Melissa Ben-Ishay founded Baked by Melissa after being fired from her ad agency job, leading her to start a cupcake business with her brother. The company grew from Ben-Ishay’s apartment kitchen to a commercial kitchen and multiple locations, leveraging social media to expand its reach, while Ben-Ishay became a successful CEO and cookbook author, overcoming gender-based obstacles in entrepreneurship. To read more about her journey, see this piece posted on CNBC
Restaurants, including large chains like Panera and P.F. Chang’s, but also local eateries and coffee shops are increasingly adopting subscription models to secure steady revenue and customer loyalty. These subscriptions can offer perks like free delivery, favorite dish selections or free beverages. According to this online piece on AP News, this model is capitalizing on the growing trend of Americans who subscribe to various services like streaming and groceries. While it hasn’t become a dominant aspect of the restaurant marketplace, it is something that small businesses might want to consider to stay engaged and competititve.
Featured recently in this article in the Cornell Chronicle, Abena Foli shares how her inspiration to bring West African flavors to the US marketplace was the idea behind her launch of POKS Spices. Foli is a graduate of the Bank of America Institute for Women’s Entrepreneurship certificate program and discusses how specific coursework as well as the connections made in the program opened her eyes to funding and resources that were available to launch and scale her business. We are so proud of all that she had achieved so far and can’t wait to see where POKS Spices goes next!
This article from Time shares examples of small businesses banding together rather than competing head to head to weather the challenges presented by public health necessitated lockdowns. By thinking both creatively and collaboratively, these businesses have been able to stay afloat while also building a community stronger than the one before COVID-19.
On November 11, 2019, NPR posted an article about a question posed to 100 female chefs and food writers by author Charlotte Druckman in her new book Women on Food. Druckman asked if there were any words or phrases that should no longer be used to describe women in the culinary field. While many words made the list, one word sparked a lot of discussion: “badass”.
As Druckman shared with NPR, “Badass is a detonated way to describe a kind of cultural male whiteness — an aggressive, swaggering one…and then it gets put onto women, as what feels like a tarnished ‘badge of honor,’ or backhanded compliment. Calling a woman — chef or otherwise — ‘badass’ is a way to signify that she’s cool or relevant because she’s acting like a man (specifically, an aggressive, swaggering one); that she is only of interest or worth consideration because she’s going against whatever ‘type’ it is she’d otherwise be categorized as because she’s a woman.”
The cofounders of Sorbabes are teaching consumers that sorbet can be plant based but also taste more like ice cream with the use of nut butters. Sorbabes earned almost $2 million in revenues last year and expects to bring in $5 million this year. To read more, see this piece in Entrepreneur.
Food-related businesses are one of the highest growth areas within women-owned businesses. The James Beard Foundation just named 20 fellows (maybe we should call them “ladies” instead of “fellows”?) to their 2019 Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Program. This diverse group of women will gather for five days in October 2019 to learn new skills to grow their careers and scale their businesses. Past fellows have expanded from a single restaurant to restaurant groups, signed national product distribution deals, and launched whole new companies. The power of education and networking is real!