickly as possible. But some of the most baffling issues he has faced since leaving his first U.S. job as a taxi driver have emanated from the government. “I had been importing one product that was labeled ‘King-Size Sausage Rolls’ for almost two years then they made us change the lettering on all the boxes from that to ‘King-Size Savory Rolls.” New product arrived at the Port of Long Beach weeks later with the prescribed labeling printed on the packaging. “We never got an explanation of why,” Hams recalled. “But it doesn’t pay to spend a lot of time questioning this stuff; you just do it how they want.” Before migrating to the United States, Bruce Hams was an importer of American products to Australia. “I was the first one to sell the outdoor misting systems you see everywhere in hot climate today,” he said. “But ten years ago, they had never seen anything like that in Perth or anywhere else in Australia. It was an easy sell.” Now, however, selling his Australian products to American consumers is a challenging task, but one Hams wakes up to do with a smile. “You really just have to taste a FourNTwenty pie to know why,” he said.