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Ange is starting a food business (again)

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Starting a food business… why does anyone do it? I started Wandering Cooks because I wanted to make preserves. Preserves were everything to me- flavour intensified, bold emphasis and subtle italics adding meaning to any dish I’d set their sights to.

I had a name. Once a Garden. I had food maker sensibilities. I knew what delicious was and how to put heart into my food so people could taste how much I cared for them and the ingredients. This was all the easy stuff. But I had no idea how to make a business out of it. The more I tried to make one come to life, to pull it out of my making making making every day, the more money I lost. Maybe it was juggling new motherhood at the same time but whatever. It was too hard and I failed.

Funny, it was this failure that conceived Wandering Cooks. I figured there must be heaps of ‘mes’ out there, and I was right. Now, after 3 and a half years of goddam hard work, I know how to make a kitchen incubator not go out of business. Tick. (Notice I didn’t say ‘make money’. Ha! Still working on that!)

I’m not waking up at 3am with the panics anymore, I’m in a place of optimism. So what better time to head back into the sensitive and confusing head of ‘food maker turned food business owner’. Damn straight that’s what I’m gonna to do. After 3 and a half years of helping others get their food licences, I’m getting my own and I’ll be trying just as hard as you to make a business out of making food.

What follows I refuse to call truthful as it may get me in trouble with the authorities. Let’s just call it a spills and all embodiment – my journey into starting a food business. Follow it here, week to week.

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Mistakes Made, Sunk Costs and Food Business

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I had a hard conversation with a food maker last night. He’d made some terrible mistakes (his words) – decisions that equalled tens of thousands of dollars spent with still no real food business to show for it, just a shell of a kitchen that he was paying rent for but couldn’t earn any money from, and might never unless he paid even more money to finish it.

His mind wouldn’t even contemplate ‘cutting his losses’ when I suggested the possibility. I watched his thoughts refusing to go there, as he tilted his head back to slow the tears. He was so ashamed. He was in so much pain. As he surveyed the roof of his marquee on this raining, depressing night, he whispered that sometimes he didn’t think he could go on.

What to say to someone in such a place? I didn’t feel like the right person to pull him out of the depths… I was too sad still… too ripped open by my own regret… too angry I couldn’t save my own brother who ended his life nearly two years ago. So I didn’t try to fix it. I just cried with him.

Is there somewhere people can go who’ve got themselves into this level of financial difficulty? If you know, please tell me so I can at least offer him that.

Seth Godin comes to mind (he often does) with his thoughts on sunk costs, which is money spent that was clearly a waste. We all have sunk costs, surely. Some of us way more than others. Seth’s point though, is that too often, we make decisions today based on mistakes made yesterday, and that this is absolutely not the kind of power money should have over future decisions.

The pain of the sunk can be applied to anything we’ve put our heart and energy into that hasn’t worked out. Question is, will we use this pain as an excuse to not keep trying? Will we let that regret dictate our future decisions?

Seth again: “Part of what it means to be a creative artist is to dive willingly into work that might not work. And the other part, the part that’s just as important, is to openly admit when you’ve gone the wrong direction, and eagerly walk away.”

It’s often not easy to tell which is which. Are we running a business that’s a mistake? or just enduring the pain before the light?

I’ve traversed the edge of this feeling for so many years, I’m starting to find strength in the tension.

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10 business books I’ve read to solve problems in my food business

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I’ve been listening to a business book, The Personal MBA. Every few minutes Josh Kaufman says something of direct relevance to my food business. It’s like I’ve got a personal business coach sitting in my ear.

I’m constantly amazed by what a difference great thinkers can make to my mindset and mood. When I’m in a rut with a problem, all I need is a good business book. I’m not talking about reading a blog or a cookbook. Those forms of writing are truly useful but quite different to this.

I’m talking about spending time with a carefully developed, detailed argument, one that stays with me while I’m working on a problem. Reading or listening to business books allows me to concentrate on one facet of my food business in duration. I often listen to a book while I walk home from work. It’s like we’re holding hands (the author and I) with the problem. Us on the outside, the problem in the middle. And we’re talking through the next steps together, calmly, as we walk forward into the darkening evening.

The author will show me a side of the problem that I hadn’t been able to see before, because I’d always been walking on just the one side of it, dealing with it with just the knowledge I hold right now, not all the knowledge I could hold in the future. Expert strangers turn anxious churnings into optimistic explorations.

Does anyone really manage to hold onto an evolving slippery business, with all its changes and growth spurts, without having smart people telling them what to do? It may be a throwback to my academic background that makes me place so much credence in authoritative voices. Even if it is, I have a feeling this helps me hold my business more lightly, with less loneliness attached to decision making, then if I were walking alone… which is why I’m sharing this habit with you.

I’ve always got one on the boil, sometimes several at once, which I bounce between depending on what’s going on for me and the biz. Here are a few that I’ve read in the last 6 months that have helped to coax my problems out on evening walks. I’ve included the byline of each book because I think they give as good an indication as I could of why each has been useful to me and my food business journey.

The Art of Possibility, transforming professional and personal life, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander

Start with Why, how great leaders inspire everyone to take action, Simon Sinek

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, building a business when there are no easy answers, Ben Horowitz

Thanks for the Feedback, the science and art of receiving feedback well, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen

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Being honest about starting a food business

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So I said I’d tell you week to week what it’s like for me to start a new food business … and now I’m regretting it a bit. Partly because I haven’t had time to do much ‘starting up’ lately. But also because I know it means I’ll be baring myself to you; myself and my struggles more so than my successes, as the struggles are so often more illuminating.

A few months ago, when I told a ‘marketing person’ about bearing myself, they said, ‘maybe leave the personal stuff out of it Ange’.

This confused me for awhile, made me hesitate about jumping in. I started thinking that what I wanted to do with this tell all method was embarrassing. ‘Cringe worthy’ even.

Like I was planning on walking into my work with no clothes on, expecting people to talk to me normally.

