Archive for the ‘All Topics’ Category

Here is our last Valentines Day love story! All of our Foodzie producers have a love for good food. But for some, their love of food goes hand-in-hand with their love for each other. Meet Bill & Rachel, the owners of P.O.P. Candy in Santa Monica, CA.

1. How did you meet?
Cinco De Mayo, 20ish years ago: Billy was on a quest with friends to find the best margarita and tacos in Los Angeles. One of his friends pulled Rachel in for her opinion on the matter, and the group ended up in line at a taco truck in Pasadena. Great tacos, great fun. Let the record show that when Rachel made her entrance, she looked left, locking eyes with another guy of the group, instead of right (where Bill stood). Rachel ended up hooking up with the-guy-on-the-left for the next decade…they opened up a restaurant in San Francisco (Rumpus). Bill and Rachel became really good friends through the years that followed (which was best, since Bill was married at the time). As life goes, 10 years later, they hooked up again — both single and solo this time — one Labor Day weekend over blasting music, great wine, and amazing conversation when Rachel moved back to Los Angeles, and have been together ever since that weekend. And now — cuz of the “I do” thing — will be 4ever…like tattoos.

2. How did you decide to start a food business together?
Rachel had been making a butter crunch candy that she’d give as gifts in ever increasing amounts of family and friends for year. One gift receiver, an a-list Bev Hills hair stylist, told her she should start a business selling the stuff. (She also pointed across the street at the swank Peninsula Hotel and said it was good enough to sell there. Rachel stored the suggestion in her “things to consider” mental file.) Meanwhile, Bill was stacking up his years as a restaurant consultant, but offers were taking him away from Rachel on the road. When Rachel learned that a mutual friend would be selling her handmade cards at a local farmers’ market during Christmas season 2007, she remembered her hair stylist’s suggestion, and asked if she and Bill could test the waters selling her butter crunch at a small table in the booth. The p.o.p. name and look came oh-so-easily and, at the farmers’ market, the product was an instant success. p.o.p. was invited to be a permanent vendor before the day had ended. After some deliberation (and a big decision to kill the business if need be to save the relationship), p.o.p. candy was launched (we’d love to say like a rocket, but alas, more like a cessna)!

3. What is the best thing about working together?
We’ve both always had tendencies of working WAY too many hours at our jobs. Being able to work with each other and spend countless hours together collaborating on building a successful business has been a gas (although, yes, sometimes, the deliberate silence in the room after a heated discussion has been ear piercing). We’ve found we have complimentary strengths…Rachel has been strong in the branding, vision, and direction of pop. Bill has strong business and production skills. Both have suprisingly enjoyed a steep learning curve from each other. We’ve also found that people have enjoyed us as a couple..that was never even a consideration, but’s been very fun to enjoy. We’ve gotten through some really hard stuff, the deal breaker kind. Two year’s into the business, we’re more certain than ever that our life and business partnership is exactly where we both wanna be. Fo sho.

4. Any funny stories or challenges that have resulted from working with your significant other?
Working together on new products with people we’ve met through the business in new venues has been very cool to experience — our lives have been stretched. We’ve discovered lots of new things together about people, about what works and what doesn’t, and about each other. Sometimes it’s yin and yang … Rachel’s attention to every detail…Bill’s tendency to always want to move on quickly. The challenges? Never enough time, not enough money, not enough sleep. The need to very quickly expand our production capacity three-fold within a few days’ time … that was an experience that we can actually laugh about now. A big challenge has been not having enough time for fun despite many hours together. It’s not the we don’t have fun working together, we just that we need more time NOT working … together. Maybe the biggest challenge has been learning how to take care of the relationship while taking care of the business. Finding out that we can do both made our decision to marry easy the the beginning of 2010, so all together the experience has brought us closer together than ever. What’s the saying: “If it don’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger.”

