Why the Founder of Callie's Biscuits Says the Old Way Is Better (Sometimes)
Plus she shares her recipe for the good life.
Got an appetite for hearing from the leading boss women that are calling the shots in the culinary world? Get ready to grub hard on our new#CreateCultivate series: Counter Culture, where we'll be talking to prominent women in the food industry about good eats, food trends, and making it in the cutting edge cooking world.
Don't put a fork in it, because we're not close to done.
photo credit: Nickie Stone
Carrie Morey founded Callie’s Charleston Biscuits and Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit with the intention of making the tender, buttery, made-by-hand biscuits of her mother (Callie).
Carrie says, "I fell into being a baker by default when my mother retired a little less than 3 years into starting Callie's Biscuits together. I have always been a cook, an entertainer, a good Southern woman, but baking was not something I had experience with."
Business has always come easy to her and she calls the "art of a deal," "fun," but baking "was challenging, hard physical work, and an opportunity to learn something new."
"I knew I couldn't captain the ship without becoming a master biscuit maker," she says, "so I dug in. The result was a love affair with the process, the art. The calm sense I had when baking was such a departure from my life of emails, diapers, and endless carpools and playdates. I found myself wanting to bake to take the stress of life away. That was when I knew I had found my calling."
We checked in with Carrie, who is business woman, marketer, and baker to find out how she manages her "calling," and her ingredients for the good life.
Southern traditions and the tradition of mom’s recipe have played a huge role in your biscuits, but how have they played into your approach and strategy as an entrepreneur?
Probably the biggest example of tradition, specifically Southern tradition as it relates directly to my business would be keeping the recipe the same, and not changing for growth or other opportunities. If you think about it, making millions of biscuits by hand is certainly not the most efficient way to do it. Throughout my 11 years owning this business, countless times people have come into my life trying to convince me to change the process. I have to remind them and myself that tradition and the handmade art of biscuit making is what got me here. I don't want to mess with that -- it's my secret weapon and maybe a little bit of a curse. But it just means I might not be able to be all things to all people.
You’re also not just about baking for yourself. It’s so amazing that you run an incubator for other entrepreneurs. You help bake careers in a sense. Why was this an important extension of your biz?
My life is crazy busy with three businesses and three children--I don't have a lot of time to give back. So I thought, if I could help budding entrepreneurs start their dreams, that could be a way for me to give back. When I had the idea to start this biscuit business, no one had ever heard of one; I remember trying to pitch the idea, and I couldn't even get a realtor to call me back when I needed to lease a space! I had a very hard time convincing people--including my mom that this was a good idea. So I hope to help others that might be in a similar space to me 11 years ago! I also want to make an impact and be a mentor.
Did you have a mentor? What are some lessons you learned from them?
The most important mentor in my life has always been my father. Not only is he a successful business man for over 25 years, he had great balance with family. This has always been my number one goal: family first. My father has always wanted to help people, regardless of whether or not it benefitted him. I hope to be like that too.
You also have three children! So you’re mom, mom to your business, and let’s say, mom to the students you teach. How does it all work? How do you get the ingredients right?
There are only a couple of ingredients actually: keep it simple, be kind, work hard and be honest, and enjoy life. Since I am a mother to three children, I have a duty to do the right thing--I am their role model and they are always watching and listening. And I make mistakes everyday, but what I hope to teach my girls--not just my children but all my biscuit babes that work with me-- is that making mistakes is ok. It's how you handle the cleanup!
"Keep it simple, be kind, work hard and be honest, and enjoy life."
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Speaking of students, what are a few failsafe tenets of brand building that you teach them?
Customer service is the most important facet of your business--it can make you or break you.
Work harder than you ever thought you could and when you think you can't work any harder--work some more.
Don't ever ask anyone to do anything you haven't already done before--no better way to get respect.
Treat everyone with kindness, whether it's your employees, the mailman, your customers, or the trash man.
Be humble.
What have you seen change over the last decade? How do you shift and adapt?
The biggest change I have seen is the social media/internet influence and online purchasing and communicating, which I guess is a great thing for my businesses. When I started Callie's Biscuits, buying food online was few and far between. Now, people are having their weeknight dinners shipped to them every day. Technology is a good thing, but if we aren't careful, it can also ruin us. Everything in moderation and sometimes the old way is better--I love answering the telephone at work and talking to customers!
"Don't ever ask anyone to do anything you haven't already done before."
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If life was a recipe, what would yours be?
Ingredients:
Family
Passion
Doing
Surround yourself with good people
Hard work
Play
Mix all above ingredients and go! Life is short; have a ball!
