What does it actually take to build a better ingredient for professional kitchens?

In this episode of The Perfect Bite, host Sarah Perkins sits down with Susannah Schoolman, founder of Tourlami, to unpack how deep culinary experience can become a real competitive advantage in entrepreneurship.

Susannah shares how her background as a classically trained pastry chef revealed a major gap in the plant-based market: vegan butters that simply didn’t work in professional baking and kitchen environments. Instead of settling for “good enough,” she spent years testing, iterating, and engineering two plant-based butters designed specifically for lamination, pastry, and high-heat applications in professional kitchens.

This conversation explores:

• How lived kitchen experience can uncover real product-market fit
• Why Tourlami offers multiple functional butters, not a single catch-all solution
• The five-year R&D journey behind building a credible food ingredient
• The mindset shift from chef to founder
• Why early-stage founders should prioritize performance over branding

This episode is a must-listen for food founders, chefs considering entrepreneurship, and anyone building a product meant to perform under real-world conditions.

You can learn more about Tourlami at www.tourlami.com. You can purchase Tourlami for your own kitchen at Chef’s Warehouse locations across the U.S and Canada and on Webstaurant Store.

You can follow Tourlami on social media @tourlami and Susannah at @itsschool_man. 

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