But then it hit me. If I’m not willing to be honest, what’s the chance you’ll want to be? And I also got completely SICK of having conversations with food business owners that go like this:

ME: ripping the clothes off my business in an attempt to make them feel comfortable (pointing out the flabby edges, cellulite and stretch marks as I go)

THEM: framing me up a glossy photo of their business successes: gym-buffed, tanned and a full house every night.

No one has a full house every night… not forever… or do they?? Are some businesses really just as buffed and fabulous as they present themselves to be?

HOW WOULD WE EVER KNOW IF NO ONE WILL STRIP DOWN WITH ME??

So I’m putting the challenge out there to you all. Who wants to get business-naked? I can make it super easy for you, because YOU can stay completely anonymous if you like. I promise that anything you tell me will be retold by me in complete anonymity, unless you want exposure. All I ask is this: if you want to help build up a world where real conversation about food business can happen, then tell me stories, real stories, short stories, long stories, but NAKED stories about the hard stuff you’ve faced while setting up your food business. Anything. I don’t know how I’ll use it – depends on what you write. But I promise we’ll all feel less awkward in our nudity – more alive! more ready for all that this business world throws at us.

Please send stories to angela@wanderingcooks.com.au

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Suz Schulte gets naked about starting a food business

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I was so happy to see our first ‘naked’ response come through my email. Here it is, unabridged because it’s perfect just the way it is. Keep ’em coming!

So – I read your latest article and it really hit home about how we are always looking to present our “best” side in order to attempt to live a mostly edited life. And really, it has become so ingrained in our society that I often wonder whether any value is placed on substance anymore…

Now – I’m so early on in my start-up that I don’t really have stories to share about its trials. Actually, to date, taking the first step and starting has been the hardest part of my start up. Having the confidence to say to the world “I know I might fail, but I have to at least try” is one of the bravest things I’ve done. But starting hasn’t stopped the constant “am i doing it right” feelings and anxiety that really creep up on you when you’re questioning your decisions and juggling life and its commitments. Or worse, focusing the majority of your time and energy away from your business.

So when you combine your own negativity with that of others, it can really build into the perfect storm that stalls you! I’ve had so many people tell me that I can’t do what I’m aiming to – “who would pay that for jam?!” “Why would you waste your time” “you already have a great career, why would you give that up”. One of the steepest learning curves has been trying to look past those initial (often hurtful) statements and seeing peoples feedback as an opportunity to learn and make incremental changes that my lead to great success (or at the very least avert a massive failure!)…

I also think one of the “trials” is admitting to yourself when (or that) you need help (or as I like to call it, getting over my ego!) and acknowledging that you don’t know what you don’t know. As you’ve highlighted, the food industry is a complex and quirky place and to navigate it as a newbie is pretty daunting. For me, it was pretty humbling to admit that I didn’t know it all myself (no matter how much time i spent on google!) and that unless I wanted to deal with the ramifications of a massive mess I needed to be smarter about my approach.

Which is where Wandering Cooks and your fine self has come in…  even the insight you provided in a basic kitchen tour made me go back and re-think and re-fine where i’m heading, timelines and approaches… so for a business that is yet to sell a single item (or even get to the point where I’m confident enough with my products to put it in jars for sale) I still feel like i’ve got a sporting chance!

Seriously though, outside of yourself – no one seems brave enough to tell the gruesome, confronting stories about business start-up. Thanks for seeing the need to share the knowledge.

written by (nakedly so),

Suz Schultze

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Cooking up a Food Business

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My favourite kind of cooking occurs when I have some time to wing it. I’ve got the direction I’m looking for in my head – I just don’t know exactly how I’ll get there. So I just start. The beer in my hand and a few key ingredients help me begin.

I’ve got leeks. I love leeks when they’re sliced thin and sauteed slowly til they’re melty, the whites with the greens. And then, as I watch them soften down, they start to behave differently than I anticipated. Maybe I didn’t use enough butter? But I can work with this! Dryer means more brown crispy potential. I’ll keep going and see if I can get me some brown crispy. There it is… now other stuff starts to declare itself: sweet potatoes. oyster mushrooms. green peas. I didn’t see the green peas coming til I started blanching the sweet potatoes and realised I wanted to smash them into the leeks rather than separately. Finally, the oyster mushrooms find themselves sauteed quickly with a little garlic and then folded into the whole mess with the peas. Ultimate comfort food has been created from drawn out slowed down steps. Beer in hand, plan abandoned, the possibilities unfold.

It takes time to cook like this. And in my perfect world, I’d let my business build in the exact same way. ‘Let’s start this project and see what happens’, I often say to my staff. Let’s get down a first draft and then we’ll get a taste and see what seasoning it needs, how it holds itself up, whether it’s beautiful on its own or needs more. And when we do it, if it looks different than we thought, well, we’ll shape it and play with it until it works.

Is this an ok way to do business? Maybe… it’s definitely not by the book. It’s a little like lean start ups but with less for-planning. It’s a little like Seth Godin’s ‘just ship it’ methodology. It works for us at Wandering Cooks if we have the time and the patience to see it through and hold ourselves back from assuming that, because the plans changed, we won’t create something beautiful.

If only new business directions didn’t matter so hugely to the viability of the business, then maybe we could cook up our businesses always. But sometimes, there just doesn’t seem to be time for my kind of business. ‘We need to see the whole picture! How’s it going to work? … When will I make my money back? … You need more than an ‘experiment’ to be eligible for this grant – we want to see a scaleable trend!’

Geez, just let me cook it slowly already and all will be fine, I’m sure of it. There’s nothing that a little time to create can’t fix.

Btw, I was so happy to see our first ‘naked’ response come through my email. Here it is, unabridged because it’s perfect just the way it is. Keep ’em coming!

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Finding the gold in customer feedback

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My customers often see my business more clearly than I’m seeing it, offering me feedback, judgements and constructive opinions about what I should do. I’m not going to give examples of their feedback here because I don’t want them to feel singled out… and because I don’t want the feedback to ever stop even though sometimes I receive it like an attack.