What’s next? What else could you possible add?
A level of surprise! My favorite thing about life in the last five years is that you never know what tomorrow will bring! Now that I'm in my 40s, meeting the love of my life, having children, etc is over--life's greatest surprises. So my mantra is to keep creating new ones. I don't know what tomorrow will bring, but I know it will be good--and the best part about not knowing is that it will be a surprise. I feel very blessed and whatever is around the corner, I am ready and can't wait to see what it is! SURPRISE!
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It's National Ice Cream Day! Meet the Woman Who's Changing the Ice Cream Biz One Flavor at a Time
"You get really, really tough blazing the path through the forest."
Photo Credit: Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
Founder of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, Jeni Britton Bauer, says that if her business was a flavor it would be Dark Chocolate: "Complex and game-changing, hard to replicate."
With over two decades dedicated to the scoop game, Jeni knows a thing or two about packing a pint, but hitting the sweet spot didn't come easy. There were learning curves, major lessons and hard, trailblazing work.
We checked in with Jeni who shared about ups, downs, her entrepreneurial vs. business spirit (yes, there is a difference), and which pint she would choose to eat fooooreevvver.
Can you tell us a little about your background and how you got into the scoop business?
I grew up wanting to be an entrepreneur. My grandmother is an art teacher and because of her, I learned to constantly create and make things. Yet, we have two very different views on how to best craft an item. As an artist, she never wants to make the same thing twice, but I relish in it. When I hit upon something I love, I want to replicate, build a process and perfect the item until it’s flawless. And as a child, I started more businesses than I could count. So, it was inevitable that I would find something that I loved to make and run with it. I studied Art and Art History at The Ohio State University. I was also interested in pastry-making and working for a French bakery. I very seriously considered switching over to perfuming. I have always been led by my sense of smell so I wanted to go to Grasse, France and become a nose or find a way to incorporate scent into art.
One day I had the idea to use ice cream to carry scent, and that moment changed my life. It was precisely where all of my interests intersected and I knew in an instant that American ice cream could get a lot better and more interesting. So I set sail -- and the rest is a crazy ass history of ups and downs and hustle like nobody's beeswax.
Ups and downs. You were living out of your car during the first months of operating your first ice cream stand, Scream. You’ve come a long way. What’s some advice you have for a scrappy entrepreneurial spirits?
I'm an adventurer. I wasn't bothered a bit by living out of my car or hustling. I have so much energy and excitement for what's possible and very very few resources to make it happen -- I have found that my hands, feet, brain, and friends have been my greatest resource.
Every entrepreneur has a very different experience, but one thing is always true: you get a wacky idea that becomes a vision and then you start working toward that vision and never quit. No matter what. Entrepreneurship can be extraordinarily isolating; the better your idea is, the more people will be repelled by it. When I started, no one wanted spicy ice cream, or flower petal or herb ice cream. It’s about getting help from anyone you can and proving yourself over time. You are the only one who will champion your idea, and in some ways, that never ends. It's always about seeking great people to help. And to do that, you have to get really fucking good at what you do. You have to earn your teammates because they make all the difference.
"Entrepreneurship can be extraordinarily isolating; the better your idea is, the more people will be repelled."
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Interior St. Louis location. Photo Credit: Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
What kind of learning curve did you experience between opening shop number 2 and shop number 10? [Ed note: there are currently 23 scoop shops.]
Suuuuuch a huge learning curve. But again, it's about my teammates. They would never take on something they can't knock out of the park - give or take a few snafus. We always push ourselves to try something new in each store and we learn from that experience.
We must get used to seeing great companies embarking on controlled growth. It's impossible to survive and truly build demand for the ingredients we want or build a safe and secure community of jobs without the resources to sustain it. The 21st century is very different from the 20th century, where we saw great little companies explode and just go downhill. It's not only possible to grow and get better, it should be expected. We look up to trailblazing companies like Patagonia for this reason. We will get better as we grow, not the other way around.
"We will get better as we grow, not the other way around."
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Is every pint still hand packed? How do you scale and business while remaining committed to local and quality?
We haven't hand packed every pint for a long time. And we determined that it’s no longer a safe way to pack pints, by our safety standards. It took us a long time to figure out how to get our ice cream to work on a pint packing machine because our ice cream is more viscous than others as it comes out of the ice cream machine.
We're building our company as a community of people and many are not local to our kitchen. We work with a 5th generation peach farm in Georgia, a vanilla farm in Uganda, and various makers and producers locally, nationally, regionally and internationally. We believe in each other and we believe that by coming together we make better ice cream. That’s how we’ve approached it from day one.
