Chocolate-covered stimulus!
SEATTLE -- There is an upside to every downturn. For Maria Friedman, it was the kitchen equipment.
“So many businesses were closing that I got steals on so many things,” Friedman said.
Outfitting her upstart café with the spoils of failed businesses was “bittersweet and daunting,” she said.
Friedman will open Curio Confections on University Avenue Saturday.
She's one of a handful of local entrepreneurs looking to overcome a poor economy by selling the one thing many can't do without: sweets.
Curio was prompted by a stint in New Zealand, where Friedman set out to work on an organic farm but ended up helping the farmer’s daughter start a bakery.
“Everyone over there was opening their own business and doing something new and it was just inspiring and made we want to do it,” she said.
Friedman, who had worked at Trophy Cupcakes in Wallingford, came home knowing she wanted to start a bakery with the $50,000 she received when her mom passed away two years ago.
The money had been dwindling too quickly; “I was blowing on random things because I didn’t have anything to do with it,” she said.
Some told Friedman, who is 22, she’s too young and inexperienced, and that she doesn’t have enough money, but she figured, “Better to start now and fail now and be able to start again.”
Her products are recession-proof.
“If there’s one thing that people always spend money on its booze and sweets,” Friedman said. “And I have both.”
Now DeLaurenti is selling her candies, and she’s got one catered wedding under her belt.
If, two years from now, she’s left with nothing, Friedman figures she'll be no different from most other 24 year-olds.
Being in the position of having had nothing, “makes you not really scared to have nothing again,” she said.
Energized by agave
John Sample was already all-in when the recession hit.
He’d developed an agave-sweetened chocolate energy gel and paid for it to be tested for taste and glycemic index. He’d even found a manufacturer that could package it in plastic packets.
By the time the financial meltdown made headlines it was too late to back out—not that he would have.
“That’s not my style,” Sample said. “I’ve been in business too long.”
Health foods have always been a sideline for Sample, who started a computer store, Seattle Micro, in the 1980s. Poring over research linking glycemic levels to obesity, belly fat, and diabetes, he hit on an agave, a succulent plant, as an ideal sweetener because it doesn’t cause spikes in blood sugar, he said.
Sample sees a market for his product, Chocolate #9, among diabetics, endurance athletes who use energy gels to sustain their blood-sugar levels during prolonged exercise, and parents seeking a treat that won’t send their kids sugar shock.
He believes the recession could keep the marketplace from getting too crowded.
“I’m hoping the down economy slows my competitors from making an equivalent product,” he said.
A small vegan grocery, Sidecar for Pigs Peace, was the first retailer to carry Chocolate #9, a fact which pleases Sample, a vegan.
A number of local bike, running, and health food stores now carry it, too. Chocolate #9 is also used by Team Type 1, a diabetic cycling team, and Sample has sent it to endurance athletes for endorsements.
He’s put about $50,000 of his own money into the business. He’s also got investors lined up “if all of a sudden one of the big nationals comes and says can you do two million units.”
Consumers are going to eat it up, he said.
“If I was trying to sell something in the automobile industry, that would be different, Sample said. “Food, everybody has to buy it.”
When the chips are down
When Amanda Nokes was laid off from Biznik, a business networking company, she couldn’t find another job.
So she created one. An avid baker, Nokes phoned a friend, Erin Brannan, a chef, and in April they started Manderin Cookie Company. (The name is a blend of Amanda and Erin.)
It was very seat-of-the-Seven jeans. Nokes and Brannan named the cookies after their kids and sought the skills of friend and family.
“We are two single moms who are totally broke and we’ve just been fudging it,” Nokes said.
And Facebooking it. Through Brannan’s Facebook page, Manderin connected to a buyer for Whole Foods, who set up a tasting.
Whole Foods is interested in carrying the cookies now, along with Thriftway, Costco, and local hotels, Nokes said. The web site averages ten to fifteen orders a week, which Nokes and Brannan bake in a Renton commercial kitchen.
“We are desperately looking for an investor now because we’ve blown up so quickly,” she said.
The onetime real estate agent learned from watching her former colleagues. “The agents who keep taking courses and other courses, because they’re too afraid to just jump in and start-- those are the ones who fail,” Nokes said.
Her advice to would-entrepreneurs: “Quit over-thinking and just do it.”