5. Who comes up with better flavors?
Bill has more food knowledge … with recipes and food combinations (i.e., rosemary almond), but Rachel brings out-of-the-box thinking, resulting in interesting flavor combinations (i.e., thyme walnut and cherries inspired by Thanksgiving stuffing), so I’d say the answer is Rachel. Think of Rachel as the kite with Bill holding the strings … together they have something that works quite well. Okay, maybe not the right metaphor … let’s see … how about Bill is the flagpole and Rachel is the flag? … no,no I’ve got it: Bill is the sound recorder and Rachel is the singer! Stop me please! What will be the next flavors? We’ll know as soon as we tasted them! All we can say is that when we hit on one, we know it right away. It’s an OMG moment.

Valentines Day is fast approaching and we all know that a little love makes everything taste better. All of our Foodzie producers have a love for good food. But for some, their love of food goes hand-in-hand with their love for each other. Meet Clare & Matt, the owners of Quince & Apple in Madison, Wisconsin.

1. How did you meet?

CLARE: Matt and I both went to school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison but we didn’t exactly meet there. It was the week before the Iraq war started in 2001 and there was a big protest on campus. For some reason it involved a giant tent being erected and people sleeping in it overnight (this was February in Wisconsin!) and for some reason we both thought this seemed like a great plan. We spent a lot of time huddled together in twenty-degree weather and found it all to be very romantic.

MATT: Clare’s pretty much got the story. I had had a crush on Clare for awhile before then, but I don’t think she had any idea who I was. I remember I went to a big meeting to plan this tent protest and she was there and even though the whole idea of sleeping outside in the dead of winter seemed crazy to me, I kept going to meetings because Clare was there. I don’t think either one of us was ever totally sold on the whole tent idea because once we started hanging out I don’t think either one of us ever went back.

2. How did you decide to start a food business together?

CLARE: I’ve always been interested in food, in fact I came to the UW to study sustainable agriculture initially. It turns out I’m a horrible gardener! We both are. But Wisconsin has a very strong local food infrastructure and throughout our relationship we’ve always been CSA members and big appreciators of local farmers. Ever since college, I’ve been employed in various entrepreneurial endeavors, mostly music-related, and hadn’t quite hit on the right thing yet. I had been developing a passion for organizational development, and I’ve always been a logistics lady, so when Matt hit on Q&A, it was a perfect fit. Now he’s the operations, big-picture and sales guy – he kind of runs the core cogs of the business – and I run the strategy, financial and marketing end of things. What I’m really into is business and what he’s really into is making and distributing preserves.

MATT: I’ve always loved cooking. As a kid, I used to tell people that I wanted to be a chemist because I just wanted to mess around and mix different chemicals together all day to see what would happen. My parents bought me a chemistry set but after I kept blowing up test tubes in the laundry room they sat me down and told me that if I wanted another set I would have to follow the instructions. Well, that’s never been my strong suit, so I gave up on chemistry. But, as I got older, I realized that cooking, not chemistry, was the job I was looking for. It get to combine all sorts of things in interesting and new ways, there’s no exploding test tubes and I get to eat whatever I make! What’s not to like? I went to culinary school after college and spent a couple of years in high-end restaurant kitchens. The restaurant lifestyle wasn’t a great fit for me, so I left and started working for Potter’s Crackers, an artisan cracker company here in Madison as their Sales and Kitchen Manager. It was there that it became clear to me that starting a wholesale food company was the right path for me. I had been making preserves for awhile at home and really loved it and before long I was selling them to friends and family. But, the word spread and it quickly got too big for me to do alone, so Clare started helping and the rest is history!

3. What is the best thing about working together?

CLARE: We’re a perfect fit in so many ways. I’ll always say, Matt, today, I really want you to do all our deliveries while I sit at the computer and administrate, but I feel so guilty!! You have to do all the hard work while I relax and do fun business-y things. And he’s like, what? I feel like I’m pulling one over on you! You have to be penned in at your desk all day! So we both always feel like we’re getting away with something and our jobs are too good to be true.

