Eat, Graze, Love: Massive Cheese Platters Become Life of the Party

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

[Music]

Hello, my friends. What's up, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Every day I have the privilege of bringing you a different story of someone who's starting a side hustle. What is a side hustle?

It's an income generating project. It's something that can become an asset for you, not just a way of working harder, but a way of creating freedom for yourself so that you can do more of what's important to you. Now, as part of working on the show, I often learn a lot myself. I learned something in the research for this episode, in particular, an Instagram fad that I was not aware of. Now, it probably shouldn't be too shocking because most of my Instagram algorithm feed recommendations feature cats or running or airplanes.

Those are three topics that are relevant to me. But this particular fad or trend is called grazing boards. And you can go and take a look at this yourself using the hashtags grazing table or grazing board. You can also try the plurals, grazing tables, grazing boards. Now, this is a thing.

The humble cheese board has grown up, at least in Australia where our story takes place, and it appears from my research elsewhere around the world as well. In this story, an Aussie woman quits her job to earn a full-time income from catering mega-sized snack boards at parties. We're calling it eat graze love. Massive cheese platters become life of the party. So how does she do it and what would you need to know if you too wanted to become a grazing professional or if not a grazing pro, perhaps a grazing side hustler?

Well, stay tuned. Here's a quick thank you to our sponsor, and then I'll tell you all about it. [Music]

Bianca Cashman loves well-presented food. She spends hours perusing Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook pages looking at others' creations. And for years, she wondered if she could start a food business, something to align her love of creative display with her taste buds.

But she wasn't always just interested in creating food for human consumption. In fact, in 2014, Bianca and her husband started a food business of another kind, specializing in healthy snacks for dogs. Now you know how it is, dog lovers of the world. Your dog is like, "Take me to McDonald's." And you're like, "No, dog, here's some kale." They achieved some success with this project, but decided to move on after one year and sold the business. After that, Bianca returned to focusing on her day job as a senior account manager for a large media company.

This continued until 2018, when a special event rolled around that gave her a bite-sized idea. It was her mom's 60th birthday, and she was tasked with preparing the all-important cheese platter. Not wanting to disappoint, Bianca decided to supersize it. While perusing some of her favorite food-based Instagram accounts, she'd noticed a growing trend. The concept of grazing and charcuterie boards had really taken off.

This is a relatively new idea that is most easily described as a food platter on steroids. And again, you gotta see it to get the picture, so make sure you check out that hashtag, grazing boards, grazing tables, grazing platters. Instead of a simple cheese board, Bianca planned a buffet of organized chaos. This grazing table would feature bowls, platters, and stands, all layered with cheese, cured meats, fruits, breads, dips, and more. This table would allow people to try a bit of everything and have a small adventure while they ate, nibbling their way through a plethora of different flavors.

Once she finished with the setup, it looked more like a work of art than a meal. To capture the moment she took some photos and posted them online. She received a tremendous amount of praise, but more importantly, she received an offer. A friend of hers had shared her all-encompassing, amazing grazing platter with a local caterer. That caterer decided to take a chance on Bianca and booked her for a job, a bachelorette party, which I think is actually called a Hinn's party in Australia.

It was time to recreate the magic. She didn't yet know the right quantities or even what price to charge, so she completely chicken-winged it, settling on a price per head of $25. Once again, the platter was a huge hit, and Bianca knew it was time to get serious. She chose a play on words for her business name, calling it Eat Grey's Love. Elizabeth Gilbert, or at least Julia Roberts, would be proud.

Setting aside a few thousand dollars for startup costs, Bianca bought several trestle tables, boards, bowls, stands, and a few other items to present awesome platters. Luckily, her husband is an IT professional. He set up her website for free. A trickle of business began to arrive from word of mouth, but that wasn't enough, so she decided to take marketing into her own hands. She turned to the same places she looked for food inspiration, social networks like Instagram and Facebook.

Running ads on Instagram proved effective by targeting people in the same demographic as her, young moms. On top of that, Bianca utilized Facebook groups. She became a member of all the mom, food, and female-focused groups in her area and began contributing. Within those groups, people often asked for food or catering recommendations. More often than not, she's now mentioned or tagged by someone in the group.

A key part of her success there is that she is active and helpful, doesn't appear spammy or unnatural, and so far, this strategy, combined with word of mouth, has enabled her to grow quickly. She's been working on Eat Grey's Love for just over one year, and in that time has generated enough income to replace her paycheck. So with much excitement, 2019 brought with it a nice, grazing gift, taking the project from a part-time side hustle to a full-time job. But to be clear, Bianca isn't stuffing herself with compliments just yet. She understands this business has challenges that may hinder growth.

Most notably, her concern is that Eat Grey's Love isn't really scalable. No matter how many orders she receives, an actual human still needs to attend each party and set up each platter. That takes time and money, and of course, she can't be in more than one place at one time. Naturally, she's already working on a solution. She's recently found someone part-time who will be able to help set up platters.

Another idea she has is to create grazing baskets. That way, they can be premade, stored, and sold to enable for larger production capacity. With that slight adjustment in her business model, the sky could be the limit. Bianca has done what many people only hope to achieve, one mouthful at a time. [Music]

Well, this was fun for me to learn about, at least.

Perhaps you're an expert grazer or you're very familiar with these things. I don't know if I'd ever understood just how massive the snack boards could be. Again, I encourage you to check out the show notes or Instagram itself to see some visuals. I also think it's a great name, Eat Gray's Love. Sometimes it's not good to have that sort of play on words, especially for something that is a book or a movie or something that's kind of a moment in popular culture.

But in this case, first of all, the grazing table thing is kind of a trend or a fat itself. And secondly, this particular reference, Eat Gray's Love, or Eat Pray Love, of course, probably will still make sense and be relevant for a long time to come. So I love it, Eat Gray's Love. And then I took a bit of a look at just the industry in general, because like I said, I wasn't familiar with it. So I looked at some other sites, some other businesses that are doing this, both in the U.S. and in Australia.

And I was impressed, first of all, by some of the options that a lot of them provided. Most of them had a vegetarian option, which I appreciated, but also some paleo options and other things. And then critically for business, they tended to have different pricing options too, which I think is important. So I looked at another site and you could choose from a snack graze option or a heavy graze option, which is basically like light hors d'oeuvres or heavy hors d'oeuvres. But the snack graze option costs $35 a person with a $700 minimum.

And the heavy graze option costs $45 a person. And for both of these, they also had a little asterisk that said set up and breakdown charges apply. I think if you're interested in this kind of business, it's good to know that there are a lot of costs. So you have all the costs for the food. And then also in most of the cases, because the visual is so important, you have to go and set it up.

You can't just drop it off or let somebody come pick it up. So to have a set up charge or a breakdown charge or at least to factor that into your pricing at minimum really is important. So if you're catering a big reception or a wedding, $35 a person, $45 a person, that can definitely add up, but it also makes sense because it's going to be a lot of costs. So be sure you kind of look at that carefully before you jump into the grazing catering business. All right, my friends, I'm going to go graze on some grapes and some nuts.

I don't have a table, but I just have some small snacks. I'm not going to post a photo because it's not that attractive, but I will wish you a wonderful day. Hope you'll come back again tomorrow. Our show notes for this episode are at sidehustleschool.com/762. We're going to link up Bianca's business and perhaps a couple of others as well.

Thank you so much for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]