“My cooking is going places where my singing career has not gone,” she says.

LaBelle started cooking when she was 10 years old, escaping to the family garage to whip up her signature spicy ketchup. She never gave it up. Throughout her performing career, she cooked for Elton John, Prince and the Rolling Stones, going as far as labeling the tinfoil trays with her name so there was no mistaking Patti LaBelle’s food for the catered stuff. Her first cookbook was published in 1999. “Friends of mine would always say, ‘Why don’t you open a restaurant or start your own line of food?’ ” she says. In 2003, she experimented with selling clothes on the Home Shopping Network, but she wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the garments, and her heart just wasn’t in it. The experience taught her that she would rather wholly own a business than merely license her name and personal brand to a third party. With Patti’s Good Life, by contrast, she’s near obsessively hands-on. She invites industrial cooks into her kitchen to see how she makes her food, then tests the product as many as ten or 20 times. Attention to detail pays off: When she launched Patti’s Good Life sweet potato pie in Walmart in the fall of 2015, it went viral on YouTube and in one three-day period before Thanksgiving was selling at a rate of one pie per second. “Even today we’re selling more than five times the number of sweet potato pies than we did before we launched our Patti sweet potato pie,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon tells Forbes via email. McMillon credits her products’ popularity to the star’s strict oversight, noting that she has personally visited Walmart stores to pepper its customers and salespeople with questions about what they want to see from Patti’s Good Life. LaBelle understands the need for “innovation and constant improvement,” he says. She’s continuing to expand. She plans to launch a line of wines later this year: a rosé, a sauvignon blanc and a cabernet modeled after the high-end bottles she favors—but at one-fifth the cost. And she’s looking to grow the Patti’s Good Life frozen breakfast line, which debuted last summer with pancakes and waffles and will soon include a syrup that is diabetic-friendly. “My cooking is going places where my singing career has not gone,” she says.