My dad was cooking bacon one Saturday morning,” remembers Abbey, now 15 and living in White Bear Lake, MN. “When he took it out of the microwave, we were out of paper towels to soak up the grease. So, he was just holding it up and the fat was dripping off of it.”

At that point, Abbey’s dad, Jon, joked, “It’s too bad we can’t just hang this up somewhere and let it drip dry.” It was at that moment, says Abbey, that her million-dollar idea was born. “I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just cook it hanging up?’”

That same day, Abbey drew a sketch of her idea and showed it to her dad. “We went down in our basement and tried making some prototypes (models),” she says. “We used wooden dowels and pieces of plastic coat hangers.” Then they inserted their wood and plastic racks into a glass dish, loaded the contraption with bacon, and put the whole crazy experiment in the microwave. “It worked! The fat dripped off the bacon,” says Abbey, laughing, “but the materials weren’t the best.”

Bringing Home the Bacon

The Flecks knew the Makin Bacon dish was a great product, so they offered it to big retailers like Wal-Mart and K-mart who, at first, turned down the funky-looking dish. So the Flecks took it to the Armour company, makers of Armour brand bacon.

Armour liked the Flecks’ bacon-cooking idea, and placed an ad for the Makin Bacon dish on the back of each package of Armour bacon. Customers sent in $6.99 and a UPC bar code symbol from the bacon, and got the Makin Bacon dish in the mail. This deal, says Jon, “was brilliant because we received the money before we shipped the product.”

As word of Abbey’s invention spread, she became company spokesperson to the media. Over the last six years, Abbey has talked to reporters from newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV, and appeared on television shows like Oprah, Dateline NBC, 20/20, and The Late Show with David Letterman.

All the press coverage soon got the attention of Wal-Mart and the Flecks got their original wish — a distribution agreement with a national chain store. However, this created another problem. The Flecks needed a lot of cash so they could make 100,000 dishes and send them to Wal-Mart right away. Abbey’s grandfather, George Fleck, took out a loan on his farm so Abbey and her dad could have the money they needed

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