By Amy Hotz, Star News

Operation Salsa Drop is under way. (We just hope they don’t drop the bottles on concrete.)

Flaming Amy’s Burrito Barn is on a mission to deliver jars of three of their top-selling salsas to troops overseas. The idea came to owners Amy and Jay Muxworthy in early April when Pvt. 1st class Justin Young, a soldier serving at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, made a joking comment on Flaming Amy’s Facebook page.

Jay told him he’d send enough to feed an army.

So the couple set about experimenting with different ways to ship the salsa. Dry ice didn’t work. And Jay didn’t like canning it.

Failure was not an option. The decision was made to professionally bottle three of their best flavors: Flaming Hot, Traditional Salsa and Pineapple Jalapeño.

“The whole thing has kind of snowballed into a grander scheme,” Amy said. “We’re going to do it as a full-on nonprofit to try to get as much over there as we can.”

The UPC bars are done. Jay meets with Bobbee’s Bottling in Louisburg this week to discuss details. Also this week, N.C. State’s Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences should be finished examining the recipes and have the nutritional and other label information ready. A tattoo artist friend of theirs, Axel Mercier, is working on the rest of the label, which should exude the Flaming Amy’s style local diners have become accustomed to.

Meanwhile, Jay and Amy have been meeting with a lawyer to create a nonprofit corporation for shipping and making the salsa.

“We’re trying to set it up modeled sort of like the Newman’s Own type of thing where it’s a total nonprofit corporation; it’ll be separate, somewhat from Flaming Amy’s,” he said. “Although it’ll be our salsas, it’ll be somewhat its own entity. All the money from the salsas will be rolled back into the company to make more salsa.”

The idea is that after the salsa is bottled, it will be sold at the restaurants and anyone in the country would be able to buy a bottle from a new website, which is under development. Each bottle sold for its retail price will pay for a bottle to be shipped overseas to the troops.

“I figured this was a good way not only to support the soldiers, but we’ve got a lot of people that want our salsas that no longer live in this area or visit the area in the summertime and this is a way that we can sell a shelf-stable version and start shipping it to them,” Jay said. “I think it’ll be a win-win for everyone.”

Originally, they had planned to just box the bottles and send them to the military units. But Amy found out that once the boxes reach the military post office overseas, it could sit for weeks before being distributed to the troops.

“That’s just not going to work,” she said.

Now, she’s trying to team up with other organizations that already send supplies overseas, such as the USO and other troop support groups, to expedite the process. If all goes according to the battle plan, the first jars of Flaming Amy’s salsa should be rolling out by late July/early August.

Those who would like to contribute to the program now can drop some cash in a jar at the register. When the nonprofit status is finished, donations will be tax deductible.

“You want to hear our mission objective? My husband wrote up a whole thing: To exploit any and all means necessary in order to get our salsa to the troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Amy said.

For more information about Operation Salsa Drop, type “Flaming Amy’s” into the search field on Facebook.com.

Read the original story here.