Quality is a choice every company makes every single day. And it begins with your values. There is no reason a company can't grow and maintain quality, but we also know that as we grow we can actually improve quality from the perspective of ingredients, molecular science, safety and direct partnerships. In many ways it’s the only argument for growth at all. Scale is important in ice cream unlike some other food products. You can't even begin to impact dairy quality unless you have scale to support it - which is why we love Ohio so much. But the same is true of direct trade vanilla or fair trade cocoa. We can all order ingredients from a catalog, but we want to be more than that.
"Quality is a choice every company makes every single day. And it begins with your values."
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You’ve talked about the difference between entrepreneurs and business people. Have you grown to understand and be more interested in the business side of things?
The short answer is no. I retain too much “artist” in my heart. In fact, I have less and less interest in the business stuff as I learn more about it. I like to create experiences, and to do that I need resources and a great team. That's what motivates me. The older I get the more comfortable I am in admitting that.
Exterior Westside Provisions, Atlanta. Photo Credit: Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
"I have less and less interest in the business stuff as I learn more about it. I like to create experiences."
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The long answer is yes. I am inspired by my teammates who are so flipping brilliant at everything from leadership and org stuff, HR, R+D, Art and Design, and our finance team kills me—some of the most creative people I know. They find stories where I see a paper full of digits.
The truth is that I have so much belief and trust in these people and our talents work really really well together. I have the luxury of being able to purposefully remain blind to many business details. Not to say that I don't keep up, I absolutely do, I just keep my head very squarely on creating the best ice creams I can imagine and making great places to eat them in, but always with great reverence for the resources we've built and how to do the most with them.
What are some lessons you’ve learned about rapid growth?
We have 23 stores. I've been at this for 21 years (I have had two ice cream businesses). Jeni's is almost 15 years old. We've stepped out our growth. As we get more great people and knowledge and dairy we apply it. Every single day is challenging in business. That's what makes it fun.
Still, if you want to do something new it's often difficult to know how to do it. You can hire the top consultants in the world and you'll still fuck up somehow. You get really really tough blazing the path through the forest.
----And you make it a lot easier for the copycats who benefit from your blood, sweat and tears.
Scoop pros. Photo Credit: Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
If you had to eat one of your pints from now until forever, which would you choose?
Lemon buttermilk frozen yogurt. It's perfect. And I say that after making it for 20+ years - with tweaks along the way. Perfect texture, body, and flavor. I think this is one of a handful of our flavors that really sets us apart from all others in terms of know-how. Plus, it's so simple: fresh lemon, cultured buttermilk, bio-dynamically raised yogurt, grass-pastured milk and a nice dose of cream. You can't ever tire of it. It would sustain you for forever, too - the right combo of protein, fat, carbs.
OK. Truth: Is the dessert business sweet? What parts are more like veggies?
The highs are really high. The lows are really low. But they balance each other to become a great adventure.
But I have a very strict policy: if I'm going to eat ice cream daily (which I do) then I have to balance that with lots of veggies (which I do).
It works the same way.
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Find Out How This Cookie Maven Turned a Teenage Recipe Into a Million Dollar Business
From mom's kitchen to storefront.
Got an appetite for hearing from the leading boss women that are calling the shots in the culinary world? Get ready to grub hard on our new#CreateCultivate series: Counter Culture, where we'll be talking to prominent women in the food industry about good eats, food trends, and making it in the cutting edge cooking world.
Don't put a fork in it, because we're not close to done.
Someone once asked Courtney Cowan, founder of Milk Jar Cookies what her secret ingredient was. Her answer?
"The salt from my tears," she joked.
But it's a little more complicated than that. "The context of that statement was that, as I was preparing to open, my dad was diagnosed with lymphoma and shortly thereafter, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. So, between the exhaustion and stress of opening the shop, keeping the train moving forward, and worrying about them, it was a pretty tough time that was definitely accompanied by some tears."
She had also left her job in the television industry, deciding to put her whole heart, soul, and focus into Milk Jar Cookies.
"I’m a fighter for whom failure isn’t an option, so even though I had to dig deep at times, the commitment to make it work never escaped me."
"I’m a fighter for whom failure isn’t an option."
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Today she is casual, (dare we say?) relaxed even. "Do you think I should put shoes on?" she asks when we arrive to shoot. There are donuts waiting and a batch of fresh cookies. It's like walking into your favorite aunt's home. The one who tells you bad jokes while baking up a storm. The one you have real talk with. And we do. We talk about 20-hour days and pivotal business moments. We talk about the decision to put off having kids. We talk about the reality of writing a business plan when you have no idea how to write said plan. And we talk about her beginnings.
