Posted on 07/18/24
| News Source: Baltimore Magazine
Baltimore, MD - July 18, 2024 - With its refrigerated trucks and vast parking lot, the outside of the Tulkoff Food Products plant looks like every other business in the industrial park. But the 98-year-old business is anything but ordinary.
The six-acre site Tulkoff occupies in Holabird was once part of an active Army base during World War II—it’s where they tested the iconic Willys Jeep—and now houses a football-field-sized room filled floor to ceiling and front to back with horseradish.
You might think that a room filled with over two million pounds of horseradish root would make your eyes water, or at least your nose tingle, but instead it smells like the dirt that still clings to the root of the horseradish plants from when they were two feet in the ground. (Horseradish’s signature nasal-clearing kick comes from oils called isothiocyanates that are released once the roots are crushed.) And standing in Tulkoff’s lobby—filled with mementos from nearly a century of business—the strongest scent seems to be fresh ginger wafting from another part of the factory floor.
Phil Tulkoff, the company’s president for the past 19 years, descends the staircase. He’s warm but not overly chatty. There’s not an extra second in his day to spare. Were it not for the speckles of gray in his beard and some laugh lines around his eyes that get activated when he talks about his family, you’d never guess he was in his 60s. A sweet golden retriever named Sofie—Tulkoff is fostering her for the Valor Service Dogs program—trails after him.
As he walks back up the stairs to his office, he passes a sepia-toned photograph of his Uncle Sol, clad in a tiger-patterned sports coat, peeling horseradish root. Look closer and you’ll see that Sol is standing in front of another black-and-white photograph of himself in the exact same coat.
(That tiger pattern is no mere fashion statement. Upon returning home from Europe after WWII, Sol was determined to incorporate the war symbol of a tiger crushing a German tank into the Tulkoff product line and, with that, Tiger Sauce was born.)
Tulkoff settles into a chair behind his desk. The room is part museum—there’s a big photograph on the wall of the company’s previous headquarters in Brewers Hill (before luxury condos and Target) and some of their original packaging with retro logos of times past—and part central command.