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A half-dozen students line stainless steel counters in the culinary arts classroom kitchen at Dorsey High School, chopping, digging and peeling ingredients for avocado sauce. It’s all the business’s picky class that led them to open Dorsey’s Green Sauce, which has a name and resemblance to the school’s colors. The students started with avocados and over the past two years have grown into a business that sells thousands of bottles in person and online.
California wants its public schools to prepare students for careers after graduation, not just college. In South LA, these young people are taking the lead in building a business — and it’s just getting started.
It all started in the year It’s 2021, when Sonja Mason Briscoe, head of the Culinary Arts Department, is preparing to bring students back into the kitchen after the pandemic shuts down. She told KCRW that she asked herself, “What else can be offered to students so they can learn things they can use after high school?”
The answer came when she spoke with Nils Kotter, a volunteer who teaches a weekly class at Dorsey. They decided that the best way to prepare students for careers was to build a real business with them.
The plan was to give students from grade 11 the option to continue the elective until their senior year. Any profits from the business are kept 100% by the students — an important part of the plan, says Mason Briscoe, because nearly 70% of the students she serves live in group homes or foster care.
With a concept in mind, she handed over control to Kotter, a real estate developer from Pacific Palisades who recently bought a 50-acre avocado grove in Ojai that had been badly damaged by the Thomas Fire.
On the first day of the new election in January 2022, Cotter walked in and told his 30 students to remind them that they could start any business they wanted, but they could use avocados for free. “And it was like, boom, these ideas are just coming out,” Kotter says.
The students began coming up with recipe ideas and then worked in the kitchen with another volunteer teacher, Mel Nicola, to perfect the hot sauce. No one remembers how many recipes they tried, said Grade 12 student Anya Brown, but it seemed like hundreds. Where their first recipe lacked, she says, “Our next recipe we just added and added until we got a nice green color … good flavor.”
Students in Dorsey High School’s chosen business form an assembly line to make Dorsey Green Sauce. Photo by Megan Jamerson/KCRW
The soup is light and crisp, with an avocado base supported by cilantro, spices and lemon. After the recipe was perfected, Kotter dived into the business connection and volunteered the advertising agency to help his children build a website and develop a logo. The final version is an avocado seed made to look like an alien head.
Then it was time to cook, which was more effort than some students expected. Twelfth grader Juan Morales remembers the day his students planned to make 100 bottles of sauce in three hours. Five hours later, he was only 70 years old.
Next time the class was inspired by a behind-the-scenes video of a McDonald’s kitchen found online, Morales created an assembly line. They picked up speed until the big commercial kitchen mixer blew up.
Six months after the elective course began, students sold Dorsey’s Green Sauce to the public for the first time in July 2022 at the Atwater Village Farmers Market. Photo courtesy of Nils Kotter.
Last July, the students prepared for the grand opening at the Atwater Village Farmers Market. They brought about 100 12-oz. Bottles of soup worth $10 each.
Brown was there that day and said she was so shocked, she felt unable to speak as shoppers left. But after getting some encouragement from Kotter, Brown says that talking to someone will attract more customers, and then “if you don’t have anyone, you’ll go to more people.”
She sold Dorsey’s Green Sauce by telling customers the history of the sauce, explaining that the students cut and grind everything by hand. Her words: “You can put the soup on anything. Want to put it on a burrito? You’re wearing a burrito. Want to put on a taco? You can put it on a taco. Do you want to put it in the grain? You can do that too,” she says with a smile and a laugh.
Customers bought the nudge – and the soup. The students sold out on the first day.
This school year, the students now plan to place online orders.
Food and dining website Eater LA got wind of the new sauce, and when it came time to publish their holiday gift guide, Dorsey Green Sauce was one of the 30 items featured on the shortlist. Within a week of that article, the students had to place orders for 1,000 bottles and list the brew on the website as sold.
This semester, the students are working on two more versions of the trio, including one that sits on a shelf. They are also selling branded merchandise and eyeing potential partnerships with local restaurants.
“These practices come out of these experiences with a completely different level of confidence, which in many cases equates to happiness and is a next step for them,” says Kotter.
The end of senior year is on the minds of many students.
Juan Morales Deutsch says he got an idea for his future when he met with students, who did an ad presentation to market the spray. Seeing what graphic designers are doing and how they think about social media campaigns has changed Morales’ thinking about life after high school.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do for college,” Morales said. But once I saw how Deutsch works, I literally changed my major to… graphic design or video production.
Visit dorseygreen.com to sign up for updates on when the next Dorsey Green Sauce will be on sale.
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