"When I was a kid— my mom taught me the Tollhouse Recipe," she explains. "I found myself making cookie dough anytime I could-- like every Friday night." It was in a suburb of Indiana during her teens that she started futzing with that recipe, landing on what become the base for her famous Milk Jar Chocolate Chip cookies. Her tried-and-true-and-tested by all friends and family recipe. Everyone knew, no matter the occasion, Courtney was going to show up with cookies.
It's a trait that followed her to LA and her job as a post-production supervisor in one-hour TV dramas. Per her M.O. she was bringing cookies into work, leaving them in the kitchen, and people kept mistaking them for bakery purchased cookies. At that point she was still relying on her trusty go-to chocolate chip recipe. Milk Jar now bakes 15 flavors daily.
In 2005 she stared an online cookie company (originally named Sweet Cheeks Cookies), hustling on the the side while she worked full-time in TV production. For seven years she shifted back and forth between cookies and her day job, using industry hiatus' between shows to her benefit.
In 2012 while laid up after a back surgery she realized she could either go back to TV or she could focus on baking full time. During the 8 weeks she wrote her business plan. She committed.
"I went through probably twenty iterations of a business plan," she says. "I didn't know where to start."
"I had a really hard time was putting into words why I wanted to do it and why I felt it was important. It’s just cookies. But my whole goal was to provide more than just cookies- I knew the experience was as important as the cookies themselves."
She says a resource that was immensely helpful was the Small Business Administration located in Glendale. "They have a small business development center— and it’s free," she says. "They have seminars and counselors you can have one-on-one meetings with and their connections were critical in helping connect us to a bank that would give us a small business loan."
It was on December 4, 2012 -- which, she points out, happens to be National Cookie Day— is the day they got approved for the loan. January 1, 2013 they moved into what would become the Milk Jar Cookie flagship-- "a former Quiznos," says Courtney, "that left everything. We had a Quiznos party the night we got the keys and started tearing everything off the walls. We sold everything," she says, "down to the meat slicer."
Today that shop keeps her immensely busy, but she wouldn't have it any other way. "As crazy as it sounds" she says, "my favorite time to bake is extremely early in the morning. I thrive on the busy times that require me to be at the shop at 3:30am, jamming to some music, and doing my thing. My life will never be as simple as it was before I opened the doors of Milk Jar Cookies, so those mornings when it’s just me and my cookies are special to me and remind me why I love this."
"I thrive on the busy times that require me to be at the shop at 3:30am, jamming to some music."
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She says it's a "cool combo" of remembering the simplicity of the days when cookies were still a hobby and relishing in how far she's come. How far she's come currently does not include kids, which, was a conscious decision she made with husband Adam when they first launched. He also worked in television (to which he has returned) and took time off to get the business up and running. "It was a solid year and a half where we worked together— and we talked about nothing but the shop. World events and then cookies."
“I’ve never worked so hard in my life," she says. "Every book says 'be ready for 12-hour days,' but we’re talking 20-hour days.” But it was something she knew she had to do. "I didn’t know if I would ever get around to doing it if I had kids. You’re not eating, not sleeping, you’re worrying all the time-- this is my baby."
Her life mantra is "if you want it make it happen." (See the chalkboard in her kitchen nook.)
"If you want it, make it happen."
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Next steps for making it happen for MJC is preparing for growth beyond 5466 Wilshire. They've surpassed $2million in sales in less than three years. They are focussing on shipping and delivery "which," she notes "is in high demand and requires the least amount of additional overhead." They are also currently overhauling their website to make it more user-friendly and streamline the process on their end.
And Courtney says, "I’ve begun laying the ground work for an additional baking space, which is very exciting and a new challenge to tackle."
Upcoming challenges will include the month of December. Not surprisingly the holidays are their busiest time and they joke that "Winter is coming..." Last December was Milk Jar Cookies' biggest month to date. In one day they "baked, packaged, and delivered over 3,500 cookies. It’s intense," she says, "but truly so much fun." They've also shown 20% growth in sales every month, compared to that same month the year before.
Despite growth it's vital to Courtney that "Milk Jar magic is in each cookie and every interaction."
She seems to have nailed that recipe.
Milk Jar Cookies is located at 5466 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036
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Adrianna Adarme of A Cozy Kitchen Talks Cooking Anything She Wants
The kitchen is her oyster.
