This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Side hustle school friends and listeners, welcome to another episode. This is Chris Guillebeau. In yesterday's episode, we looked at someone who had seen a lot of success distributing a food item, well, specifically tea, through Amazon. Today we have another different story, but same kind of concept. Today's product and today's story is about ketchup, the condiment, or at least something close to ketchup, as you'll hear.
The title is "Writer Turns Leftover Cherries into $5,000 a Month Income." Also, this story has a twist when our featured side hustler uses a medical diagnosis to further develop and grow her project. I'll also tell you about a crowdfunding resource specifically for people doing something with food or beverages. All of that coming up in today's episode. [Music]
In June 2013, Erika Kerekes, a writer for a nonprofit, took her kids to a pick-it-yourself cherry orchard. They had so many cherries, they couldn't eat them all fresh.
And it turns out that her kids don't like jam pie, but they do eat a lot of burgers. So she turned some of the leftovers into a sort of cherry ketchup, and everyone loved it. So that whole summer, she experimented with lots of different fruit ketchups in her own kitchen. She'd feed them to her family, friends, food bloggers, and even the mail carrier to get honest feedback on her formulations. Based on all that feedback, by August, she decided to turn her recipes into a side hustle.
Her first step was reaching out to a food chemist who helped her figure out how to take a home recipe and turn it into a formula that a co-packer could use in their facility. And just a quick side note, we've talked about co-packers a couple of times. They are essentially businesses that can replicate your recipe on a wholesale basis. So if you've created a food product, they can then create it in bulk for reselling. Anyway, this involves several rounds of testing to make sure the taste and consistency was perfect, as well as figuring out how to source all the fruit ingredients she needed.
Once she had that dialed in, Erika decided on a name, not ketchup, like that's the actual name, not ketchup, then worked with a graphic designer to create labels. With all that in place, by the end of the year, Erika was able to have 60 cases of three different flavors of not ketchup produced. Because Erika had been writing a food blog for a while, she knew a lot of people in that industry and gave away about a third of her first production run to local bloggers. They in turn created some original recipes using her sauces and posted them on their websites and social media. She also used some of that first run to go to the Fancy Foods trade show in San Francisco in January 2014.
There she met a reporter at the LA Times who wrote an article about not ketchup. Erika was savvy to realize that the reporter was probably gonna ask where people could buy her products. So she leveraged the upcoming article at a few different stores and was able to get stocked there. This early success meant that for many months afterwards, Erika distributed not ketchup herself. Since signing up with the distributor would involve a lot of additional costs that she couldn't justify, at least at that point.
She continued to get in more and more stores throughout 2014, including Sam's Club and Whole Foods. And by early 2015, not ketchup was available on Amazon. It was all going well, but then in August of that year, life threw her a curve ball. Erika was diagnosed with type two diabetes and she realized she needed to make some lifestyle changes, including cutting out all added sugar from her diet. Within three months of snapping into action, she had reversed her diabetes, no small feat, congratulations Erika.
And during that time, she also realized if she was trying to cut out sugar, other people probably were too. So in late 2015, she made a huge pivot by shifting away from traditionally made fruit sauces, which means they're full of sugar, to condiments sweetened only by the fruit itself. Erika said it was almost a complete relaunch and took a tremendous effort, but I knew it was the right direction to take. Her first no added sugar flavor, Tangerine Hatch Chili, was released on Amazon at the end of 2015 and instantly became her number one seller. In January of the next year, she released a no added sugar version of Cherry Chipotle and sales for that flavor doubled overnight.
With these successes under her belt, Erika decided to switch all of her products to be made without any added sugar. And to help with this transition, she used a crowdfunding site called Pie Shell to successfully raise $15,000. A few months later, she was able to put her new flavors up on Amazon. This time, she specifically focused on paleo, whole 30, low carb and diabetic customers. And through all of her efforts, December 2016 was her biggest month of sales so far.
In this year, sales have continued going up month after month. And in April, she released an actual ketchup with no added sugar. This addition bumped her income up to $5,000 a month. In fact, since its release, it's completely sold out twice and earned the Amazon Choice Award for a month at the beginning of the summer. She plans to continue to grow this not ketchup brand, which now includes an actual ketchup, but she also plans to keep it a side hustle no matter how big it gets.
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So I wanna follow up quickly on this crowdfunding resource that Erica used. Great story, by the way, congratulations to her. This crowdfunding site called Pie Shell, this was new to me. I went to check it out and they describe it as a place to fund ideas for food and drink and everything in between. So it's basically a crowdfunding site for food and beverage entrepreneurs or side hustlers like Erica.
Big or small restaurant or truck, fresher packaged app or website, sparkling or still, this is their description. You'll find people who share your passions and can help get your project out on the front burner. So I thought it was interesting that there is this crowdfunding resource, which seems like it's been up and running for a long time. I just haven't heard of it myself. Focus specifically on people making food or beverage products.
For example, I took a look and there's this product on the homepage called Kelp Jerky, the perfect plant-based snack. And the people who are making this say that for the past year, we've been working to develop a line of delicious and nutritious products made from sustainably harvested seaweed. Seaweed? Yep, that's right. Seaweed has more vitamin C than orange juice, more calcium than milk, and more protein than soybeans.
Our first product is Kelp Jerky, a delicious, nutrient-dense, high-protein snack. Kelp Jerky is vegan, non-GMO, and free of dairy, eggs, soy, peanuts, and gluten. So basically anyone can eat it, it sounds like. And Kelp Jerky comes in three flavors, high-tide, barbecue, and sea salt. So I thought that was cool.
Maybe one day we can feature the Kelp Jerky guys. Looks like they've raised about $5,000 so far, at least at the time I'm recording this. And if you're out there and you're thinking about developing a food product or a beverage product, maybe you heard yesterday's story about Sheena making the tea, or this story of not ketchup, or one of the several other stories that we've looked at. Maybe this crowdfunding platform is something you should take a look at. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/241. We'll include links to pie shell, not ketchup, anything else I mentioned. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you're doing well. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
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