AUBURN – Since Susan Eminger’s gourmet strawberries were featured Tuesday night on Food Network, a quarter-million people have visited her Web site – as many hits as she logged the whole year before.

After the one-woman business got 80 orders in the first half-hour, she declared herself booked for the week on her answering machine and online and hoped people understood. Customers kept ordering anyway.

Now she’s braced for a triple-airing of “Road Tasted” on Sunday.

At the ready: 800 giant strawberries, 50 pounds of chocolate and 20 whole cheesecakes.

“This is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to my business. It’s just what I wanted,” Eminger said.

Eminger started Eminger Berries out of her small cape 18 months ago. She patented the berry-stuffing technique, cutting out a wedge, filling it with any number of delicious-on-their-own fillings, like chocolate cheesecake infatuation, and smothering the whole thing in chocolate.

She thinks the crew of “Road Tasted” found her through a free Made in Maine Web site listing. Hosts Jamie and Bobby Deen filmed at the Black Watch Restaurant and Pub on Court Street in Auburn in July. Seven minutes of show took a whole day to tape.

They strung up lights, miked her up and started “beauty shots,” like enticing shots of berries being sliced in slow motion.

“They actually call it food porn,” she said, and laughed.

The episode, titled “Portland … Maine, that is!” also samples Wicked Whoopies and Morrison’s Maine chowder.

Eminger was told it would air Sept. 19, but in Food Networks’ online TV schedule, that particular episode appeared to be pushed to Oct. 3, then Oct. 17.

But on Tuesday, “at 10 o’clock at night, the phone just started ringing off the hook, and I thought something horrible had happened,” she said.

It was just her berries bursting into the national spotlight.

Cheesecake-stuffed are the post popular, most likely because those were featured on the show. Eminger’s berries sell for $9 each, with $25 shipping. The high-end price is probably what leads to way more hits than orders, but given the size of her business, that’s OK, she said.

Locally at the Black Watch, berries sell for $6.

She expects the show to re-air on Sunday at 4:30 p.m., 11 p.m., then again at 1 a.m. Food Networks’ online schedule says differently, but, as she learned, it’s been wrong before.

Eminger’s first employee starts Monday.