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. In this first episode I give you an introduction to what the Local Food Center was, and what I was doing when I arrived. I tell you how I spent my time learning about my surroundings, the manufacturing equipment, the products we were manufacturing, and how the products were distributed. I also tell you about the inspiration behind me trying to automate data collection, production scheduling, and projections for our manufacturing process. I ended up at the Local Food Center through an Alumni from the University I went to. I decided to intentionally accept a substantially reduced income for the opportunity to learn from the founder directly and work as a Food Scientist/General Manager. I still have copies of our original contract haha! In Hindsight Arriving at the Local Food Center, I believe, was a good experience. It was a high paced environment, there was a lot to learn, and the pressure to succeed was on which are all ingredients that help me do my best work. I think where I could have improved in the early days at the Local Food Center, was getting to know the people who worked there a little bit better. I dove directly into the work, but did not spend as much time getting to know everyone. It wasn't until a few months after I arrived that the pressure let up a little bit, and I began getting to know people more in depth. I found that getting to know people is important for developing relationships as well as gaining buy-in for a desired change within the business, and getting quality, honest, constructive feedback from the people around you. Currently it is 2021 and I still rely on the experience I gained at the Local Food Center for interpersonal interactions and team building.

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! Besides the equipment update there were 7 things I wanted to talk about: My first (failed) experiment making Kombucha My experience volunteering at New Roots in Louisville Kentucky. I volunteered at 1 event, went to 1 meeting, and volunteered 1 other time. I started taking photos around Louisville. I now have a ton of photos on my hard drive and am always looking to grow my image portfolio.  I met with someone to talk cryptocurrency & blockchain at a coffee shop. I traveled to Mansfield Missouri to visit a Food company startup called The Local Food Center. Lastly, I talk about how I started adding to a book list I created which was inspired by a podcast called 'The Investors Podcast':                - Check List Manifesto               - Death and Life of Great American Cities               - Good to Great 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. I thought volunteering at New Roots was a valuable experience. I haven't been over there or reached out to them since the end of 2017, but even now I hear their name come up from time to time.  I still volunteer some of my time, I will expand on this in later episodes but I think there is so much value in getting involved in your local community. Whether its volunteering, or going to events or whatever you can do - I think its worth it. So much so that I wrote an article about it on Thrive Global.  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!