Nonprofit Employee Sells 25,000 Gourmet Ice Pops
Belgian Fine Chocolate Comes to America
Online Coffee Company Brews Up $30,000 a Month
Delicious Cookies Hand-Delivered at Midnight
Avocado Queen Earns $45,000 Selling Spreadable Granola
NONPROFIT EMPLOYEE SELLS 25,000 GOURMET ICE POPS
NAME
LOCATION
FORT WORTH, TEXAS
STARTUP COSTS
$2,000
INCOME
$80,000 IN YEAR TWO
WEBSITE
A Texas couple’s bucket list challenge turns into a full-time hustle making and selling ice pops throughout the state.
Carolyn Phillips and her husband, Wiley, created a list of thirty things they wanted to do before they turned thirty. They framed the list and updated it regularly by placing stickers next to the items they completed. But as the stickers started to add up, one item remained stubbornly sticker free—Carolyn’s goal to start a side hustle.
Around this time, they threw a party at their house. In a fit of inspiration, Carolyn decided to create alcoholic ice pops using a bottle of vodka and some items that she’d picked up from the farmers’ market. Living in Fort Worth, Texas, anything that can be used to beat the heat was likely to go over well, and gourmet pops were essentially the cupcakes of the sweltering Southwest.*2
Carolyn’s boozy pops were a juicy success, and it occurred to her that this might be the project she was looking for. Not only could she make them using whatever seasonal ingredients were available at the time, ice pops in general were also wildly popular across multiple demographics. And despite the success that this frozen treat was having in other major cities, it was relatively nonexistent in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
So she began to experiment from her kitchen with different flavor profiles and combinations. When she wasn’t working her 9-to-5 job in donor relations, she spent every free hour on her new side hustle, which she called Alchemy Pops.
Her friends would come over to try out new flavors of pops and take a “pop quiz.” For her birthday party, she made herself more boozy pops. And she started frequenting her local farmers’ market to ask questions. Through those visits, she learned what was in season and unique to the greater Texas area.
Some of her first flavors came straight from what she learned at the farmers’ market—watermelon basil, cantaloupe mint, and blackberry lemonade. In addition to all the in-person research, she also created social media accounts and tried to post consistently about her new research project.
By the end of the year, Carolyn was convinced that she wanted to pursue Alchemy Pops more seriously. She bought a domain name, signed up for PayPal, and got a business bank account. She then volunteered at a local food festival. Her goal was to talk to a bunch of chefs in one place and ask if anyone had extra kitchen space they would rent to her. Only one said yes, but that was all she needed.
After the holidays, she moved the operation from her home kitchen to a commercial kitchen in a local bakery. This meant she had to get liability insurance and upgrade the type of pop molds she was using. She also bought her first “pop cart” for $500 from Craigslist, which brought her startup costs to around $2,000.
The next spring, she booked her first event, a charity car wash, through a family friend. The event benefited a young girl with cancer, to help the family pay medical bills. In Carolyn’s words, “It was such an amazing feeling to not only set up on-site as a business, but also as someone there to help out. That’s when I first realized the potential of using my business to give back to others, which I later dubbed our Pops for a Cause program.”
From that charity event, she got her next gig catering a wedding three hours away from her home. She had to figure out how to make and store enough pops, and then transport them three hours in the car without any of them melting. She pulled it off, and kept the momentum going.
Alchemy Pops rolled these successes into a successful crowdfunding campaign that summer, raising over $8,000 from more than one hundred supporters. Carolyn used that money for kitchen equipment, an outdoor tent and banner, more freezers, and more molds. That first full year, between events, catering, and the Kickstarter campaign, she made over $15,000, all while working on weekends and evenings.
Carolyn wanted to make the jump and turn her side hustle into her full-time focus. But before she quit her job, she created a spreadsheet of all the money going in and out of her family’s personal and business accounts. After getting a detailed accounting of their overhead, she realized that they weren’t huge spenders.
Since Alchemy Pops didn’t have a brick-and-mortar establishment, most business expenses went toward maintaining the mobile food carts that she used to sell on the streets of Fort Worth, as well as the energy it takes to keep all of those pops nice and cold. Thanks to those mobile carts, Carolyn can still make sales year-round through in-person pop-ups, events, and corporate catering.
The next step was figuring out how many frozen pops she would need to replace her full-time salary, and how long it would take her to get to that number. The direct costs for each pop are around 25¢ to 30¢ each (including the wrapper, stick, and ingredients), and she turns around and sells them for $3 to $4 depending on the ingredients. In setting her initial pricing, Carolyn surveyed the landscape of the market and set up the business to where Alchemy Pops wasn’t the least expensive seller, but not the most expensive either.
In year two, she sold more than twenty-five thousand pops and brought in roughly $80,000 in sales, with about $1,350 to $3,000 each month as net income. Not only that, but the business was growing. Once she had all those numbers in front of her, it was a much easier decision to quit her job.
The move to running Alchemy Pops full-time meant that Carolyn could focus all her efforts on expanding her pop empire. It also meant more freedom and flexibility. While she admits that she works more hours now than when she had a 9-to-5 job, what she’s lost in hours, she’s more than made up for in living her life. For example, she and Wiley took a month off to travel in New Zealand and Australia. They had to plan the trip around his job, but her schedule was easier: she just didn’t take on any events that month.
In year three, Carolyn hit a new milestone: she made more in one month from Alchemy Pops than she had made in all of year two. And she’s not slowing down. She recently opened her first brick-and-mortar store, right on Main Street in downtown Fort Worth. She already has plans for new products, additional locations, and even an idea for a brand-new side hustle.
Finally, she can also put a sticker next to “start a side hustle” on her 30 Things Before 30 bucket list.
“Don’t try to be perfect, be personable. Don’t pretend to know it all, embrace the fact that you don’t. Pick one person to ask. Pick one thing to try. And before you know it, you’ll have your next step, and then the one after that.” —Carolyn
FUN FACT At one point, Carolyn ordered equipment from Brazil and listed her home address as the delivery location. She got a call from the company the day before it arrived, confirming that there was a loading dock for the eighteen-wheeler that would be delivering it. After making some frantic calls, she was able to get permission from a company down the street from her to deliver the equipment there. A kind employee then drove the equipment to her house on his forklift.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Ice pops are the new cupcakes! Carolyn was the first to focus on the Dallas–Fort Worth market, which has warm temperatures much of the year.
BELGIAN FINE CHOCOLATE COMES TO AMERICA
NAME
LOCATION
SHREVEPORT, LOUISIANA
STARTUP COSTS
$1,500
INCOME
$5,000+ (SEASONALLY)
WEBSITE
After living in Belgium for thirteen years, a Louisiana freelancer returns home and starts a hustle making fine chocolate.
The small country of Belgium is well known for its delicacies, including french fries, beer, waffles, and chocolate. Jeff Slaughter lived and worked in the country for thirteen years before returning home to his native Louisiana.
While he was in Belgium, he became intrigued by the chocolate culture of the country. Not only is its chocolate delicious, it’s also artfully made and well packaged. Jeff had the idea to bring some of this culture back and share it in America.
As a resourceful side hustler, he set out to learn how to make chocolate in the traditional European manner—but at first his quest led only to dead ends. He found two options, neither of which was ideal.
The first option was a two-year, full-time school, which would have been nearly impossible to fit in with his day job. The second was a short, three-day workshop from one of the Belgian chocolate companies. This sounded good at first, but as he dug deeper he learned that it was mostly for tourists and wouldn’t really show him everything he needed to know.
Finally, he found an online program in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, known as École Chocolate. This three-month course came with a lot of reading material, video training, and graded weekly assignments. Although attending a course in person might have been more helpful, with the limitations of time and money, it seemed like the best option. The course exceeded his expectations and gave him the working rules to learn much more on his own.
Back in Louisiana, Jeff set up a small kitchen and began to make batches of artisanal chocolate, using the skills he’d learned through the course. Rather than open a chocolate shop, which would have been expensive and potentially risky, he decided to stay small and nimble.*3 He wanted to run the project seasonally, from November to March, so that he wouldn’t compete with the heat and humidity.
Louisiana and many other states have what’s known as a “cottage law,” where you can sell certain foods that you make in your home until you reach a certain level of revenue. In Louisiana, it was $20,000 a year. At that point, you have to have a dedicated kitchen and receive regular inspections, but you don’t have to worry about those things in the beginning.
When it came to marketing, Jeff had another novel idea. He decided to offer other services such as parties, workshops, and personal chocolatier services. Making chocolate can be a lonely venture, but the client interaction that comes with the events allows him to get out of his kitchen and spend time with others.
Jeff’s chocolate hustle brought in more than $5,000 the first season, and then about the same the next. His long-term goal is to grow it to $12,000 a year, so that every month he has $1,000 in extra income.
There’s no word on whether he’s going to expand to making Belgian waffles.
“When people sample my chocolate, they can instantly taste the difference. I enjoy being a chocolate ambassador for Belgium!” —Jeff
FUN FACT Farmers’ markets proved unprofitable for Jeff, but becoming a “personal chocolatier” at hosted parties and events has been far more successful.
ACTION PLAN
1. Learn to make legit chocolate.
2. Experiment with packaging. Appearances matter, and a luxury product needs to look good.
3. Set up shop online, offline, or both.
4. Add supplemental events, like a tasting party or Valentine’s Day celebration.
5. Optional: Remodel your kitchen.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Jeff’s passion for Belgian chocolate combined with his new interest in marketing is bringing buyers to his door. Not being reliant on this income for his livelihood, he can also experiment and have fun without feeling much pressure.
ONLINE COFFEE COMPANY BREWS UP $30,000 A MONTH
NAME
EMILIE SIMMONS AND SHARON PIECZENIK
LOCATION
COTATI, CALIFORNIA
STARTUP COSTS
$30,000
INCOME
$30,000/MONTH
WEBSITE
Tired of the guilt associated with consuming coffee while pregnant and breast-feeding, a biomechanical engineer creates a line of coffee bean options that keep moms happy and babies healthy.
Mommee Coffee is not your average cup of joe, and cofounder Emilie Simmons is not your average entrepreneur. She’s a coffee lover, a biomechanical engineer at a medical device company, and a mother. Oh, and a couple of years ago, she set out to develop coffee options for moms everywhere.
It’s a hustle that grew out of a need—because coffee is serious!
It all began when Emilie, at eight months pregnant, was planning a trip from San Francisco to San Diego. Already a parent to a two-year-old, Emilie could imagine the misery of a long car ride with a toddler. The idea of having one on her pregnant lap while flying wasn’t any better, so she welcomed a solo driving adventure while her wife flew with their son to their destination.
In Emilie’s words, the alone time “was like finding a unicorn.” It gave her an opportunity to do some thinking, and her thoughts were fixated on coffee. She’d already been researching the impact of caffeine on a baby, both during pregnancy and while breast-feeding. Emilie came to the realization that for many women, drinking coffee during pregnancy is influenced as much by emotion and guilt as it is by data.
This led to her big idea: to source and roast delicious coffee specially geared to the unique needs of moms and moms-to-be. That blissful, eight-hour unicorn voyage provided the creative foundation of what would become Mommee Coffee.
Emilie connected with her friend, Sharon, who, after spending time in a cooperative community in Costa Rica, realized she wanted to shift her focus toward women’s health. When Emilie mentioned Mommee Coffee, Sharon thought it was an intriguing idea and the perfect name.
