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.

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!

               - Check List Manifesto

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.

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!

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.

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:  

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.

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.   

Let me try to untangle what was going through my mind at the time of recording this episode. Listening to this episode I remember what I was thinking very clearly, however, I remember when the microphone got in front of me and I began recording my thoughts my communication was not the best.  

At the time of recording this I had created a list of my long term goals and a number of smaller short term goals using the 'Notes' App on my iPhone. My primary long term goal at the time of recording this was to "Become a food entrepreneur, and start a food company". I still have not achieved that long term goal, but I have achieved a wide variety of short term goals that will hopefully lead me to completing my long term goal.

In this episode I'm talking about my short term goals at the time which were:

Let's dissect and reflect on the short term goals from 2 years ago I was trying to communicate with those of you listening to this episode now.

Mapping Out a Workflow:  I realized very quickly after trying to create & collect photos, audio, and blog articles that I could design a system to streamline the process of creating content. I designed a flowchart, created images, and created videos for the system so that it could be easily communicated and replicated in the future.

My plans for these Audio Recordings: When I first decided to start recording these episodes, I did not know where I wanted to distribute them. I also use to call them 'From The Ground Up Audio'. My thought at the time was to distribute them on something called Dsound or 'Decentralized Sound Platform'. This was so I could monetize the audio without having to add ads. On 03/05/19 I decided to distribute these audio recordings on a more mainstream platform, Anchor!

Market Research Questionnaire: I reached out to a professor at Penn State about Food Market Research who referred me to an old boss of mine. He told me about Secondary vs Primary market research. A year and a half later, I created a survey here. The survey currently has 25 responses.

In this episode I talk about how I began learning more about food additives and reading about how the FDA classifies the safety of certain food ingredients. One of the things that stuck out to me is how vague the language that the FDA uses can be sometimes. I go on to give some examples of how certain food ingredients have been rated by the FDA for consumer safety. I also touch on my approach to increase the quality of my blogs/photos/audio in order to increase the amount of disposable income available to feed back into improving my content quality.

To Reflect: At the time of recording this I had been jobless out of college for about 10 months. My goal at this time was to research and build a system that would allow me to be more productive on a daily basis. I would brainstorm ideas and create miniature projects for myself that I would then have to complete. Around this time I also started writing down the characteristics I wanted to have, my values in life, and the goals I wanted achieve.