Got an appetite for hearing from the leading boss women that are calling the shots in the culinary world? Get ready to grub hard on our new#CreateCultivate series: Counter Culture, where we'll be talking to prominent women in the food industry about good eats, food trends, and making it in the cutting edge cooking world.
Don't put a fork in it, because we're not close to done.
We're watching food blogger Adrianna Adarme of A Cozy Kitchen decorate cupcakes in the gorgeous light of her LA living room. There's a setup of icing, baby's breath, and blackberries. She spreads the icing on the vanilla base, baked earlier, the knife creating perfectly smooth swirls. It's Pinterest heaven.
Adrianna didn't set out to be a food blogger. "When I first started my blog," she says, "I was working as a producer at a trailer house. We made trailers and promotional materials for studios. When people hear this they think it’s really fun but in actuality it doesn’t require a ton of creativity."
It was a work environment that left her feeling disconnected from art or creative work and searching for something else.
"I wasn’t inspired by the films we were promoting nor was I inspired by the content I was creating there. Looking back I think if I was working on films I did love, I might not have ever started my blog." But she did.
In 2009 she started A Cozy Kitchen. In the fall of 2015 she published The Year of Cozy, her step-by-step book of recipes and projects. She also has a new coloring book A Cozy Coloring Cookbook, designed with illustrator Amber Day, to be released November 2016.
It's cozy because it's a grown-up take on comfort food, like pie, the smell of which she says will always bring a smile to her face. It's a modern-meets-nostalgia approach to cooking and baking that she says is more about a feeling than anything else. "It’s not necessarily one that is in the middle of winter or one that has snow outside of the windows."
When I think of a kitchen that's "cozy," she says, "I like to think of it as a warm place you never want to leave. Maybe music is playing, the oven is baking up something awesome, and your dog is at your feet. And maybe it’s right before your friends are coming over. It’s that safe feeling that everything is OK, even though it’s usually not."
"Cozy--it’s that safe feeling that everything is OK, even though it’s usually not."
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We chatted with Adrianna about the power of good food, what "Cozy" means to her, and the one food she'd choose to eat for the rest of her life. ("Easy," she says, "Pasta.")
Why food? Beyond the obvious of it bringing people together? What special meaning does it hold for you?
Unfortunately there isn’t some big story that drew me to food other than just the desire to be creative in my spare time. I majored in filmmaking in college and with film, unlike food, you need a lot of people involved and a ton of resources in order to create the work that’s in your brain. But with food you can sort of just do it by yourself. You don’t need much. I like ceramics for that very reason, too.
How did you land on blogging as the answer to a creative void?
I arrived at blogging when I was bored at work reading blogs. I found them really entertaining, a great way to procrastinate. So, I started cooking at home a lot more because of them. I really liked that there wasn’t that much production between the person/writer and what you were reading. It felt super immediate and fluid.
How much of cooking is instinct and how much is following a recipe?
I think that sort of depends what you’re making (laughs). I think cooking is very much about instincts but you don’t really get those instincts until you’ve cooked a lot. I don’t think people are born with those instincts; I do think people are born with good palates but those instincts you speak of are ones that are learned over time. Being a good cook is all about doing and experience, like a lot of other things in life.
But that’s ok. I think a lot of people don’t have those instincts yet so that’s why recipes were created.
Is there a moment in the kitchen you can remember from your youth that has stuck with you?
Not necessarily a moment but more like a feeling. It’s the feeling of how our Sundays felt growing up. Salsa or merengue or jazz was usually playing, and my parents were cooking with my grandfather. My grandfather would usually be lecturing my dad about the importance of “tuco” (which means tomato sauce in Spanish). There were lots of heated arguments about using water vs. chicken broth (laughs). That feeling is a super warm feeling to me when I look back on; it felt safe and comfortable—like a hug.
"Salsa or merengue or jazz was usually playing, and my parents were cooking with my grandfather."
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What is your favorite part about being a food blogger?
My favorite part about being a food blogger is waking up and being able to cook anything I want. I have a platform that allows me to cook anything I’d like-- and still make money. I mean, that’s a dream. There are challenges in any job but I can tell you that there aren’t that many with food blogging, or at least I don’t think so.
What are some unexpected challenges? From creating something from scratch to making sure it’s photographed just right?
For me, the biggest challenge is just not being basic and boring. I sometimes think, 'Oh this is just my style,' but sometimes I’m just being boring (laughs). It’s so hard. That’s probably my biggest struggle, just coming up with ideas that I think are worthy of being shared.
Do you ever run into a recipe rut? Kind of like writer’s block but with food?
