Danish Pastry Partnership Bakes Up Series of Events

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

What's up, hello, welcome to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau. Now today's story features a Midwestern pastry by way of Scandinavia known as Abel Skieber. Have you ever heard of Abel Skieber before? I have been practicing my pronunciation of it all morning.

This story also features two friends who become side hustle partners, and it features no less than four different iterations of this side hustle. Now this is interesting. Sometimes I talk about how you start one project and then that gives you an idea for something else. You do that one for a while, then it kind of morphs into something. Well, in this case, it's kind of like that, but these are really different phases of a common vision.

These two friends are both vendors at a local farmer's market. They've got day jobs. This is just something they do on the side, but they end up partnering on something that leads to something else and then to something else and then even to something further, okay? So it just kind of goes to show, once you go down the road of side hustling, you don't know where you're gonna end up. And you could end up building something even more significant and meaningful than you first imagined.

This story of a Danish pastry partnership that bakes up a series of events is coming right up. So stay tuned. [Music]

Way back in 2007, Chad Gillard, a business analyst at a Minneapolis agency by day, was selling AbleSkeever, there it is again, at a local farmer's market. AbleSkeever, crushing it, is a Danish pastry which is like a small pancake ball with filling in the middle. His food stall neighbor, Zoe Glass, owner of Lucille's Kitchen Garden, was selling jam, the perfect thing to fill the AbleSkeever with.

A natural partnership formed. Zoe offered to let Chad use her jams in the pastries and in return, he would conveniently direct customers to her food stall. By collaborating, they both benefited. Chad was able to save money on the filling for his pastries and they both got more exposure for their products. It wasn't AbleSkeever win-win.

Okay, now I'm done saying that word. Let's just go on with the story. They decided to team up to learn more about growing their food businesses. They attended national trade shows and met with food industry leaders in other areas. At some point, they decided to start a side hustle together.

They spent around $1,000 to incorporate and create a brand identity for this company. It was called Midwest Pantry. Now their aim when starting Midwest Pantry was to help level the playing field for small-time players trying to take their food business to the next level. They noticed that even though the Midwest is known as the breadbasket of America, all the big wholesale food trade shows were located on the coasts. These are the places that food producers go to meet with wholesale buyers and try to get their products in grocery stores and other markets.

Not only would people have to fly to the coast to attend these, they would have to pay upwards of $10,000 to get a booth in order to try to sell their products. For many people who were just starting out, that was an unreachable price tag. Chad and Zoe wanted to bring together local food producers with wholesale buyers without charging them a year's worth of pastries. A local kitchen and food supply store was holding an annual tent sale at their store location. Chad and Zoe thought this could be an interesting place to gauge interest in a trade show type of event.

So ahead of the tent show, Midwest Pantry paid for an extra day for the tents and set up booths for food producers. They only charged enough to cover the costs and brought in wholesale buyers. After testing things out at that tent show, they then secured some booths at a food and wine show that was held at the state fairgrounds. This grew from one booth to four to eight, and before they knew it, they had a whole wing of the event. These experiments were somewhat successful, but the next step was to create their own trade show.

Midwest Pantry found a cool warehouse space at an old brewery and set up a semi-annual show, one in March and one in August. They kept the cost of the booth to $700 so that small food producers could afford it, and they invited local wholesale buyers. The first shows were successful and have continued to grow in size since they started. But while putting on the trade shows, there was another issue that came up, and this leads to iteration number two or number three of the side hustle, depending on how you count it. Chad noticed that while it was great to get food producers and wholesale buyers in the same place, a lot of smaller food producers didn't have the necessary tools to effectively speak with the buyers.

This led to Midwest Pantry collaborating with another organization to create an educational series to teach people more about growing their business, especially in the food industry. Along with that educational series that's now held at the University of Minnesota, Midwest Pantry holds monthly meetups and happy hours for its members. Their latest venture, which is now number four or number five, is creating a food innovation district. Now, what does that mean? Well, the idea of the food innovation district is to finally have a physical space to bring the food community in the Midwest together.

