Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur Learningtobeafoodentrepreneur

I am releasing all of season 2 because business has picked up for me over the last year or two and I've gotten behind on these episodes. Writing in depth reflection on my experiences at the time of these recordings takes a lot of time. If you like the reflections maybe I can do those in a recorded form instead? Let me know what you think.


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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learningtobeafoodentrepreneur/support

I am releasing all of season 2 because business has picked up for me over the last year or two and I've gotten behind on these episodes. Writing in depth reflection on my experiences at the time of these recordings takes a lot of time. If you like the reflections maybe I can do those in a recorded form instead? Let me know what you think.


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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learningtobeafoodentrepreneur/support

I am releasing all of season 2 because business has picked up for me over the last year or two and I've gotten behind on these episodes. Writing in depth reflection on my experiences at the time of these recordings takes a lot of time. If you like the reflections maybe I can do those in a recorded form instead? Let me know what you think.


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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learningtobeafoodentrepreneur/support

It has been a year and a half since Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur season 1 ended. During season 1 I wanted to start exploring my path as an entrepreneur, but did not know exactly where to begin. I decided to fill my days with what ever tasks I could, and researched cryptocurrency in an attempt to start gathering equipment I might need for a food business. At the end of season 1, I was headed to The Local Food Center in Missouri to learn more about what it took to run a food business.

Season 2 is a four part series all about my experience at The Local Food Center during 2018. You'll hear about the challenges I faced, what I learned, what I built, my successes and my failures.

In this first episode I give you an introduction to what the Local Food Center was, and what I was doing when I arrived. I tell you how I spent my time learning about my surroundings, the manufacturing equipment, the products we were manufacturing, and how the products were distributed. I also tell you about the inspiration behind me trying to automate data collection, production scheduling, and projections for our manufacturing process.

I ended up at the Local Food Center through an Alumni from the University I went to. I decided to intentionally accept a substantially reduced income for the opportunity to learn from the founder directly and work as a Food Scientist/General Manager. I still have copies of our original contract haha!

In Hindsight

Arriving at the Local Food Center, I believe, was a good experience. It was a high paced environment, there was a lot to learn, and the pressure to succeed was on which are all ingredients that help me do my best work. I think where I could have improved in the early days at the Local Food Center, was getting to know the people who worked there a little bit better. I dove directly into the work, but did not spend as much time getting to know everyone. It wasn't until a few months after I arrived that the pressure let up a little bit, and I began getting to know people more in depth. I found that getting to know people is important for developing relationships as well as gaining buy-in for a desired change within the business, and getting quality, honest, constructive feedback from the people around you. Currently it is 2021 and I still rely on the experience I gained at the Local Food Center for interpersonal interactions and team building.


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Hello, I wanted to address that I am a few days later than I'd like to be with this post. I recorded this episode as episode 9, but when I started uploading the podcasts I ended up combining episode 6 and 7 into episode 6 pt.1 and 6 pt. 2. That is why this is 'Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur Episode 8' and not episode 9 . 

In This Episode

There were a ton of updates in this episode that I briefly go over. First and foremost I updated my sound equipment! If you think the pop filter and mic stand helped the quality of the podcast please let me know!

Besides the equipment update there were 7 things I wanted to talk about:


My first (failed) experiment making Kombucha
My experience volunteering at New Roots in Louisville Kentucky. I volunteered at 1 event, went to 1 meeting, and volunteered 1 other time.
I started taking photos around Louisville. I now have a ton of photos on my hard drive and am always looking to grow my image portfolio. 
I met with someone to talk cryptocurrency & blockchain at a coffee shop.
I traveled to Mansfield Missouri to visit a Food company startup called The Local Food Center.
Lastly, I talk about how I started adding to a book list I created which was inspired by a podcast called 'The Investors Podcast':

               - Check List Manifesto
              - Death and Life of Great American Cities
              - Good to Great

In Hindsight

Listening to this podcast before uploading it, I am filled with so many feelings. Going into it, I didn't truly understand how transformative 2018 would be on my life. There are a few things here that stuck out to me, and you can find them below. 