Regardless of whether feedback is delivered in the form of a jibe, accusation or excited suggestion, if my mood is askew,  if I’m already a little despondent or overwhelmed, the customer can feel like Statler & Waldorf  commenting from the stalls in The Muppets (and I’m definitely Kermit the Frog).

But when I’m feeling positive and strong and in control of all the loose ends, I can see that from their position up in the stalls, they aren’t directing the action but can see it all in play. They have the distance to see important things and notice gaps in opportunity. They can feel the overall vibe, offer opinions and be moved to make jokes (mostly kind) about my performance. And at least I’ve created an environment where they feel like that’s ok to do. And so it is. Well done me.

So regardless of how and who throws me the feedback, I have to remember, there’s always some gold hidden in the pile of poo it’s landed in (my mood). I just need to dissolve my mood with the expectation of delight, so I’m willing to search for all that glitters beneath it. And if I can do this, my commentator, my customer, may well become my business’s best friend. When they see that their feedback is received, not with defensiveness and excuses, but with some gold being dug out of it and then thrown into bright shiny action, their efforts and care have been recognised. And out of this experience, they are likely to become the ‘sneezers‘ that all businesses should cherish.

How can a business owner stay open in the face of feedback? Tricky, huh. We all need strategies that will keep us out of the resentment and defensiveness that hides the gold inside the pile of poo. I’m going to have a think to see if I can dig some out for you.

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Eating the Other – Angela Hirst

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Ash here, Ange has passed over the reigns FINALLY so I can harp on only for a smidge how cool she is so (now in a David Attenborough voice) let us trek into the wild mind of Angela Hirst, owner of Wandering Cooks as she gives us the skinny on her talk she presented at the ‘New Food as an Urban Agent’ conference at Harvard University earlier this year. Backed by her experience as a business owner of a company that is in the world’s top 2% of incubator kitchens and her mind blowing PhD on food ethics she wrote way back when, here is why what Ange, her Charter kitchen customers and team do is so important to changing our current food culture. 

Eating the Other


What does it mean to be an ethical eater?
Zoe Tulleners
Zoe Tulleners – Alphabet Cafe

And how can we provoke ethical encounters between the city and its food makers, between our mouths and the animals, plants, soil, humans that have transformed their lives in order that I might eat? These are the questions that have driven my work for the last 20 years. First, as an architecture student obsessed with permaculture, then as a phd student obsessed with eating, then as a chef and now, finally, as a business owner. This final category is the most challenging because I must also be obsessed, unfortunately, with staying afloat. And that’s what this presentation grapples with.

What I’ve learnt? Ethics is a disasterously messy beast – and to let it in means both the most beauty and most anxiety you could want in your life. Running a business adds an extra dimension to the equation – both in its possibilities and its dangers, but this is a dimension that is crucial to the transformation of our cities into places where ethical encounters can thrive.

What do I mean by ethics? My meaning is as specific as it is contextual, and you’re going to have to bear with me because the only way I can take you there is to take you down with me so here I go.

Chooks

♦ ♦ ♦

 

If you are anything like me, you’ll notice that more often than not we are surrounded by the symbols of ethical life devoid of the face.

 

For me, ethics is what Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian philosopher from the 20th Century describes as: a face to face encounter. Faces are key. The face of another has a way of interrupting your reality, particularly if it is showing you it’s suffering. In that moment when you truly see suffering in the face of another, you lose all faculty to judge or rationalize.

All you see is the others suffering, all you feel is an overwhelming sense that you know nothing, really, that nothing of what you thought you could bring to this scenario is appropriate now. Right now the undertow of guilt takes you off kilter, and your appetite, your ability to enjoy yourself, your full belly, your life of good soup, it disappears. In its place comes a realization, one that Levinas borrows from Pascal: ‘My being-in-the-world or my ‘place in the sun’… have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?’

Pretty calamitous stuff right? Wait though. It gets worse. Now that you know you are guilty, that you are responsible because YOU have taken the others’ enjoyment from their lives, you respond in the only way that makes sense after such an upheaval. You stop knowing and start listening.  You don’t try to predict what is needed of you, and if sacrifice is needed, then all the better because this would be fitting of the damage your existence has done. You give bread. Not from your pocket, or your plate, but from your mouth. You literally regurgitate what you have already enjoyed.

What ethical response could be more personal, more wholly directed towards an other’s needs? What ethical response could be so completely unmanageable?

Maybe you’re thinking – but there are more manageable ethical systems – than say, vomiting in someone’s mouth, right? Ones that allow me to live my life just as I want it, donate to charity, be careful about what kinds of food I eat, and do a job that makes a difference. Doesn’t have to hurt. And I’m not denying that this kind of higher level engagement with suffering is necessary, it is. But without the dystopic encounter with the face, where does this higher level draw its energy? What disrupts it enough to make it effective?

The Blue Goose

If you are anything like me, you’ll notice that more often than not we are surrounded by the symbols of ethical life devoid of the face. The pretense of the city, the lack of face in SO many of our engagements, the physical distance we place between ourselves and the suffering of others so entrenched that we NEVER have to experience the face of suffering if we don’t want to. It’s there, our avoidance, you can feel the face everywhere in its absence.

The higher structures we put in its place, not BECAUSE of the faces but INSTEAD of the faces, codes of eating like ‘vegan’, ‘organic’, ‘free range’, ‘local’… we convince ourselves that these labels will stand in for any necessity for direct encounters with suffering. We invest in food manufacturers and suppliers rather than farmers and makers, letting them make decisions for us about how well these labels are dealing with suffering. And we get homogeneous, faceless, packaged food, that hides all trace of suffering, because suffering (maybe like vomiting) doesn’t sell.

