Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

This is pt. 2 of Episode 6

In this episode I dive in to what my plans were for the camera I purchased. I also talk about how I organized the files, content, and ideas that I come up with.

Every Sunday evening around 5pm I started doing an internet broadcast I called 'From The Ground Up: Lazy Sunday Broadcast'. It started off as an experiment where I would play music from artists I met through blogging. After a while the show transformed into a broadcast where I would share my entrepreneurial journey and talk about Food, Tech, and Media. Sometimes I would come up with an idea, talk about it on the broadcast, collect feedback, experiment, and then talk about the results in the next weeks broadcast. I initially got the idea from The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. In the book Eric Ries talks about the Build-Measure-Learn method which is a positive feedback loop to see how effective a product, service, or idea is and changing it based on the feedback you receive. Overtime I used this feedback to change the broadcast and the experiments little by little over time. The show is now called 'Lazy Sundaze' and I have been doing the show every Sunday for 2 years now. 

Basically after getting my camera I started planning what I wanted to document and I also built a system that would help me try to  continuously create new things or 'experiments' to document. The end goal was to learn or figure out a way to, make it fun, make it valuable and try to monetize it.

In hindsight, I have still not brewed mead. But I have done some other experiments that came up during Lazy Sundaze. I have tried making kombucha,  lacto-fermenting pickles, I have made carrot powder, and celery powder. I have also started a 28 sq foot garden in my back yard and a 4 sq foot garden in my closet.

I think at the time of recording this I did not have my pop filter for my microphone yet, so you can hear breathing and other fast-moving air in the microphone. I still use my 'Business Folder' today, however, some of it has moved over to google drive for collaborating purposes.  

I also want to mention, during this recording I was trying really hard to learn different or unique ways to document and monitize my experiences. However, over time my need or desire to monetize my documented experiences/experiments faded away. I started to just enjoy sharing my experiences, learning and figuring things out. Now I do Lazy Sundaze, and do the Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur podcast without really any intention to make money from it.   

In this episode I talk about a book list I started creating, I also give a summary of my experience exploring cryptocurrency.

To reflect: By this time I had figured out my approach in cryptocurrency and it came down to executing in order to keep collecting as much as possible. My goal at the time was to purchase a camera with cryptocurrency in order to improve the quality of my blogs in hopes of earning more cryptocurrency. I was still relatively new to Louisville Kentucky (where I was living and currently live) and I did not know to many people or places. I didn't really get to show people my skill sets or thirst for knowledge until late 2018/early 2019. During 2017 I felt pretty alone, I didn't know the direction I wanted to take and had little to no guidance. I didn't realize the power of getting out and interacting with people/clubs/organizations yet. I am still adding on to and working through my book list. I've made it into a 'live' book list where I add to it and cross books off over time. In 2018 I even read some books that weren't on the list... but more on that later.

Reminder: These are raw audio diaries. In order to streamline to process of creating them I reduced the amount of editing so I apologize if you hear any nervous hiccups.

In this episode I briefly stumble and then begin explaining my origins in the Cryptocurrency and Food Science space. I share one of the experiences that made me passionate about the Food Industry.

To reflect: I was and sometimes still am nervous about sharing my thoughts/ideas publicly to people that I do not know. But in this video I tried to force myself through that and share some of my experiences that lead me to be passionate about food & entrepreneurship. At the time getting a camera was a big deal to me. My video/photo quality had been lacking for some time. I had been using a logitech USB camera which limited me to being close to a computer or laptop to take video unless I used my phone.

    
I remember putting a lot of thought into my strategy and approach to creating content on the Steemit platform. I also put a lot of thought into how I would strategically deploy the cryptocurrency I earned over time. Since I started all of this living with my mom, $0 USD and $0 cryptocurrency it was very important to me to think deeply on how I used my $ and my crypto. It still is very important to me.

Reminder: These are raw audio diaries. In order to streamline to process of creating them I reduced the amount of editing so I apologize if you hear any nervous hiccups.

In this episode I fumble through the very first audio diary I ever recorded.

To reflect: Back then I remember being a lot more nervous to talk to the world about what I am doing and what I want to accomplish. There are moments where there is dead air, moments where I repeat myself, moments when I cough and hiccup into the microphone. Overall the quality is not good.

At the time I was learning a lot about cryptocurrencies and had very big ideas of the potential growth. If you listen to this you will find out my thoughts and goals at the time.

I also said I would do these weekly which lasted about 5 episodes.

In this episode I introduce Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur. I talk about the purpose of this podcast, the format and the overall goal of Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur.