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When Life Hands You Lemons?
Roasted corn and lemonade business brings couple sweet success
Lemons – and lots of them – are the basis of Elliott and Susan Stockard’s Main Squeeze Lemonade Co.If you’ve been to Mule Days in Columbia or the Tennessee Renaissance Festival in Triune – or any number of regional fairs and festivals – chances are you’ve seen Elliott and Susan Stockard in action, squeezing lemonade and roasting corn at their concessions booth, the Main Squeeze Lemonade Co.
When the Stockards say their lemonade is “fresh-squeezed,” they aren’t kidding. Susan, who’s known as the lemonade lady, puts each lemon in the squeezer
and squeezes the juice directly into a serving cup before mixing it with their handmade syrup. Elliott adjusts the secret formula according to the weather – sweeter when it’s cool, and more tart when it’s hot. Folks come by just to watch the process.
“I can squeeze a lemon about every seven or eight seconds if I’m going really fast,” Susan says,
“Sometimes every 10 seconds. And I keep that up –
I mean, I do it a lot.”
That often means upwards of 1,500 times a day. When you start talking corn, Elliott’s the one who lights up.
“We have a broker in Nashville who buys corn from all over. There’s one outfit in Ohio – oh my, they grow good corn!” he says. “We cook our corn in the shuck, and people say, ‘I bet you soaked that in water overnight to get it so juicy.’ But we just cook it in its own juice. And you know, yesterday that corn was growing in the field.”
It all started about seven years ago when Elliott’s friend Mark Thornell – now his business partner – became convinced they could get rich selling caramel apples and bottled water at festivals. So they gave
it a try.
“We were still selling that same batch of apples nine months later,” Elliott says with a laugh.
That first show didn’t make them rich, but it
fueled their interest in the concessions business.
And they happened to set up their booth right next
to a corn roaster.
“I kept watching him,” Elliott says. “Afterward I told my partner, ‘This is what we need to be doing.’”
The cost of a corn roaster – about $10,000 – was out of their reach, so the partners designed their own and had it built.
“To this minute it works just fine,” Elliott says.
The roaster debuted at a tractor show in Lawrenceburg.
“We started selling corn as fast as we could pull it out of that thing. And I thought, ‘This is a money machine! We’re gonna retire!’ And then it started raining. We never sold corn that fast again.”
But they kept selling it, hauling the trailer-mounted roaster to shows within a 100-mile radius of the couple’s home in Columbia – nearly every weekend from April to mid-October. And they added sweet iced tea and loaded baked potatoes to the Main Squeeze Lemonade Co. menu.
Their vegetarian fare has helped them get “in” at events that are sometimes closed to new vendors.
One aspect of the business the couple particularly enjoys is dressing in medieval costumes for the Renaissance Festival each spring. Another is looking up from the squeezer or the roaster and seeing old friends they haven’t seen in 20 or 30 years.
Susan and Elliott have roots deep in the Middle Tennessee soil, and after traveling separate paths that led away from home, they eventually returned – and found each other. That was 20 years ago, and they have been each other’s main squeeze ever since.
“This is an interesting way to make a living,” Elliott says.
“We have fun,” Susan adds. “He’s my main squeeze, and I’m his main squeeze …”
“And we sell lemonade,” Elliott says.
Story by Carol Cowan