MATT: Like Clare said, we complement each other very well. I really enjoy the physical aspects of the job and can only sit at my desk for a few hours a day or I go crazy. She would much rather sit and focus at her desk for hours at a time. It makes it very easy to divide up the work when we take on a new project. Basically, there’s no way I could do this without her, my brain would turn to mush trying to do all the administrative and organizational work she does. But, she couldn’t do it without me and all the physical, logistical work I do. We’re lucky to have each other.

4. Any funny stories or challenges that have resulted from working with your significant other?

CLARE: We worked so hard this Christmas, I have actually never worked so hard in my life. We’d come in at 8 or 9 and work until 1, 2, 3 in the morning, routinely. When we got back from our holiday break, we were like zombies. I was like, Matt, I can’t do anything. I can only sit at my desk. But we were completely out of all of our flavors of preserves, so the first week back we had to do four different production runs. The only way I could make myself do it was production dance party. We’d be peeling oranges and blasting Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z. We’d take a break to get down for awhile and then go back to more peeling. I was like, what’s going to happen when we get employees? And Matt was like, they’re gonna have to be dance party employees.

MATT: One of the funny things for me is when we spend all day together at work, meeting or talking or doing production and then we go home together and we walk in the door and I look over and there’s Clare, I always think, “Oh, you again. Didn’t I just see you at work?” And like Clare said, it can get pretty goofy at work, especially when it’s late and we’re tired and we’ve been working a long day. It helps keep things light. When we hire our first employee, we’re going to make sure they can dance and work at the same time because I have no intention of stopping.

5. Who comes up with better flavors?

CLARE: Our flavors are a pretty collaborative process. Matt comes up with tons of ideas and we filter them to find our favorites. Basically, he has to really feel a flavor and be passionate about it in order for it to work. Sometimes I am the subject of extended experiments in non-amazing flavors. But sometimes he doesn’t know until he tries. Yesterday I said to him, “Matt, don’t ever make me eat cocoa nibs again.” And he said, “I’m sorry, I will not.”

MATT: We usually work together on new flavors. Basically, I am always coming up with some new crazy idea for a preserve and Clare helps me winnow these ideas down to ones that will actually taste good in the real world. Once we settle on a flavor concept, I start making test batches and just keep making adjustments until I get it right. Sometimes the end product is just what I envisioned and sometimes it ends up very far from my original idea. I often make 20 to 30 test batches per idea, so we end up trying a lot of bad preserves along the way. But, it’s the only way to get the recipes just right.

Stay tuned for another great Foodzie Love Story tomorrow!

Valentines Day is fast approaching and we all know that a little love makes everything taste better. All of our Foodzie producers have a love for good food. But for some, their love of food goes hand-in-hand with their love for each other. Meet Jenna & Mark, the owners of Whimsy & Spice in Brooklyn, New York.

1. How did you decide to start a food business together?
Our story is one of those recession stories. A layoff presented us with an opportunity to start our own business when we we didn’t have the courage to do so before. We had vague ideas over the years of eventually starting a business of our own, but when we were faced with a sudden financial crises, we hatched a plan and moved really quickly to open up shop 2 months later. We developed the products as we went along. Between the 2 of us, we luckily had all the skills we needed to do this completely on our own – the products, the packaging, the photography, design and branding. Desperation has a way of lighting a fire under you, but we’re actually now grateful for that fateful day.

2. What is the best thing about working together?
We get to fulfill this dream that we’ve had for awhile. Mark’s been in the restaurant industry forever working as a pastry chef, but it’s a nice feeling to be able to build a company from the ground up. It’s also liberating to not be a slave to the kind of schedules that go along with working in the restaurant industry. Even though Mark puts in the same amount of hours as he did when he was working as a chef, we’re in charge of our own schedules now and it’s nice to be able to have that flexibility so that we can pick up the kids from school or take an afternoon off to go do something as a family.