Incubation

And the result? Let me give you a perfect example: free range and organic chicken meat in Australia. The reality of this industry in Australia is rather hidden, but also, rather cruel, because the life cycle of the chicken has been so industrialized. Chicken farmers don’t rear from eggs – another industry does this and then passes on the chicks for pasture raising. And ALL these birds, regardless of the fact they are being sent to free range situations, are bred for grain fed lives. They are what are called ‘fast growing’. They’ve been designed to eat and grow and eat and grow and do so so fast and furiously that they can be culled at a bloated 3 weeks of age. Now, if you take one of these chicks and place them in a free ranging context, you are putting them in a situation where they can’t eat enough to feel satiated. You are condemning this bird to constant, overwhelming levels of hunger. Sure, you can grow them more slowly but this only extends their suffering.

Blue Goose Chicken

Not that we would know this as all we see is the happy chicken grazing on green pastures on the label.

Sommerlad Chicken

But, what if it were still possible to have a face to face encounter with this suffering? Well it is, but you’ve got to be there. And there is a farmer in Australia that was there. He came into the vicinity of the suffering and was brave enough to turn and face it directly. And he responded by changing everything about what he did, so that he could support a different kind of life for chickens destined for meat. From this response, he’s created a ‘higher structure’ called ‘Sommerlad Farmers’. These farmers have taken on the whole life cycle of the bird. They’ve reintroduced a selection of slow growing, heritage breeds and are producing these meat birds via strict guidelines that are derived from their careful listening to that face to face encounter. And this is what guidelines need to be – held in check, and often even broken again and again by more encounters that throw into disarray what we thought we knew when they were made. These chickens aren’t selling fast mind you – they are raised for 16 weeks not 3, and by the end, they don’t always look like the kind of chicken you’re used to eating.

WC Grapes

So this is an isolated example of ethics for city eating, and there are others, but clearly I want more of them. I think there are ways that we can accelerate the number of face to face encounters that can occur between eaters, makers, producers and the animals, plants and soil they care for. But it’s going to be messy. Cities need to be open enough to allow us to lay down a fabric that is woven deeply with rich, penetrating connections between faces and their stories: from this animal, to this farmer, to this supplier, to this eater, each one knowing the whole line of faces. The faces become the threads that connect, and there will be so many rough edges and unraveling’s. But as in any ecosystem, it’s the rough edges that hold all the textural potential. They are the ecotones of the city, the most diverse, most lively places to live. The edges where creation occurs.

We won’t be able to avoid our ethical responses quite as easily as we can now, in a city like the one I imagine.

Which brings me circuitously (which is the best way really) to Wandering Cooks.

Brisbane

I decided to create a business that could sit on this textural edge. That could bump together more and more faces more stories than I’d seen possible in the place we live in. The City of Brisbane is on the middle of the east coast of Australia. Unlike the bigger global cities like Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane (Australia’s 3rd largest city) is typically known for its proximity to famous beaches and lifestyle culture. Australian mainstream food is dominated by two (that’s right, just two) enormous chain conglomerates, Coles and Woolworths, who run a duopoly and tell the farmers how much they will sell for. But Brisbane has some amazing producers, and as we found out, loads of latent talent…

Wandering Cooks Made from Scratch event with Alphabet Cafe
Wandering Cooks Made from Scratch event with Alphabet Cafe

At Wandering Cooks, we support that breed of food maker in Brisbane who hasn’t settled down, who is on the cusp of their learning, and who doesn’t even know how to begin, particularly when commercial kitchens are prohibitively expensive to create and run. I wanted to make a place that would take the fear out of their creating, so that they could begin before they were ready, making lots of mistakes, and hopefully, bump into many faces that would impact the way and what they created.

Drone shot of WC

Physically, we are housed in an old warehouse in the centre of the city. We constructed 5 kitchens that would allow for heaps of flexible use and lots of interaction between makers. And the wall to the kitchens is transparent, so that outside, where our event space and bar has grown itself, the food makers can be seen by the people who are their customers.

Construction of the kitchens

At first, starting a business didn’t seem to be a far cry from studying, writing a phd, working in someone else’s kitchen. In each situation, I could dream up perfect scenarios, analyse them, imagine like crazy, and bump up against many walls to my understanding. But owning a business is next level in the way it engages a sense of responsibility. It’s the ultimate endurance event in ethics because it puts one’s desire for ethics face to face with one’s aptitude for making money or just staying afloat.

Brendan from Closed Loop Organics
Brendan from Closed Loop Organics

Conceivably, the right business should be able to weave any kind of ethical possibility into reality – all that’s required is the right kind of match between the possibility and the customer- will this thread of possibility be picked up by the customer, will they weave it into the fabric of their businesses so it can truly live? It’s the way Sommerlad Farmers found existence – they found each other, and then they found advocates, and through them a network of customers who cared enough to spend over twice the money to buy their scrawny looking chickens instead of a generic free range bird.

Brewsvegas
A couple of lads from the Brewsvegas Committee

In the case of Wandering Cooks, we have two customers: our micro business food makers, and, by necessity in the end, our eaters & drinkers. To me, this looks like the perfect potential, because we are not only providing resources for our food makers, but we are creating a market for them too. And if we can solve the market problem by bringing them ethical eaters, then we are all the more likely to be transforming something together.

After so much planning and building, the day we opened finally arrived. But like I said, business is an endurance event and again and again, ethics and money, ethics and money come up to bat against each other.  I don’t know how many of you have experienced the level of panic that arrives when dreams are sent out into the future- you wave them goodbye and good luck and then find them crashing back into reality like a sack of broken watermelons. What I mean is, projections don’t account for paying customers.

Small Batch Winter
Tamara Henwood and Ange

But there’s also a strange comradery that can develop at this point of panic, if you can for a moment, find a face to face encounter for yourself. Someone to see your suffering. As a business owner, we are taught to avoid these face to face encounters as well. But as I was on the search for them anyway, I did what others rarely do, I talked with people about the terror. I avoided people who faked it in favour of people who would tell me the truth about business and how they have suffered. And I kept my face forward – leaning into the pain. The decisions I’ve made that led me to so much business anxiety were also the decisions that placed me on the edge of my learning, making me a weaver of my own dreams.

Pep talks

We started creating events that celebrated failure and involved people who would talk about food and business in a truthful way. Events became the back bone to our livelihood, not in terms of revenue, but in terms of trust. Our events put the faces that needed to see each other in the same room. And this hadn’t happened in our city before. All our food events are celebratory in a larger, structural way.