Yes, totally. It’s the worst. There are times when I feel like every idea that I can think of is so basic (laughs). During times like that I usually just go on Instagram and look up restaurants that I know are doing really inspiring work. I look at their food on Instagram, try to imagine the flavors together and think of something else completely so I’m not totally ripping them off AND transform it into something real people in real non-professional kitchens can recreate.
What do you hope your readers get from A Cozy Kitchen?
I hope they get a place that is fun and cozy. I hope it’s a place that inspires them to maybe make something they were slightly intimidated by. I hope that they find something to bake with their friends. I like to think that a lot of my recipes are perfect for that lazy Saturday when you want a project to bake .
What’s the long-term goal for A Cozy Kitchen? How do you see your brand expanding— including your book, etc.?
I like to tell people that I want to wake up and cook every single day for the rest of my life. How that exactly looks and where my money comes from might change, especially since digital media is always rapidly changing. The large picture isn’t easy to see since no one has really blogged for twenty years. All I know is that I want to keep making and creating food for a really long time. Hopefully people will be interested in what I make for that long.
"The large picture isn’t easy to see since no one has really blogged for twenty years."
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In the fall I’m coming out with a new cookbook. It’s a coloring book called A Cozy Coloring Cookbook. I’m SO excited. It’s full of illustrations of some really simple recipes that are colorful and fun to color. I worked with a really amazing illustrator named Amber Day. She’s ridiculously talented. I like to think of it as hyper-reality. It’s full of sprinkles falling from the sky, a pattern of pizza slices and Amelia (my dog) dreaming about all the things she wishes she could eat. I can’t wait to share it with the world.
Be sure to catch Adrianna on panel when she joins us for Create & Cultivate ATL. Get your tickets now!!
More from our blog:
Kore Kitchen Founder Explains Why She'll Always Be a Small Business
More money, more problems.
Got an appetite for hearing from the leading boss women that are calling the shots in the culinary world? Get ready to grub hard on our new#CreateCultivate series: Counter Culture, where we'll be talking to prominent women in the food industry about good eats, food trends, and making it in the cutting edge cooking world.
Don't put a fork in it, because we're not close to done.
We’re making zero waste toothpaste in the kitchen of Meryl Pritchard of Kore Kitchen. She’s using an olive wood spoon made from branches; no trees were cut down in the name of the spoon. She uses aloe instead of Bandaids. Her water jug is filled with spring water a friend delivers. Even her TP is made with wheat straw and requires no deforestation.
“Why would we cut down trees so we can wipe our butts?” she asks me as she mixes the concoction of coconut oil, baking soda, turmeric, peppermint, and cinnamon. She scoops it into a glass jar for me to take home.
“The turmeric makes the toothbrush orange,” she tells me, “so don’t get weirded out.”
What’s weird is how little I know about recycling; a blue bin is hardly a perfect solution. “Less than 10 percent of plastic that gets thrown in blue bins is recycled,” she explains. The reasons for this are multifold: people don't sort, rinse, or really know what can and cannot be recycled.
[Unfun fact: In Los Angeles alone nearly 10 tons of plastic fragments-- think parts of plastic bags, straws, and soda bottles-- are carried into the Pacific Ocean, every day.]
Meryl hasn’t always been about that zero waste lifestyle. For a minute she was about that life. In her early twenties she was working for a well-known Hollywood celebrity stylist. “We’d spend days picking dresses, fitting these beautiful women, and then they’d get torn to pieces in the press.” It made her feel terrible about herself and her body. “At the end of the day,” she tells me, “I’d think, if people are saying this gorgeous woman looks terrible, how am I supposed to feel about myself?” It lead her down a dark road rife with body image issues: “I was trying every fad diet out there, not eating,” she says. “Feeling bad in your own skin is the single worst feeling.”
[Define it: Zero Waste is a philosophy that encourages the redesign of resource life cycles so that all products are reused. No trash is sent to landfills or incinerators.]
“Feeling bad in your own skin is the single worst feeling."
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“This is my trash from the past three months!” she exclaims. "I’ll keep it and I’ll analyze it. I like to keep it because then I can go through it and find a solution.We don’t have a relationship to trash. People just don’t know where it’s going-- someone picks it up, takes it away, so how are you supposed to care when you don’t see it?”
But then she came across a book, “The Kind Diet,” by Alicia Silverstone. Meryl says she had so many ah-ha moments while reading, from coming to understand aspects of the food industry to what she was putting in her body, she knew it was time for a change. She emailed “every single holistic nutritionist in LA who had a website and seemed legit,” and was surprised when they all responded nicely. “I was so used to dealing with people not getting back to me or being nice,” she says in reference to her styling career, “that the energy immediately felt different and promising.”