They each invested $15,000. As they explored the world of coffee and developed their product, they focused on low acidity, as well as varying levels of caffeine. The finished product is organic, low acid, and offered in four caffeine levels: full caffeine, one-half caff, one-quarter caff, and decaf. Their coffee is decaffeinated using a water-processing technique rather than chemicals, to be on the safe side for pregnancy and breast-feeding.
A few months prior to public launch, Emilie and Sharon had friends and family test their product, website, and shipping process. They took to the streets to spread the word about Mommee Coffee, handing out information at farmers’ markets, baby fairs, and to anyone who would listen.
Two years in, the business was selling approximately $30,000 of coffee each month. Emilie attributes the success to satisfying a true need—not just a need for coffee itself, but a need for moms to feel that it’s okay for them to still want things that were important parts of their lives before they became parents.
In addition to the financial prosperity, one of the best parts of the hustle has been the out-of-the-blue emails from customers telling them how Mommee Coffee has made an impact. For example, one breast-feeding mom wrote to tell them about how her baby’s skin had been constantly breaking out. Realizing it could be from acidic foods, the mom cut out suspect items like orange juice and coffee until there were no more breakouts. When she tried to return to drinking standard coffee, the breakouts returned—but then she tried Mommee Coffee, and her baby’s skin remained healthy.
Since this is a side hustle, Emilie and Sharon have limited bandwidth. They like the idea of doing more local events, but want to be mindful of spreading themselves too thin.
The partners may expand further at some point, but for now the priority is to continue spreading the word about their current mission. Just because you’re a mom doesn’t mean you have to give up your precious caffeinated (or one-quarter caffeinated) ritual.
“Pick something manageable and something you are passionate about. Limit the scope as much as you can to start, because even something that seems small can take an enormous amount of work. Test your idea before making big investments. And have fun!” —Emilie
FUN FACT The amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee depends on many factors, including the type of bean, brew time, how many grounds are used, and whether it’s brewed with hot or cold water.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Moms like coffee, but many of them need to be choosy about drinking it because it can affect their baby’s health. Mommee Coffee provides a variety of solutions while relating directly to the intended audience.
DELICIOUS COOKIES HAND-DELIVERED AT MIDNIGHT
NAME
JULIA BALDWIN AND RICHARD KOTULSKI
LOCATION
PORTLAND, OREGON
STARTUP COSTS
$3,000
INCOME
$8,000/MONTH
WEBSITE
A late-night craving evolves into a cookie-delivery service, spreading chocolate chip goodness throughout the land.
Julia Baldwin and her husband, Richard, grew up in Portland, Oregon, but they spent the better part of a decade living in Philadelphia and New York City—cities where you could get anything delivered at any time of night, and there was always someplace open to get a snack.
When they moved back west, they realized that aside from pizza, Portland didn’t have much in the way of late-night delivery options. One night, they were relaxing at home and were overtaken with a craving for cookies…but they were too tired to make them themselves. That was how the idea started: What if there was a way to make delicious cookies and bring them to people’s doorsteps?
They talked about it for over a year before beginning to work on it. Richard, the head of customer experience at a startup, was coaching some students on the basics of entrepreneurship. He suggested that one of them look into what it would take to create a late-night cookie business.
That student ended up not wanting to take the idea anywhere, but Richard and Julia kept mulling it over until they decided to take their own advice.
Their first step was market research. They prepared a survey that went to students at two local colleges. Not surprisingly, students were responsive to the idea. This gave them the confidence they needed to figure out how to make it happen.
They called it After Dark Cookies. Julia was in the kitchen baking, and Richard stood by, ready to take cookies out for delivery. The first weekend they opened for business, two things happened that showed Julia and Richard they were on to something.
