BELFAST - It was on a break from college, visiting the family of his future-wife, that Brian McCarthy tasted dilly beans for the first time. His thought at the time was: why have I never had these before?

The short answer is that he grew up in Ohio, and dilly beans are fairly specific to New England — his wife is from Maine and the recipe was one passed down from her grandmother. But the question, like any that accompanies a minor epiphany, had more to it than that.

Over a stretch of years during which McCarthy would make serious forays into landscape architecture and commercial piloting, skipping back and forth between Ohio and Florida before settling in Belfast, the question evolved into something like: why aren't dilly beans as popular as pickles?

On a recent afternoon at Coastal Farms Food Processing where McCarthy was testing out an elaborate production line of specialized machinery he'll use for his business, Magic Dilly Beans, he offered a convincing answer.

"You can get a nice sized jar of pickles for four or five bucks," he said. "But you can't find dilly beans for that. The same jar might be $10."

McCarthy had started canning his own dilly beans back in Ohio, making variations on the traditional recipe and selling them in small batches. When he came to Belfast, he tried to scale up by booking time in a catering kitchen, but the hours of trimming and packing the beans and the cost of glass jars kept the price tag in the specialty foods range.

The solution he hit on was to use a resealable plastic bag already widely used for everything from cereal to cat food and dishwasher tablets. The empty bags lay flat — 1,500 occupy the space of the dozen glass jars he was using for his dilly beans. The bags are easier to fill and they expand at the base allowing them to stand upright on a shelf. They also weigh next to nothing, which means dramatically lower shipping costs.

As a bonus, he later found that he could heat the filled bags according to the same procedure used for canning, but then cool them immediately after — an impossibility with glass jars, which would shatter. By stopping the cooking process short, the beans retained more vitamins and a little bit of crunch.

McCarthy seemed giddy about his set-up at Coastal Farms. It's a big step up from hand processing, and without an established market, he acknowledged that it's a bit of a gamble, but he was headed this direction anyway.

Before Coastal Farms opened last summer, McCarthy was planning to retrofit a garage as a working kitchen. Having the basic space taken care of at Coastal Farms, however, allowed him to invest more money in equipment. In the long run, machines like the jet-engine-shaped trimmer that automatically de-stems the beans by the carton-load will dramatically speed up the process.

Where it once took him a week to fill 500 jars, he now anticipates doing around 2,000 jar-equivalent pouches a day.

Keeping costs down may be McCarthy's best chance of snapping the cucumber's long reign over the pickled food market. But marketing also is going to play a part.

Dilly beans aren't widely known outside of New England, so breaking into the pickle market is going to take more than a reminder of an overlooked alternative, like the pork industry's what-about-us push in the late '80s for "the other white meat." It's going to mean getting people to try something totally new.

McCarthy has lots of marketing ideas that seem to have sprung directly from his own excitable personality. The basic gist of all of them: Dilly beans are more fun than pickles. (!)

Starting with "Silly Dilly," the product's namesake mascot, who appears on the pouch as a cartoon string bean. In the evolving lore, Silly uses his magic to turn one of his fellow green beans yellow. To this end, McCarthy includes a single "magic" yellow wax bean in each pouch. Silly Dilly's nemesis, "Boring Ol' Pickle" is there too.

"We're still trying to figure out what Boring Ol' Pickle does," he said, laughing.

McCarthy bubbles over with other ideas that may turn up on business' website: a Where's Waldo-style hunt for Dilly; a contest to come up with a story featuring Dilly and Boring Ol' Pickle.

And there are flavors too. The recipe that first turned him on to dilly beans gets the "traditional" label, but there's also dialed-back version with less seasoning, a horseradish variety and one with enough habanero peppers to inspire love or fear, depending upon how you feel about hot stuff. 

"We just want to have fun. Food is fun," he said. "Obviously you need it to survive but it's a fun part of life."

Ethan Andrews can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com