She began working with a holistic nutritionist who let her sit in on all client sessions. “That’s when I saw healing first hand. I watched as people would cancel surgeries doctors told them were 100% necessary, and they’d go on to live life healthy.” With a little experience and a lot of enthusiasm she went back to school at 23. What she says is a “great age to make a shift.”
She attended The Institute for Integrative Nutrition, which teaches over 100 different dietary theories. As she was learning them, she’d try them. “You are the best doctor you can have— you live in your body, you feed it, you feel what doesn’t work.” The hitch was that Meryl had no idea how to cook. “I would go on Google or talk to Siri and ask really basic things like, ‘Siri, how do I cook a chicken breast?’ But it taught me that I can do anything. If you want to, you can figure it out.”
Kore Kitchen evolved naturally from this mindset. Kore is a “curated and nutritionally designed, meal delivery service and cleanse offering based in Los Angeles.” The intention is to help clients adapt a healthier lifestyle through simple nutritional philosophies: eat whole, organic foods, that are local and sustainably sourced.
There's no packaging in her pantry. She fills reusable glass jars with foods from the bulk bins.
With these Kore values in mind she began cooking for friends and delivering meals. “It would take me forever.” she says. “What would take a chef 20 minutes would take me 3 hours, but with food you’re transferring energy into the meals.”
“I was planning the menu, doing the shopping, the cooking, the delivery, and right after I finished I’d get up and do it all over again.”
She had a few clients during this time, but it was when friends and clients Donovan and Libby Leitch recommended her to Gwyneth Paltrow, the business took an unexpected turn. “I delivered her meals and heard nothing for a few months,” she says. Until Goop’s food editor reached out in December 2014, saying they loved her recipes and would she contribute a few to the site. She shared some recipes for Goop’s 2015 Detox Guide and the email floodgates opened.
“It was just me with one pan, in this kitchen, and I had all these orders.” She hunkered down, found a chef, Anna Lagura, whom she met through a happenstance convo with her neighbors across the hall, and signed a lease for a commercial kitchen space. Anna and Meryl now work out of L.A. Prep.
Of Anna, Meryl says, “She’s the person I’m most inspired by. I can send her a photo of any dish and she can make it with our philosophy. And she knows all of the clients and their food preferences by name and memory.” The meals Kore offers are organic and made from local ingredients whenever possible. They use no processed foods, no additives, no antibiotics or hormones, no preservatives, and no refined cooking oils or refined sugars. They are 100% gluten-free and dairy-free.
The business has been running for about a year and a half, and Meryl acknowledges the difficulties of being a self-funded, small business, but insists that she prefers it this way. "No funding required us to be more creative with our marketing," she says, adding "and I think we have a stronger connection to our clients."
“It’s difficult, but it’s also really fun. Business is like life, there shouldn’t be an end goal— you should be learning and growing all the time.”
"Business is like life, there shouldn’t be an end goal— you should be learning and growing all the time.”
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Growth for Kore however, does not include meal delivery services outside of Los Angeles. It is important to Meryl that they stick to their values of staying local. “We’re not a corporation, we’re a small business.”
“I don’t want to grow outside of LA. Local is really important to me because of the carbon footprint. With other meal delivery programs, you have to wonder, why are you in California eating food from North Carolina?”
It’s also why they have partnered with LA Compost, a local compost with four hubs, one of which is five minus from the commercial kitchen space. “All of the food that you’re eating, the scraps are going directly to the compost. Not trucked out of the city and brought back to be sold as soil.” They also now have a plot at the Elysian Valley Community Garden where Meryl is trying out her green thumb.
“We’re not trying to feed everybody,” she says, “we’re trying to feed our community.”
Click through the below gallery to see more of Meryl's zero waste lifestyle and see our toothpaste!
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Meet the Under 30 Duo Changing the Vegan Game
by CHLOE is expanding faster than Chloe Coscarelli & Samantha Wasser could have ever imagined.
Got an appetite for hearing from the leading boss women that are calling the shots in the culinary world? Get ready to grub hard on our new #CreateCultivate series: Counter Culture, where we'll be talking to prominent women in the food industry about good eats, food trends, and making it in the cutting edge cooking world.
Don't put a fork in it, because we're not close to done.
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Americans know burgers and they know mac ’n cheese.
