Cooking Up a Business summary

You’re constantly told, whether by inspirational books or close friends, to chase your dreams no matter what. But what if you want to start a food business and you’re short on cash?

Lacking funding isn’t a dead end. Rather, it’s an opportunity to put your creativity and resourcefulness to the test.

Take Maddy D’Amato and Alex Hasulak, founders of Love Grown Foods. While still in college, they cooked up the idea of building a food business using Maddy’s family’s delicious family recipes for granola. Of course being students, they didn’t have much in the way of financing.

By day, the two young people lived at their parents’ homes and worked hard at their regular jobs. But by night, for hours they cooked and hand-packaged batches of granola in a catering kitchen, watching movies at the same time to keep them going.

This initial phase was tough, but fun! D’Amato and Hasulak proved that with hard work, they could start their business with very little start-up cash.

As well as working with limited resources, you should also feel comfortable with selling your product before you actually make it. This sounds risky, but will help you avoid unnecessary spending.

The first clients for Love Grown Foods were two neighborhood coffee shops. A great place to start, yet D’Amato and Hasulak had bigger dreams. Hasulak soon managed to close a huge deal with the Aspen City Market. They were worried as they had yet to produce such a large amount of granola – but with many long hours, they made their deadline.

Then D’Amato and Hasulak landed a deal with King Soopers, a supermarket in Denver that brought their product to 40 stores. Quickly the chain wanted to sell their product in 80 stores!

With this, D’Amato and Hasulak realized they could start working on Love Grown Foods full-time. In an impressive example of scaling, Love Grown Foods was stocked in 1,300 stores a mere 18 months after the duo’s first supermarket deal!