Their first order came from a couple in Colorado with a friend in Portland who had just had surgery, and the faraway couple wanted to get something nice delivered to him. They Googled “Portland dessert delivery,” and the brand-new After Dark Cookies site came up on the first page.*4
Richard went out to deliver the order, but when he knocked on the door, nobody answered. It turned out they’d already gone to bed for the night. Richard called the friends in Colorado, who said to just leave the cookies by the door. He did as instructed, but it didn’t feel right. When he got back home, he emailed the recipient to say that he wanted to deliver to them again the next night—at no charge. They were over the moon with gratitude…a buttery, sugary moon.
That same weekend, another customer was so excited that when Richard dropped off a delivery, she asked if she could give him a hug. He’d worked a lot of jobs, in restaurants and retail and all sorts of other industries, but had never gotten a reaction like that before. It was another moment when they thought, “Hey, there really might be something to this.”
The goodwill and good baking continued. But even though the cookie kingdom is delicious, it’s also a ton of work. Julia and Richard have full-time jobs, and they’ve been spending six nights a week working on their side hustle.
They’re also doing this as a couple, a fact that they point out is enriching in some ways, but “character building” in others. Still, they’re glad to be following their chocolate chip passion.
Can you change the world through cookies? Perhaps so, and even if not, they’re still delicious homemade cookies brought to your doorstep.
“Question all the assumptions you tend to make. When you think about how much it would cost to do something, try to think creatively about how else you might accomplish it.” —Julia
FUN FACT Julia recently took a phone order from a mother in Florida who wanted to send cookies to her son for his twenty-ninth birthday. Those kinds of experiences—the hugs from customers, the faraway orders to loved ones—have given her and Richard the fuel to keep going. The free samples don’t hurt either.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Who wouldn’t want late-night cookie delivery? If this service doesn’t exist in your town and you like to bake, maybe it’s time to fire up the oven.
AVOCADO QUEEN EARNS $45,000 SELLING SPREADABLE GRANOLA
NAME
LOCATION
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
STARTUP COSTS
$40,000
INCOME
$45,000 IN SALES IN THE FIRST FOUR MONTHS
WEBSITE
After documenting her recovery from unhealthy eating, this health tech worker turns a kitchen experiment into a growing business.
Ali Bonar, a product marketer for a health tech company, lives in San Francisco. Growing up, she was outgoing, had a bunch of friends, and played volleyball on her high school team. On the outside, everything appeared fine.
On the inside, however, she was developing an unhealthy relationship with food. People would marvel at how thin she looked. Ali would play it down, acting as if everything was okay…but it wasn’t.
She’d starve herself all day, and then spend the night binge eating—which left her feeling guilty. She felt that she had no self-control. In fact, she had developed an eating disorder while studying nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley. Food was seriously stressing her out.
Shortly after college, she began documenting her journey of intuitive eating on Instagram, using the handle @avokween, because of her love of avocados. Her struggles with food persisted, and she tried a lot of different methods in search of lasting improvement.
Her breakthrough came when she shifted her focus away from worrying about how certain foods made her look and instead focused on how they made her feel. This changed everything. The “avokween” began giving zero guacs.
At the same time, her marketing job was leaving her creatively unfulfilled. As soon as she’d get off work, Ali would go home and tinker around in her kitchen. This was the place where she could exercise her creative freedom. She felt alive and in control. She began experimenting with different foods, posting stories to her followers.
A self-proclaimed nut butter–aholic, Ali found herself putting peanut or almond butter spreads on everything. However, these tasty treats were taxing her digestion. Trying out alternatives, she looked for something that tasted good and left her feeling full.
It was while experimenting with a combination of granola and coconut oil that Ali stumbled upon a mysterious, buttery concoction. This spreadable gold was getting rave reviews from family and friends. Because of all the encouragement, Ali decided to kick things up a notch.
What started as mere kitchen experiments resulted in the founding of Kween Foods, a wellness company with the mission to empower women to reclaim their relationship with food. Her first official product? Granola Butter—the world’s first spreadable granola.
It didn’t happen all at once. There was paperwork to fill out and permits to obtain for a commercial kitchen space. It took her nearly four months to get through all the red tape. But there was also a silver lining—this four-month window allowed her to test and retest her product to get it just right. Ali tried nearly forty variations before she was certain that she had a winner.