Which is why we love that the Tuesday following Memorial Day, AKA national BBQ-eat-a-burger weekend, Chloe Coscarelli opened her second vegan restaurant, by CHLOE, housed inside the new 365 by Whole Foods concept in Silverlake, CA. It’s not the first time the chef has flipped the script.
The public got a taste of Chloe when she became the first vegan chef to win a culinary competition on national TV. The winning dish: cupcakes. A possible affront to your grandma’s secret family dessert recipe, but with three vegan cookbooks all featured on Amazon’s Top “100 Best-Selling Cookbooks” and Whole Foods on her fresh young branded coconuts, she’s clearly whipping up something the people want.
Today with partner Samantha Wasser, Creative Director of ESquared Hospitality, the two are committed to bringing healthy, affordable, and satisfying (yes, this vegan food will FILL you up) dishes to the people with the fast casual concept.
“The best way to change the world is through food,” Chloe says the Wednesday following the Silverlake opening. It is the second storefront that she and Samantha have opened in under a year. The first by CHLOE opened to a line around the block in New York’s Greenwich Village in July 2015; the response has been exciting. “If someone can sit down and enjoy a delicious meal in a fun environment," says Chloe, "that’s the way to win over their heart.”
"The best way to change the world is through food."
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Winning over the masses they are, even those who might be turned off by the more moral aspects of veganism. Chloe went vegetarian, and then vegan, at a young age, recognizing the correlation between "the animals on her plate and the animals her family had as pets." Still with her food she says that the goal wasn’t to create a “vegan restaurant,” noting that probably only about 10% of the New York customers are strict vegans. “From the start I knew I wanted it to be burger and fries,” she says. “The core cuisine is supposed to be a take on American comfort food.”
Credit: otteny.com
Samantha echoes this. “The intent was never to target vegans, it was to target everyone. 'Vegan' can be kind of scary and at one of our first meetings we talked about the priority of the brand— making this as playful as possible. Our menus have kitschy icons that feel approachable.” Kitschy icons include: a sad-faced ice cream cone, napkins that say “So Fresh and So Clean,” and crayons and coloring placemats for kids, whom they encourage to “Get Cray.”
“Originally I was inspired by retro, old supermarket branding and signs. I wanted it to be fun and I didn’t want to put the logo on everything,” says Samantha who focusses on the branding and visual aspects of by CHLOE. Instagram and social media was also on her mind when developing the branding. "You have to have a brand that translates to social, but we keep Chloe's Instagram and the by CHLOE Instagram separate." It's a different approach from most brand's that put the *star* front and center. There is not a single photo of Chloe or Samantha on the @bychefchloe handle.
As for the move out West, although Chloe is from LA it wasn’t where they expected their second location to open.
“It’s two coasts and you can’t be two places at once, but the opportunity with Whole Foods came up and there is so much crossover between our ethics and beliefs and theirs, we had to move,” says Samantha.
Move they did. The partnership came about as fast and casual as the cuisine. “We were talking about just getting our ice cream into Whole Foods,” explains Samantha, “when they came to us with the larger concept.” From the time Whole Foods approached the founder to the time they opened, "it was just about three months, but it was too good to pass up. We did everything we could to make it happen.”
As for the logistics of going back and forth, Chloe is optimistic. “This is our first time opening a store across the country, so we’re going to feel it out, and do what needs to be done.”
That doesn’t mean they aren’t still focussed on NY. "22nd street," as Samantha calls it, will the 3rd by CHLOE and is opening this month. “We have pretty big expansion plans in New York,” says Chloe. “Three more in New York, and two in Boston,” specifies Samantha.
Three restaurants in under a year is bold, as are their expansion plans, but we’ve all heard the bit about who fortune favors. “Being partners with ESquared,” adds Samantha, who is a 50% partner, “we do have a lot of support. With a traditional startup you don’t have some of the same infrastructure. Corporate came down and helped hire the staff and find the cooks, and then we came in and fine tuned everything.”
“The best way to describe the relationship is three-fold: Chloe heads up food-menu development, I head up the aesthetics and design with both branding and store design, and ESquared focusses on operations, which allows for each of us to play to our strengths."
If the packed house is any indication, they are playing their hands well. Chloe chats with patrons at tables, happily takes photos with others outside the storefront, and people are clearly excited by the chow and concept being in LA. There are customers wandering in from the market. Others who were familiar with the NY concept, sought out the space and made the drive from distant LA neighborhoods. “We also have a lot of people telling us they walked here,” says Chloe, “so there’s a nice, neighborhood vibe happening.”
They nailed their menu. They've nailed they branding. And now they're stretching their vegan sea legs.
by CHLOE is now open at 2520 N Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026
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