This space is an eight-acre area in Northeast Minneapolis with a variety of buildings that will include production kitchens, co-working spaces and offices, restaurants, and even a venue for events, perhaps some of their own events. They've partnered with the building owner to lease out space to their members and they're currently in phase one, which has six production kitchens. All right, so they do a lot of different things. Let's talk about how they make money. Like the activities of the business itself, the revenue model for Midwest Pantry has transformed multiple times since Chad and Zoe started up.

At first, they tried to create a membership model, but because they didn't have the name recognition that they do now, it didn't really take off. They then transitioned to monetizing at the event level, but because they wanted to make sure food producers had access to the events, they also wanted to keep costs down. Therefore, they've since transitioned back to the membership model. And this membership model offers both individual and corporate tiers. At the annual individual level, which is $65 a year, members get free entry to the meetups and access to that educational series, along with other discounts.

There's also a premier level which costs $40 a month, and then there are five tiers of corporate memberships ranging in price from $500 to $10,000 a year. They have anywhere from 100 to 150 individual members, depending on the time of the year, and over a dozen corporate members. Since starting up, Midwest Pantry has worked with over 500 businesses, many of them one man or one woman shops. Their next steps are to continue to grow out the food district and to reimagine trade shows. They're looking for ways to innovate and make the process of putting producers in touch with wholesale buyers even more time and cost effective.

Now that they have their own space, they can test out different things and see what sticks. And by the way, with all these things going on, just to clarify, this is still a side hustle for both Chad and Zoe. It gives them the opportunity to help other small and micro businesses and to have a voice in shaping the food industry. You might say they're keeping the bread in the breadbasket of America. Man, you know, while I was working on this story, it reminded me of the time that I was in Minneapolis, this is many, many years ago, and I did an event in a most unusual venue.

Now I have done book events all across the country, all 50 states, every province in Canada, and many other countries around the world. A lot of these events have been completely bootstrapped, completely improvised, especially when I was getting started. I didn't have venues for different places. And so I relied on my readers to suggest various spots. So especially on my first tour when I went to all 50 states, I did events in yoga studios, in pizza parlors, in bars, in coffee shops, in a heavy metal concert hall in San Francisco, which was pretty cool, although it sounds more exciting than it was because it was really dark, like it was hard to get them to turn the lights on.

But I always say that my strangest gig, or at least the thing that is the most memorable in some ways is when I went to Minneapolis and I did the book event in a grocery store, like in the middle of a grocery store. And believe it or not, this actually made some sense because it was a neighborhood revitalization effort. This particular grocery store wasn't a huge corporate chain. They had lots of like local vendors and little food stalls in it. Sounds very similar to some of the people that Chad and Zoe work with.

So I understood the concept, but at the same time it was basically a grocery store and like I was in the middle of it and everybody was like trying to shop. And so we had like a hundred people there that were there to hear me, which was cool. But then we also had like, I don't know, couple hundred other people that were shopping in the grocery store and pushing their carts around. I think they call them buggies in some places, maybe perhaps Minnesota. So it just felt a little surreal.

It was one of those moments in my life when I kind of looked out and I was like, can't believe this is happening. You know, like I never imagined first of all that I'd be writing books and traveling to speak, you know, all across the country and elsewhere. But I really never imagined that it would be in a grocery store. And like people are picking up bananas, you know, next to the stage where I'm trying to answer questions. It was a night that I will never forget.

I'll say that. So more to the point of this story, congrats to Chad and Zoe. I really respect how they've taken this vision and just been willing to follow it and see where it leads and see these problems that pop up and then look for solutions all while maintaining other jobs. So good for them. Hopefully the next time I'm in Minneapolis, I can meet up with them and not do my event at a grocery store, but you know, something else.

And I also hope that you enjoy this episode. Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. This is episode 523 of the show. So our notes are at sidehustleschool.com/523. Come and check it out.

Send me a note. Let me know what you're up to as well. You are the reason I make this show every day and we've got another episode coming up tomorrow. How about that? Until then, I'm signing off.

My name is Chris Guillebeau for side hustle school. [Music]