She now says that her naiveté was an advantage—she simply didn’t think it would take so long. If she knew in advance, she says, she might have been discouraged from starting.
Meanwhile, Ali’s Instagram following had increased to over twenty-eight thousand followers in just over a year. The shift happened when she publicly shared her eating habits, including the struggles she encountered. Comments, likes, and messages began flooding in.
Ali was deliberate when it came to building this following. She attributes success to posting every single day, sometimes twice a day. Her followers loved her authenticity, seeing her hard work and her not-so-glamorous posts.
Leading up to the launch, Ali created a list of one hundred influencers that she wanted to send her product to. She broke down her targets into microinfluencers (under ten thousand followers), midtier (ten to fifty thousand followers), and high tier (over fifty thousand followers). When selecting influencers, she was careful to choose the ones who had high engagement and therefore a loyal audience base.
The influencers she reached out to consisted largely of people she had some kind of interaction with in the past. And she asked them to only post about her product if they loved it and really wanted to.
An additional perk of “working in public” was the immediate feedback she received when testing various brand ideas. It was like having an instant survey at her fingertips. For example, her followers helped her to pick the product name Granola Butter.*5 It also made her community feel more invested in her brand’s success.
In the first four months of launching Kween Foods, business went on a steady climb resulting in $45,000 worth of sales. In addition to what seems like a bright financial future, the project has had a tremendous impact on her life in other ways. In her words, “Starting Kween has fulfilled me in ways that my full-time job couldn’t. I’ve always had a creative streak in me, and didn’t find myself fulfilled with my traditional marketing job. With my side hustle, I had freedom and control, which ultimately meant I was a lot happier.”
Kween Foods is scaling quickly, and there might even be an opportunity down the road for Alis to pursue it full-time.
The avocado queen’s reign is set to continue.
“People don’t relate to perfection, they relate to realness. And if you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one.” —Ali
FUN FACT Ali’s first launch almost never happened. Before she could officially share her Granola Butter with the world, she needed the approval of the food inspector. However, at the time, there was only one inspector in all of San Francisco, who was struggling to keep up with the amount of work on her docket. Ali worried that she wouldn’t get approval in time—but after a flurry of emails, it finally came through the day before launch.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Ali built her following by sharing honestly and posting consistently. Then, she spent a lot of time and energy developing an interesting product.
WRITER TURNS LEFTOVER CHERRIES INTO NATURALLY SWEET INCOME
NAME
LOCATION
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA
STARTUP COSTS
$15,000
INCOME
$5,000/MONTH
WEBSITE
After being diagnosed with diabetes, a food blogger creates a sugar-free line of ketchup alternatives.
One summer day, Erika Kerekes took her kids to a pick-your-own cherry orchard. They ended up with so many cherries that they couldn’t eat them all fresh. The kids were picky eaters and didn’t care for jam—but the family did eat a lot of burgers.
Getting creative, Erika turned some of the extra fruit into an improvised version of cherry “ketchup.” Everyone loved it! For the rest of the summer, she experimented with lots of different fruit recipes in her own kitchen. She’d feed them to her family, friends, and even the mail carrier, in an attempt to get honest feedback on her formulations.
Based on the response, by August she decided to turn her recipes into a side hustle. Her first step was reaching out to a food chemist who helped her figure out how to take a home recipe and turn it into a formula that a copacker could use in their facility.*6 This involved several rounds of testing to make sure the taste and consistency was perfect, and learning how to source all the fruit ingredients she needed.
Once she dialed in the product, Erika decided on the name Not Ketchup. She then worked with a graphic designer to create a logo and product labels. Finally, she purchased product liability insurance and found a copacker that would work with her on a small initial run.
With all that in place, by the end of the year Erika was able to have sixty cases of three different flavors of Not Ketchup produced. She estimates that it cost her $15,000 to complete these steps.
Erika is a writer for a nonprofit organization, and she knew a lot of food bloggers. She gave away about a third of her first production run to those bloggers, as well as to anyone else she knew who might help get the word out. They cooked up original recipes using her sauces, sharing them on their websites and social media.
She also used some of that first run to go to the Fancy Food trade show in San Francisco. While there, she met a reporter at the Los Angeles Times who interviewed her and wrote up an article about Not Ketchup. Erika knew that the reporter was going to ask where people could buy her products, so she leveraged the upcoming article to get stocked at a few local stores.
Month by month, she continued to get into more and more stores, including Sam’s Club and Whole Foods. And by the second year, Not Ketchup was available on Amazon.
It was all starting so well, but then life threw her a major curveball. Erika was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and realized she needed to make some lifestyle changes, including cutting out all added sugar. Within three months of snapping into action, she had reversed her diabetes. No small feat!
During this time, Erika realized that if she was trying to cut out sugar, other people probably were too. She decided to make a big shift from traditionally made fruit sauces (which included a lot of sugar) to condiments sweetened only by the fruit itself. As Erika shared, “That was almost a complete relaunch and took a tremendous effort, but I knew it was the right direction to take.”
Her first no-added-sugar flavor, Tangerine Hatch Chile, was released on Amazon at the end of the year and instantly became her number one seller. A few months later, she released a no-added-sugar version of Cherry Chipotle, and sales for that flavor doubled overnight. With these successes under her belt, Erika decided to make all of her products without any added sugar. To help with this transition, she used a crowdfunding site called PieShell to successfully raise $15,000.
Erika fulfilled her campaign rewards and put the new flavors up on Amazon. This time she specifically focused her marketing efforts on paleo, Whole30, low-carb, and diabetic customers. To reach them, she used content marketing, social media, and pay-per-click advertising. Through all her efforts, she recently celebrated her biggest month of sales yet.
While she plans on continuing to grow the Not Ketchup brand, she also wants it to remain a side hustle no matter how big it gets.
“I focus on my day job when I’m at work, but in between things—when I’m doing dishes, folding laundry, brushing my teeth, packing my lunch, or working out—I’m always thinking about my business.” —Erika
FUN FACT Erika’s side hustle started because she had a ton of leftover cherries from a family fruit-picking outing, and her friends didn’t like jam. This eventually turned into her line of condiments that she had to call Not Ketchup.
CRITICAL FACTOR
Switching to a sugar-free line of ketchups was a huge transition, but the change allowed Erika to market to people with specialized diets. By narrowing her audience, she increased her sales.
If your idea involves food, you might need to do more research than what’s required for other projects. In most cases, you’ll need a basic business license before selling to the public. In some cases, a visit from your local health inspector will be required.
One of your first steps should be to look into local “cottage laws,” which may make it much easier for you to get started. These laws are on the books in many states, provinces, and areas. They allow people to sell certain food products without going through a complicated process of inspections.
The specifics of the laws vary quite a bit. In some places, you can sell up to a certain amount of goods before your business is required to operate under the same regulations that larger companies follow. In other places, what matters is whether or not you have employees. Do your own research to see if the answers help you decide how to proceed.
For more, visit SideHustleSchool.com/recipe.
*1 We thought about calling it “Eat, Drink, and Deposit Money in Your Bank Account,” but it didn’t have quite the same ring.
*1 “Popsicles” is a trademarked term owned by Unilever. Generic terms include ice pops, ice drops, icy poles, and freezer pops.
*2 He also said, “I don’t want this business to run my life—I want it to fit into my life.” This is a great philosophy for side hustling!
*3 Search rankings like these don’t always appear so quickly, but in this case there was limited competition, so the new site shot straight to the top.
*4 She had a different idea at first, but the new name was clearly the “butter” option.
*5 A copacker is a company that will make a food product in bulk for you, according to your specifications and recipes.