Financing Our Foodshed (6 page)

So she did. With the customer base and revenue generated from donut sales, she planned to launch the next phase of her business plan: a vegan catering company. She’d offer pre-selected menus for the customer to choose from for breakfast, lunch, or dinner events. Pricing would be “per person” and be all-inclusive, with disposables, drinks, set-up, and break-down included in the price.

She knew of several Vegetarian/Vegan Meet-up groups in the area to approach with her services.

The next phase of her plan included building wholesale accounts and — eventually — opening a Vegan Bakery Cafe. Her model was Foster’s Market (a funky gourmet food market, café, coffee bar, and catering company that has operated in Durham, NC, for over 30
years, making everything in-house), but her café would offer a vegan version of the traditional country cuisine found at Mama Dips, a famous Southern-style restaurant in Chapel Hill, owned and operated for 36 years by Mildred Edna Cotton Council, aka Mama Dip. At Stephanie’s vegan bakery café, her catering and signature item lines would all come together and synergize in one location.

It was a compelling vision, and, having been through a lengthy “vegan phase” myself, I knew she’d find a ready and welcome following for her products and services if the quality was good and the prices approachable. I remember carrying my own food to parties many times, or leaving restaurants still hungry, because the vegan options were so limited. Now, I always try to have vegan options for guests, so the idea that I could call Stephanie and order a couple of pans of Vegan Fried Chicken and Vegan Mac and Cheese sounded great to me.

Sweeties Vegan, the name Stephanie and the two women who were helping her launch her business eventually chose, would
not
just be about the food. Their mission is much wider.
Sweeties Vegan
the website reads, has a commitment to
developing a transparent, socially responsible and sustainable business model based on the abundance theory that “there is more than enough for all.”
Their goals include not only promoting the health and societal benefits of a vegan lifestyle, but also hiring the hard-to-employ and giving back a percentage of their profits to the community.

Stephanie was clear on how much money she needed to get started. She had secured a commercial kitchen that allowed her to rent space by the hour, and she had quotes on the insurance needed to do commercial catering—about $850 per year. She had a spreadsheet that itemized equipment and product inventory. And she had a team to work with. One partner, Damita, would make the donuts and share the responsibility for operations and logistics. A second partner, Kim, would do the occasional recipe development, but most of her time would be spent on bookkeeping, designing and managing the website, and designing brochures, business cards, and recipe
sheets. Stephanie would cook, of course, and also be in charge of sales, marketing, and customer service.

But they needed the money to pay for that insurance before she could get into the kitchen and start cooking.

As I read through all this, I had one thought:
“I want to try those donuts!”
Luckily, I knew of a perfect place to test market her product (and give her new business a bit of income as well).

Twice a year, I run the Coffee Barn at the Shakori Hills GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance in Silk Hope, NC. For four days and four nights — in April and again in October — a 75-acre Chatham County farm is transformed into a festival grounds with five stages, massive tents, dance floors, a healing arts area, children’s activities, dance workshops, great food, and over 50 musical acts. It is astounding. For the last ten years, with a host of volunteers, we’ve magically turned a shed into a Coffee Barn and kept it open for the duration of the festival — all day and all night. We’ve sold great pastries from Ninth Street Bakery in Durham, but, before Stephanie, we never had warm, homemade donuts to sell in the morning.

But now we could. A few weeks after Stephanie and I met, I put in an order for several dozen vegan apple cider donuts, and she happily delivered them to the Coffee Barn in the early morning hours. They were a hit. We used some of the donut holes for samples, and some ended up at the bottom of the first-ever “Vegan Apple Cider Donut Hole Ice Cream Sundae” (I had taken on running the Ice Cream Stand as well that year). With both the donuts and the sundaes a success, Stephanie had her first wholesale customer.

Now she just needed to find enough money for that insurance coverage so she could do full-fledged catering. When I told Pierre Lauffer, who ran the Sustainability Tent at the music festival (and who has supported Slow Money from the start) about Stephanie, her donuts, and her dream, he suggested I talk with his wife, Laura, so I gave her a call.

Slow Money lenders are special people. Not because they are necessarily rich in dollars, but because they
care.
They are rich in
passion for local food and understand the value of soil fertility. They may be environmentalists or activists — or not. They understand that money has the power to harm or to heal, and they are willing to take a risk to move some of their own money in the direction of repairing our planet.