3. Any funny stories or challenges that have resulted from working with your significant other?
The most challenging aspect of working with your spouse is not being able to separate work from home life. It’s really easy to to be tempted to talk about work stuff wherever you are, whether it’s doing laundry or making a trip to the grocery store. Our lives are intertwined with the business. It’s not uncommon to have to swing by a supplier to pick up 10 dozen eggs and bags of flour on the way home from an outing to the zoo with the kids.

Stay tuned for another great Foodzie Love Story tomorrow!

Valentines Day is fast approaching and we all know that a little love makes everything taste better. All of our Foodzie producers have a love for good food. But for some, their love of food goes hand-in-hand with their love for each other. Meet Zahra and Jennifer, the owners of Hedonist Chocolates in Rochester, New York.

1. How did you meet?
We met in Santa Cruz, CA at the Blue Lagoon bar in the summer of 1996. Santa Cruz is Jennifer’s hometown and she was going to school and working in the city’s Parks and Recreation department at the time. Zahra had just graduated from college and was in town for the summer, working in the costume shop at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. It was 80s night at the Blue, Jennifer was there with her sister and housemate, recovering from a recent breakup. She watched two confident and beautiful girls (Zahra and her friend Irene) as they entered the bar and said to her sister “I want to be with a girl like that.” After exchanging glances across the bar, we connected on the dance floor. After a little while, Zahra asked Jennifer if she wanted to kiss her. The rest is history

2. How did you decide to start a food business together?
We moved to Rochester, NY (after living in Michigan for 2 years while Zahra finished grad school) for Zahra’s job as a user interface designer at Xerox. Jennie left a career job in Parks and Recreation in Michigan but was not able to find similar work in Rochester. She spent a year working on the project house we bought together, then needed something more satisfying. She had always wanted to start her own business, so we started discussing options. Our first idea was a consignment clothing store, but we soon realized that we would have to have a much more extensive knowledge of women’s clothing than we possessed and scrapped that concept. Zahra then suggested a chocolate business because Rochester didn’t have an artisan chocolatier. Jennifer had experience working for a California chocolatier so it seemed like a good choice that would also allow us to be creative. We started experimenting with chocolate truffles at home and in early 2006 found a kitchen space and made everything official.

3. What is the best thing about working together?
The best thing about working together is that you know you are not alone, that you can always get the support you need from your partner. Starting a small business is a lot of hard work and the pressure to succeed can become too much for one person. Our situation is a little bit unique in that Jennifer works full time on the business and Zahra works part time on it (in addition to working full time as an Interaction Designer at Xerox). But we each know that we can ask for help, discuss problems, complain, or whatever else is needed.

4. Any funny stories or challenges that have resulted from working with your significant other?
In late 2005, we had made the decision to start our chocolate business and were nearly finished with the business plan. We had almost everything in place, but we were still struggling to come up with the perfect name to express our style and approach to chocolate-making. Around this time, Zahra was talking on the phone to her Aunt Carol, telling her about our latest travel and food adventures. Aunt Carol, whose lifestyle is quite different from ours, responded by affectionately referring to us as “a couple of hedonists.” We knew right away it was the perfect name for our company, not only because chocolate is one of life’s greatest pleasures, but also because it captured the spirit of our life together. A hedonist is someone whose life is devoted to the pursuit of sensual pleasures. We find our bliss in chocolate and hope to help our customers do the same.

5. Who comes up with better flavors?
Zahra has the occasional brilliant idea, but Jennifer and her apprentices are the ones who come up with the flavors in the Hedonist kitchen.

Stay tuned for another great Foodzie Love Story tomorrow!

Wow, we received submissions from Iowa, Oklahoma, New York, and many other towns in between with people gushing over their favorite producers. Into my inbox came a stream of passionately written e-mails about (to name a few) local eggs, creamy goat cheese, and chocolate truffles. We’ve discovered some amazing new artisans that we hope to share with you soon here on Foodzie.

Congratulations to Katherine for her winning entry! She wrote a Blues song for Blue Baker. We were impressed and we hope you enjoy. Maybe we can convince her to sing it for us.