My food manufacturing/cooking/formulating experiments have all but stopped. Now (1/1/2020), my experiments focus more on learning efficient ways to grow produce in a limited area and thinking of ways to apply technology to augment that process.

I thought volunteering at New Roots was a valuable experience. I haven't been over there or reached out to them since the end of 2017, but even now I hear their name come up from time to time.  I still volunteer some of my time, I will expand on this in later episodes but I think there is so much value in getting involved in your local community. Whether its volunteering, or going to events or whatever you can do - I think its worth it. So much so that I wrote an article about it on Thrive Global. 

My book list is a dynamic list that I started putting together at the end of 2017, so if you have any recommendations please let me know.

Going to Missouri was the beginning of a series of events that would provide me with a lot of insight on what it means to be an Entrepreneur. I ended up moving to Missouri in 2018 were I was the General Manager and Food Scientist at The Local Food Center. During 2018 I was exposed to the pros and cons of taking an alternative Entrepreneurial path. I learned a lot about myself, what kind of business owner I'd like to be in the future, and got a glimpse of what it actually takes to operate a food manufacturing business. Entrepreneurship is hard work, it should be no surprise to find out Entrepreneurship is not actually how its portrayed in the media. Season 2 will be about 2018.

That's it for 2017, in this case I will call it the 'Season 1 Finale'. I want to remind you all listening, that this is one big experiment to see if these podcasts bring any value to you, so let me know how I can make it better!


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In Episode 7 of Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur, I talk about experimenting with making Lacto-fermented pickles and performing some market research.

I was really interested in learning about lacto-fermented pickles because I had been reading some articles about the potential benefits that lacto-fermented foods may have on gut health. So I decided the way I wanted to explore and learn more about lacto-fermented pickles was to make them myself. To do this, I split my approach into three categories - Formulation, Manufacturing, and Market Research.

Initial formulation was primarily comprised of finding a recipe, tweaking the recipe, and finding the variety of pickling cucumber. 

Manufacturing (at an extremely small scale - a couple of jars at a time) involved writing down detailed explanations on how to make the pickles. This included, washing the jars, how many pickling cucumbers went into a jar, how long to boil the brine I wanted to use, how long I needed to store the pickles in brine at room temperature, and how long to store them in refrigerated temperatures. This is just to name a few, but the goal was to write down as many details as I could.

Market Research, I thought, was an extremely important category. The purpose was to gauge how much interest in lactofermented pickles there was. If not, I would have gone back to the drawing board and tried to play around with finding a food item people may be interested in. I also used the market research to guide how I changed the formulation or manufacturing process over time.  For example, in this episode I was able to get a group of people (mainly family members, but some peers of family members) to try the pickles I had made and I wrote notes on what they would say. Their input would guide decisions such as reducing the salt content, increasing the number of days the pickles spent at room temperature during the fermentation process. 

I am under the impression that the method I am talking about:  
1. Creating a baseline formulation,
2. Creating a written manufacturing process in detail
3. performing market research can be used across a wide range of products.

The purpose of using this method was to establish a market research and data influenced feedback loop that could direct the development of the food product over time.      

IN HINDSIGHT

Since I recorded this episode I've stopped working on my lacto-fermentated pickle project. This is due to something that will be revealed on a later podcast that I don't want to spoil for you now. I also want to remind you that I was still using a video game microphone in a coffee cup, with a kitchen towel over it to help block out some of the hard P's and S's you may be hearing.

As far as formulation goes, back then I did not own a proper scale to weigh ingredients on, but now I have more equipment. I think it is important to weigh ingredients when formulating a food product in order to create a price breakdown for the product. A metric like price/gram of each ingredient used can make a huge difference when figuring out how to price a product. Also, weighing ingredients can lead to a more consistent product.  

For manufacturing, I think I did pretty well. I took a lot of photos, and I think I have some video of the process I was using as well. What I wish I did differently (that I learned later on) was to time myself on each step of the manufacturing process. Getting a time for each step, helps determine a total manufacturing time. You never know when this information can help!

My Market Research was very family oriented. This was partly because I was nervous to ask strangers to try 'an experimental food item'. In hindsight, I would be curious to learn more from strangers. 


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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/learningtobeafoodentrepreneur/support