Stallholder profile today is on a new stallholder for Toowoomba and her business name is Cooked
I live in Toowoomba.
Cooked is
founded on a back-to–basics principle:
healthy, unprocessed, delicious food, made from scratch with ingredients
that you can pronounce.
We are good, family, home
cooks.
Before I started my business
I worked as an accountant. I have 3 busy children and a busy husband. I felt
terrible that by the time I got home there was no time to make nutritious meals
for them. Even though I was a good cook, my family were not eating well.
Friends of mine were in the same situation. So when I left my job, I started
cooking for them and then their friends and the business has grown from there;
by word of mouth.
The first meals were sold to
5 friends in February 2014. Cooking though has been part of my life sine I left
home at 18 and realised I needed to cook to eat and as I loved to eat, I would
need to learn to cook well. Whilst I have worked as an accountant for nearly 30
years, I have also had stints cooking for a pub in London, a ski hotel in the
French Alps and managing a guesthouse in NSW.
Every week I send an email
with a newsletter, which details the meals I will be making the following week.
Subscribers to the newsletter order their meals over the phone or return email
and I deliver them once a week; on Thursdays. I have recently started to sell
to a local convenience store. The Handmade Expo and Vintage Market in Toowoomba is the first market that we
have ever attended.
Our product is unique because
it is local. It is not produced in a factory. It is made by hand, from scratch.
The only difference is that we have a bigger oven and bigger pots. The recipes
are domestic, cookbook ones that I just make a lot of! There are no
preservatives, numbers and fillers. They are wholesome and family friendly.
The most rewarding part of
this is the feedback that I receive.
When someone finishes a meal and sends me a text saying: “Sensational!”,
or “Thank you for making my life a helluv a lot easier”, it is very rewarding
indeed.
My favourite product is the chicken
and leek pie. I must have made nearly a thousand of these. I never get sick of
them and my family all request them for their birthday dinners, so they must
love them too.
I have not taught classes or
workshops. However I have spoken to a vocational teacher about taking on a
Hospitality Cert 111 student and this will happen some time in the near future.
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