Laura certainly understands this. She has an advanced degree in development and policy and worked for over 20 years in sustainable community development. For three years of those years, she and Pierre were Peace Corps agriculture extension agents in Zaire.

After Laura resettled in North Carolina, not far from where she had been raised, she served for several years as the executive director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association that helps create sustainable food systems. She is now the Sustainability Coordinator and Lead Instructor for the new Sustainability Technologies program at our local community college.

She loved the sound of Stephanie’s business and wanted to meet her. And she was already familiar with the Slow Money concept. She told me:

Stephanie, Laura, and I got together one afternoon in Pittsboro’s beautiful newly opened public library (part of an ambitious building plan at Central Carolina Community College that focuses on sustainability). Stephanie shared her vision and her plans for Sweeties Vegan. Laura told her about the work she did at the college. They compared notes about raising thoughtful, responsible, environmentally
conscious, teenagers (Laura and Pierre have two, and Stephanie has three). They found they had much in common. Here were two strong, brilliant, resilient women who knew how to get things done.

Laura wanted to know how she could help Stephanie get her business going, so they set about the task of working out the terms for a loan that would cover that insurance payment and some equipment. Papers were signed, and they both headed back to work.

With her insurance in place, Stephanie started taking on catering jobs. Now, whenever I can, I take her donuts to gatherings, large or small. I know I am not her
only
customer, but I might be the most enthusiastic.

Stephanie’s payback year stretched out a bit, as she had to push her catering business to a back burner temporarily while she took on full-time employment. As a single mother with three teenagers at home, the part-time catering business had to fit in around her other commitments. But she still managed to fry enough donuts and bake enough pans of her signature Vegan Mac and Cheese to pay Laura back — albeit in two years rather than one — and her catering business is now going strong.

I called Stephanie recently for an update, and she was full of good news. She had been accepted at the Piedmont Food and Agricultural Processing Center, a recently opened incubator kitchen that offers local farmers and merchants a way to produce food products for commercial distribution. And she had just secured an order for 600+ prepared meals per week for a “local food market on wheels” that was being launched the next week. She was scrambling to get the logistics worked out, but having the big, new, well-equipped kitchen to work in at the Piedmont Center was making that a lot easier.

The day before I called, Stephanie had spoken to Ali Callahan, the general manager at the Chatham Marketplace, our local co-op grocery store. Ali was looking for a supplier of homemade vegan desserts for the deli. Ali had called across town to Angelina, of Angelina’s Kitchen (the happy recipient of “Slow Money Loan #2”)
to see if she made vegan desserts. Angelina remembered meeting fellow Slow Money borrower, Stephanie of “Loan #4.” Keeping it in the Slow Money family, she referred Ali to Sweeties Vegan, where the food is “Good as Grandma’s, Only Vegan,” and (my personal favorite) where there’s “Plenty for All Y’All.” And thus Stephanie gained another wholesale customer.

The business is definitely growing. Kim manages the website and keeps up with orders. Damita is creating beautiful new signage, a new logo, and a unique cartoon-style menu.

In line with her social justice mission, Stephanie is sourcing much of her produce from the women farmers at nearby Genesis Farm. They are growing vegetables especially for Sweeties Vegan: carrots, onions, potatoes, green peppers, celery okra, collard greens, kale, and more. Genesis Farm’s mission is to further agricultural, and small-farm life through education, awareness, support, outreach, and service, especially to women and girls. They run The Farm School for Women, a residential on-farm training program, where women can learn how to operate a sustainable, small-scale farm and “Girls on the Farm!” a fun summer agricultural education program for adolescent girls.

I love this. It is a wonderful extension of how much positive impact we can have in our communities, if we just try. First, we start financing ourselves, then we strengthen one another’s local food businesses with referrals. Along the way, we begin to heal the earth, and one another. The food is better, more people stay employed in local businesses, our money stays closer to home for a bit longer, and our local food system becomes stronger and more resilient. The returns are better health, joyous engagement with one another, and a degree of hopefulness that we might be able to design a better, more equitable financial system.

And I can now get Stephanie’s delicious desserts at my local coop. And I’m already looking forward to biting into one of her freshly made donuts at the next Shakori Hills Festival. They are just so good on a cool fall morning with a hot cup of coffee.

Thinking about Jackie Green’s story and how she came to own and run Sweet Cheeks Bakery, makes me yearn for a piece of her Southern pecan pie. It may have the same effect on you.

She writes: