More Than A Cookie Stella Vanstone & Emma Kula

In this episode Emma and Stella discuss some of the more taxing aspects of entrepreneurship, why a quick pivot is harder some days than others, and they spill the tea on some new product formulation!

Highlights: 
We get vulnerable after a particularly rough day. Entrepreneurship ain't all rainbows!Help us pick our new product!! 

In this episode, Stella Vanstone and Emma Kula unpack some of the wilder things they have encountered as women in business. 

From body shaming, condescending emails, imposter syndrome, and fellow founders not taking them seriously, this episode is full of some hot tea that is sure to resonate with any women in the workforce. 

TW: Stella and Emma discuss their shared histories about struggling with eating disorders and how these journeys impacted the mission behind Stellar Eats.

They  dive into diet culture, how the early 2000s version of “health food” was a lot of diets in disguise, and why they hate when people say foods are ‘guilt-free’
KEY TAKEAWAYS: “Diet culture” wants you to believe that being skinny is the most important thing about you. When in reality, it’s the most boring.Brands/media want you to believe being skinny is the #1 goal and that its the main indicator of health/wellness.Diet culture aims to reduce you down into the least interesting thing about you - how small you are.

Stella Vanstone and Emma Kula reflect on how far they've come from the early days in commercial kitchens at 2am, hand pouring product, and hand-stickering bags.

Come along as we discuss the early days of Stellar Eats and some of our biggest kitchen mishaps and fails. We've come a long way.

But growth in the business also means...growth in the scale of problems.

To put it simply -- more products, more problems.

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Storytime. When we started Stellar Eats, we had JUST enough money in our bank account to buy our first round of ingredients, print some stickers, and to buy some white pouches (to apply said stickers to). With just enough leftover to rent a shared commercial kitchen in “off hours” AKA 8pm - 8am. Queue the worst night of our lives….
It’s hot. It’s dark. We’re wearing hairnets and lugging 50lb bags of cocoa powder down a dark hallway.
We thought the 3 of us were going to make our first 1,000 mixes.  We had brought a big metal bowl and a giant whisk.
Help. lol.
To say it went badly was an understatement. Tears were shed, cockroaches were trapped underneath crates, powder was spilled, and turns out trying to mix 25 lbs of baking mix by hand with 1 whisk was not the most efficient. Our 1,000 mix goal quickly became 500, then 300…
100 mixes later…It’s 4am when we finally leave the kitchen. Covered in powder, sweat and tears we silently walk towards our cars ready to head home. Ultimately defeated and questioning what we have done.
As we’re about to leave, Michelle says, “well….can’t say we killed it. But we can say we did it.” and the 3 of us burst out laughing. We laughed for a solid 5 minutes straight. It was the worst and the best. We had just made our first Stellar Eats products.
We got into our first 5 stores and sold out of product within 2 weeks. So, back to the kitchen we went. This time to one without cockroaches.

MORE THAN A COOKIE: A podcast by Stella Vanstone and Emma Kula, the founders of Stellar Eats
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We’re here to disrupt the way brands speak to consumers so we figured, let’s start the conversation via a fun podcast full of industry disrupting hot takes, business BTS, and so much more.

We truly knew nothing when we started this business. We went in fully naive, but fully ready to learn. 
And wow…have we learned. 
It’s been a wild ride over the last 3 years and we want to share that journey with you. For the good, the bad, the ugly. Come along with us as we problem solve on a real-time basis, talk to other founders, and attempt to laugh off the rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship.
More than a cookie resonates with us for more than just our mission. It’s also about empowering other women in business. The reality is that it can be hard out there for women in business.  We want to shed light on female strength, resiliency, and even though we might look sweet, we’re tough cookies.