We started with Conversations with Punch, where I would use David Wondrich’s wonderful book to woo my customers into conversations they had no forum for previously. Relaxed, earnest, open conversations began in these meetings and were embraced by Brisbane’s food industry.

ben devlin
Ben Devlin prepping for Snackdown

We brought our events down into the dirt, and we drank and ate as we rolled around in our broken dreams together. We weren’t seen as the antichrist to bricks and mortar business but the site of interaction between fine and informal dining, gypsy restaurants and established counterparts.

Brett
Brett Ledger from MegaBake

I heard, again and again, how it was almost impossible to carve out a living in this city, as a small producer, and I had to agree. This was a city that couldn’t seem to tell the difference between hand-made and brand-made. We were barely treading water. Our bar would go from packed with 200 people on an event night to earning $50 on a regular evening.

Strudle
Kurtosh Cakes

We decided that if we could, we would make our kitchens free. We couldn’t, but we’ve gotten pretty close. We started with maybe 15 food makers, we hit 30, then 50, then 70, and now, we’re supporting over 100 food makers, which puts us in the top 2% of kitchen incubators in the world.

Hands in

Now, in many ways, we’re well on our way to achieving success as a business. We’ve been voted Australia’s coolest micro business and I may just manage to pay myself next month! But in other ways, something devastating has arrived with our success.  After 3 years, I’ve noticed a certain homogeneity creeping into our space, despite the extra faces. Deliveries turning up from the same huge distributors, boggling conversations with more and more miserly customers wanting ever cheaper rates from us, not because they need them now that we’re so cheap but because they really don’t appreciate how much sacrifice has already gone into this place’s creation.

When I look into our 5 kitchens now, humming with industry, I see our makers weaving a fabric that supports the exact industry annihilating face to face encounters in the city. And the worst part of it is, Wandering Cooks is providing the subsidy, not to the local ethical farmer but to Woolworths, Coles and more recently Aldi and Costco.

So now, on the brink of us being ‘stable’, it’s time to start again – scrubbing the space clean of the ill placed subsidies and finding a new way.  The best way, in my opinion, would be to turn our current customers into ethical weavers. So we created a charter, and this is what it declares:

We might be small players in the food world, but we are huge when we work together.

We commit to being ethical in our sourcing and waste practices – buying our ingredients from local farmers and closing the loop between soil and food.

We may not be perfect, but our hearts are aligned, and we promise to work with collaborative creativity every day.

And one day, we will be both big and small at once – thousands of beautiful businesses transforming our food culture together.

Jack Stone from Bee One Third
Jack Stone from Bee One Third

 

So how does this ‘higher level ethical strategy’ play out for us? Well, I’m not entirely sure yet, but I’ve started with more face to face disruptions. Food trucks, the last bastion of cheap eats, have become our first focus. If we can convert these bastards who knows what we can do!! We need to find ways that ethics and money can meet up and shake hands.

One of the most popular food trucks in Brisbane is run by a British immigrant who loves traditional Scottish preparations but seems to mostly use beef cheek because he can get it cheaply and it falls apart so beautifully.

Pig face

We sat down with him and he said, no way can I use grassfed. I’d love to but it’s too expensive. I’d have to sell my burgers for 20 bucks and my customers won’t stomach that. But then I said, what if we work together and we can organize to buy some whole beasts?

We can use our kitchens to carve them up, our freezer rooms to hold some, you can take the cheapest cuts and we’ll sell the rest through the buyers group that meets here every week? His eyes lit up as he recalled how much he’s missed being able to take on larger cuts, but that his truck’s too small to handle them. He started imagining the possibilities, of food truck long table dinners in our carpark, of make bresaola and bone broths. And I got excited because I’d just managed to turn his head a little to the south, towards the place where his meat comes from so that next time, perhaps, his face would encounter something other than a miserly customer and he would not be able to step back into the world he inhabited before.

Phil
Phil from Not Waste and Loop Growers

This is how I see the threads developing – through hard work by all of us and more risk. I think it’s supremely important for people to realise the kinds of risks ethical food producers take all the time to remain intimate with the face to face, and that such stories must remain available to the public view if we are to encounter the true costs of business done ethically.

Wandering Cooks

If we start valuing the time it takes to transform our faceless city fabric into a rich tapestry of ethics, then couldn’t every neighbourhood have its community supported abattoir, its butchering room and its buyers group. Could every food truck or market stall or grocery corner store become an outlet for the makers and producers of our city? It’s a dream of course, unrealistic many would say, but that, I hope, is the beauty of business.

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11 Food Business Ideas

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As Seth Godin would say, to have good ideas you first need to have lots of ideas and some of them will be bad. Here’s a mix I wrote down on my walk to work:

  • A pick your own herb garden
  • A tailor made garden personally looked after by a  gardener for apartment dwellers
  • Soil made from restaurant scraps in public parks, with eggs as value add
  • Sign writing makeover angel- pay me if you like it more
  • Branding makeover angel that has the same business model
  • Breakfast offerings made for coffee carts
  • Coaching doctor- drops into live coaching sessions to give feedback based on third party fly on wall
  • Burial service for broken restaurants where sale of items is prefaced by celebration and learning of mistakes made
  • Catching huntsmen spiders in old Queenslanders and setting them free for kookaburras to catch
  • 99 wine label designs
  • Composting bins for biodegradable packaging

Take any of them if you like, I don’t mind if you do. Some will be good ideas, some will be bad ideas. Some could be good or bad depending on the hands that mould them. I’m not precious about them staying ‘mine’ because the hard part is always in the execution. That’s when the real work begins.

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What is Food By Us?

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Sign up to Food By Us

 

Food By Us launched in Sydney in 2016 with the aim to connect food buyers to their local food makers through their online platform. The team have grown their brand in both Sydney and Melbourne and now, Brisbane. On the 12th July, Food By Us will be officially launching their presence here in Brisbane (however there is a presence currently growing on their website right now).

Food By Us have worked hard to build an online community for those food makers who are looking to turn their passion or hobby into more – whether it be part-time or full time you’d like to be in the kitchen it is purely up to you. This is an amazing opportunity for those who don’t quite have the reach they’re looking for or if the markets just aren’t cutting it.

By signing up, you’re taking a positive step in bringing yourself closer to food makers as you’ll have an immediate online presence. The next food drop off opportunity will be on Friday 7th July 2017 right here at Wandering Cooks.

Sign up here

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6 tips from my first 6 months

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In November 2016, Anna Jones launched a human-grade dog meal delivery business called Suburban Pup. Why? Because humans are busy and dogs are awesome. She works an early morning in our kitchens, when the mind can be wobbly and self doubt often does a double shift. But Anna’s brave! and it’s been six months! It’s time for her to share what’s kept her heading forward on the rocky path of business beginnings.
1. Know your why
There’s a saying in my previous gig as a grant writer (aka asking politely for money): why you, why this, why now? Know the answers to these questions about your business because you’ll ask yourself these questions a lot, and because you’re going to need to be passionate about helping other people (your potential customers) embrace these reasons, too.

2. Launch
As soon as you can, do it.  Until my online store went live, I was just one crazy dog lady with a good idea, which felt way more like loneliness than trailblazing.  As soon as I launched, I was part of something much larger than me – a community of other micro businesses. This group of makers understood my most minute concerns, became complementary collaborators (even ‘co-op-etitors’), recognised that we’re stronger together, and sometimes just said ‘I think what you’re doing is really cool’. (They don’t know half the uncoolness!)

3. Expect advice
I’ve had much bigger roles where everyone just assumed I knew what I was doing. In this role, I’ve received generous small business advice and tips from just about everybody. Even so, consider taking on this rule:  don’t change anything for the first 2-3 months.  You probably spent 6-9 months writing a business plan, so at least give yourself a chance to test all those well-researched assumptions. Then, be genuinely open to the suggestions that keep bubbling to the top, and just as genuinely let go of the others – you don’t have time for other people’s doubt (particularly if they’re not people in your target market).

4. Don’t expect the worst
Because you can’t even imagine it yet.  Sure I had risk management strategies for the big things, but the bits and pieces that went wrong along the way were nowhere near my consciousness til they happened.  So learn fast. And the flipside is you get to create the great solutions.

5. Hustle (nicely)
The responsibility of selling your product is all yours. You will never work so hard. Tell all the rich and wonderful stories of your products and clients to your chosen piece of the world…  and then tell them again. Have a rest when you get tired, and then get back to it.

6. Own it
When the pressure’s on, breathe it in a little.  As adults, we tend to spend most days doing what we know well, but there’s great untapped power in the things that are slightly out of our control simply because we’ve never done them before.  Plus, there’s only ever one first time.

And what then?

Definitely draw some new lines in the sand for the next six months.

And maybe take an intrepid new business owner out for a coffee.

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Kitchen incubators, de-risking and a little indignation

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People often ask, ‘what kinds of things do your customers sell?’ I’ve always told them that it’s a mix: about a third make products for wholesale to cafes and independent grocers, another third sell products online through their own websites (or Food By Us now), and the last third sell through a market stall or food truck.

But actually, the reality is a lot more fluid than that. Diversification and experimentation with products and services is one of the characteristics of the kind of food business that begins in an incubator kitchen.

These food makers transform their businesses at a pace not easy for most bricks and mortar. They use our resources flexibly, pivoting their focus if a particular product doesn’t sell well, or to shift from one farmers market to another or from markets to catering events or from catering to pop ups, in an attempt to find their groove and best business model mix. They’ll jump at opportunities that lay outside their original plans, because they can. They don’t have that much holding them back – no shopfronts costing them money every week, little in the way of expensive equipment going under-utilised, no hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of commercial kitchens to pay off.

So it’s always a little troubling for me, I have to admit, when I get kick back from customers about the cost of the kitchens ($14 – $22/h) or if I try to set minimum hourly requirements (like 8 hours a month at the moment). Take this email for instance, received last week (and edited to maintain anonymity):

“It’s been 2 weeks since we were in your kitchen when we made 60 boxes, and over these 2 weeks we’ve sold 8 through the markets and 3 online. With 49 boxes still to sell, we don’t need to come back in for a few weeks… How are we supposed to move the business forward when you’re our largest expense?”

Emails like this tickle the scratchy spot of indignation I keep just between my shoulder blades for occasions like this. I don’t know how to word it exactly… perhaps it’s the lack of recognition at the opportunity that’s been given to them? That I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on creating a facility that’s even made it POSSIBLE for them to lose a couple of hundred at the start of what is hopefully a very long business road.

Or maybe it’s just because I’ve got the hindsight that comes with someone who has lost a lot of money in starting up. I can now see what a little ‘losing’ does for the soul. Lose some money, so you know what it’s like to free fall, to have to make decisions on the fly and with a strong hold on reality and resolve and resilience. Lose some money, so you can be grateful that you haven’t lost even more. Lose some money so you HAVE TO GODDAM PIVOT or market, or rethink your tastebuds, or diversify, like the rest of us. And then MAKE IT BACK. But don’t blame me for the fact your projections aren’t meeting reality. Just join the club. Share your woes. But take responsibility for them. Lean into it like the rest of us and keep going.

There. Scratch has been itched.

 

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Resisting the whole picture

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Sometimes, I don’t think things through.

I mean, I intentionally resist seeing the whole picture.

I started on a jamming slam this week, churning through kilos of strawberries, rhubarb, cumquats and pears, melting them into jars with clip lids. The act of hulling, weighing, stirring and bottling kept my mind in a kind of stasis, away from planning and worry. It gave me a chance to exercise other parts of me – fingers, eyes, mouth. Writing that now I realise it sounds rather sensual. Erotic jam making. Maybe that could be a thing.

What’s for sure? It’s difficult to think beyond a mountain of produce… 

Sometimes I create challenges just so I can fight my way out of them.

I haven’t thought through who will buy this jam exactly, or even how I’ll sell it. Sitting down at my desk today I figured out that one large ruby glowing bottle of strawberries cost me over $30 in ingredients, so really, I’ve been manufacturing gold to spread on toast. 

I’m also pretty clear right now that it doesn’t matter what this bottle is for. Not yet. It’s important that it exists. And that when it’s lined up along our bar’s green wall with its friends, all kinds of glass and colour will shatter into our plans with rainbows and remind me that sometimes we don’t do things that have an economic logic, but that they make sense in a different way. It makes sense like the painting in our upstairs office, which I bought after returning to Brisbane from Paris and which took me two years to pay off with my $19/h job. It makes sense like my cookbook library, that I I trust to our public space, hoping that no one will walk my dear books out the door. It makes sense like our garden, which soaks up any time and money I can free for it. Why should businesses only be the grounds of pragmatic plans? Well clearly I think they shouldn’t be to which this 900ml bottle of strawberry jam attests.

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Come work with us!

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Our beautiful bar and our collection of incredible local produce is growing even more hence we’re on the hunt for badass bar tenders to nail it at our wee establishment.

Our dream badasses would:
– have a STRONG passion and knowledge of locally made brews, wine, spirits and non-alcoholic beverages – particularly around makers’ ethos and methods.
– have strong and current experience working a fast paced bar and have excellent customer service skills;
– have a prolific smiling tendency and join in the joy of being part of a small business;
– have a desire to explore ways to further our growth and provide and improve upon our customer experiences within the Wandering Cooks journey;
– enjoy taking responsibility and be reliable;
– have a flexible and forward leaning approach to work – you need to understand that there are no minions in a small exciting start up like ours!

Now there’s no horsing about with this, please only apply if you’re willing and able – if you’re just looking for a willy nilly bar job – move on as this job ain’t for you!

All applications must be in by Friday 28th, 5pm – email Jo, our Bar Manager: jo@wanderingcooks.com.au with your resume and cover letter.

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Getting crazy naked with Paula Morris

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Angela posed a challenge to the food makers at Wandering Cooks a couple of weeks back urging them to get naked about their food business – Paula Morris from Happy Home Chef took on the challenge and here she is butt-naked.

I’ve been a chef since I left catering college 20 years ago in the UK and love nothing better than a good home cooked meal. Whenever my friends come over I always prepare extra food so they can take away meals for the week and that’s where Happy Home Chef started. I had a few friends that I would prepare food for and also made healthy meal preps for my disabled clients as I’m also a disability support worker.

After a few more meal requests and my kitchen getting a bit too small in my little loft apartment, I decided to rent out a kitchen at Wandering Cooks so that I could do it all legally and not worry about the council knocking on my apartment door!

Often with ideas I have, I’ll make excuses and not follow through, so this time, I bought the insurance, paid for the food license and got all my equipment so I couldn’t back out! I was ready to go and although I was excited, I was also terrified. I couldn’t sleep. I had a scroll through the Wandering Cooks Clubhouse Facebook page and everybody’s food looked so professional and packaged amazingly! I felt like an amateur and decided to pull out.

Angela wanted to show me the oven the next day so I decided I would cancel all my plans there and then and tell her I was not going through with it. I was too scared. This hobby was meant to be fun not scary!

Angela showed me the oven and all I was thinking was I need to cancel, I need to cancel, but I felt like such a wimp.

I organised to have a coffee with the lovely Maya from MYK FFF Kefir to clear up some of my worries and questions. She asked me about my labels and NIP’s. Labels? NIP’s?  I thought all I needed was a use by date! She then showed me the FSANZ website and told me all I needed to know. NIP’s, Weights, ingredient lists…. I was terrified! I’m allergic to computers and I had planned on making four different meals each week, sometimes more and I had all these label’s to do! I looked at Maya’s kefir bottle and it all looked so professional!! I was petrified. How was I going to make my little homemade meal prep packaging look this good?

I left there in a blur still not knowing whether to cancel or carry on. On the way home I drove to Officeworks and spent an hour deciphering labels, calling friends for help, googling in panic and then decided I definitely couldn’t do this. I then crashed my car not paying attention to the road five minutes from home with all this going on in my head!

That was it. No more stress, no more worry. I would cancel the whole thing in the morning!

My partner came home, gave me a pep talk and a little shake, told me to stop blubbering and to at least try to create a label before I gave up ‘like I always do’. I sat and wrote all my recipes, entered them into the NIP, and after 3 hours I had four recipes, NIPS and ingredient lists. Now it was time to put them onto a label. The hard part was over, right?

Being allergic to computers, this took me HOURS. I was on Avery typing every individual ingredient and NIP number onto the label manually, and then copying my logo. Then after 8 hours on FOUR labels they would not print inside the borders.

I cried, drank wine, cried again, nearly threw the computer at the wall and then gave up and posted my task on air tasker! This guy made me a label template and I discovered how to screen shot the NIP to save manually adding every little detail and long story short I HAD A LABEL!

I finally had my first day at Wandering Cooks. I loved being in a real kitchen with lots of space. I had a great day preparing my 70 meals. After my cook off, I got chatting to a baker who told me I needed lab tests for each product to ascertain used by dates, at a cost of $1000 per meal! And I had planned on 56 meals over an 8 week period! There was no way I could afford this. Another roadblock.

That night I didn’t sleep. Stress, worry, time to cancel my plans again and then the next day one phone call to FSANZ put me back to baseline. It was not compulsory. It now takes me 20 mins to create a label instead of 24 hours and my little ‘hobby’ is alive at Wandering Cooks. I’m actually enjoying it!

Postscript…

I have listened to my gut, my partner and my headaches and I have just handed in my 2 weeks notice

Time to PUSH PUSH PUSH Happy Home Chef and put 100% attention and focus into my little hobby!

No more night shifts, no more violence and no more shit…

Happy Home Chef is ready to ROCK!!!!!

 

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What not to ask a business owner – can I pick your brain?

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Hi Angela,

I’ve been trying to get in touch with you to pick your brain about Wandering Cooks. It’s such an interesting concept and I’d really like to set up something in Canberra. I’m in Brisbane on Friday and would love it if you could show me round.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Cheryl

I receive this request quite regularly and although I used to let the creatures feast on my brain a little, now I swat them away. I thought my latest response might be useful for other business owners who receive similar requests – who may have gathered some momentum, may be demonstrating success in something that seemed undoable.

It’s also useful for people who like to pick brains… to encourage them not to. Please cease and desist or at least first think about what you’re offering in return for such a feast. You better have a mighty tasty offering to make first, because if you wait til you’ve piss us off, it’s too late to go back and try again.

Hi Cheryl, 

I did get your messages but I’ve been busy, and also (to be completely honest) I find requests like this (which I get often) a little confronting. You’re asking for my time and my experience in order to benefit your own new venture, without giving any sense to the why. Why would I want to give you this valuable information? Who are you and why do you deserve it? What kind of passion, dedication, affiliation or real offers of partnership are you showing me? Have you been hardly done by in the world and deserving of an extra leg up that others aren’t? Or have you read all the information I’ve already put out into the world about how I started up my business, what advice I can offer others who wish to learn, lose, fail, succeed, make beautiful things happen, and are dearly wanting more? And are you assuming I have no plans on Canberra myself? I have worked enormously hard to create a Wandering Cooks here, so why wouldn’t I be thinking about taking it elsewhere? I’ve had no external funding for what I’ve done here. It’s been a really tough road. If I said yes to all the requests like yours, I would be doing tours for other people’s plans on a regular basis and burning my own business’s future potential in the process.
 
I’m sorry to sound so brusk about this! But I don’t want to sugar coat it as I do think there are much better ways for you to approach your information gathering from business owners like myself, who’ve had to fight their way to where they are currently. Please don’t ask to pick their brains either.
 
all my best,
 
Angela

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Why am I so lucky?

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to have stayed standing through all the leaning in?

and the endless days, weeks, months of not making it but having to keep going anyway.

When I see this video of Jo and Sam I’m reminded of the sheer beauty and happiness I’m surrounded with every day. And I feel so lucky to have moments when I’m standing straight up tall. Seeing it all.

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Podcast – Caveman Kitchen

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Ange sat down with Robyn from Little Birdy Cakes and Abbey from Caveman Kitchen to discuss starting a food business. Robyn was keen to learn from Abbey’s success and a lot of ground was covered. Grab a cuppa tea and listen in.

PS. the resources are coming – we’re in the process of tracking them down from Abbey who’s got a new baby to contend with (congratulations!)

 

 

 

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We’ve got some shoes to fill, for now…

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The lovely Olga will be jaunting off to Mexico soon for a much needed holiday and we’re on the hunt for a casual or two to fill her shoes with the possibility of staying on after she returns. The Bar at Wandering Cooks is growing (literally! there are extensions being made right now) with the touch of our carefully selected Australian drops, delicious bar food and the ever present willingness from our existing staff to continue to make this place a gorgeous place to work and a great support to our food makers.

To fill the shoes of our dear Olga, you’ll need to have a strong passion and knowledge of locally made brews, wines, spirits and non-alcoholic beverages, be able to stay on your toes while working the bar with a smile on your dial and you’ll also need to want to work for a kickass (and challenging!) business like Wandering Cooks. We’re a quirky bunch who are passionate about our work. We’re not just another pub. You’ll need to have the desire to woo our customers, and to encourage them to tell their friends (and return, obvs).

You must be available in the evening and on the weekend and there will be between 10-15 hours available while Olga is away. IF you’re awesome, chances are, you’ll be able to stick around!

All applications must be in by Friday 8th Sept, 5pm – email Jo, our Bar Manager: jo@wanderingcooks.com.au with your resumé and cover letter. Make it interesting because we’re bored of shit cv’s.

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Biggest mistake so far? Being too accommodating

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I asked our kitchen customers about the biggest mistakes they’ve made since starting their food businesses, and as usual the crew shared with beautiful abandon. They’re awesome like that.

I’ll share some of their responses here over the next few weeks, because they’re spot-on learnings for all businesses in their infancies.

Below is the response is from Alphabet Cafe (Meghan & Zoe Tulleners), who’ve been with us from the start of Wandering Cooks. They’ve diversified from selling sweet goods through markets to making celebration cakes to wholesaling for a selection of Brisbane’s coolest bars and cafes. And they’ve experienced a HEAP along the way, including how to say no:

Megs said, “You might not know it by looking at our grumpy faces… but the biggest mistake we used to make and sometimes still do, is to be to accommodating. We used to be so uncomfortable saying no and wanted to please everyone that we nearly always said yes. This led to us straying from our path – baking things we didn’t want to, using ingredients we didn’t want to, working with or for people we didn’t respect. Now we’re hard arse motherf**kers who LOVE to say no. But really, we’ve just learnt to respect ourselves, our time and our decision to be proud owners of an ethical business.”

This is such a difficult lesson to learn, and we’ve seen it here again and again with our customers’ businesses, as well as our own.

One of the most difficult things Wandering Cooks needed to learn was to say no to prospective kitchen customers who didn’t share our values about ingredient sourcing. Because of this, there are many businesses using our kitchens that aren’t sourcing (for example) pastured reared animal products and in-season produce from smaller farmers who would benefit from all our support. But we’ve finally found our courage, and have started to say no to anyone wanting into our kitchens that can’t make some basic commitments to ethical sourcing.

Soon, we’ll be finding ways to incentivise all our existing kitchen customers to make the same commitments to sourcing ethically, as well. We have a plan! and you’ll be hearing more and more about it from us into the coming months. We weren’t brave enough to do this 4 years ago, but saying it now feels like coming home. And we’re proud to work with Alphabet Cafe, not just because they’re awesome individuals, but because they care about the same stuff we do. And when they do finally leave us for their own cafe (sniff! sniff!) home will be there, too. Love you two. x

 

 

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