Healthy Grains, Wealthy Gains with Tamara Ketchian

The Forrager Podcast for Cottage Food Businesses

Tamara Ketchian lives in Orange, CT and sells gluten-free vegan granola with her cottage food business, Wildwood Granola.

Tamara started her granola business in 2021 after years of making healthier granola for her family. After being a long-time stay-at-home mom, she was finally ready to do something for herself.

In the past two and a half years, her business has grown substantially and she recently won a pitch competition where she received a $10k business grant to help grow her business!

She has now expanded into a commercial kitchen so that she can sell in stores, ship nationwide, and keep pursuing her long-time dream of building a successful food business.

What You’ll Learn

• How Tamara went from a stay-at-home mom to successful entrepreneur
• Why most granola is actually unhealthy for you
• How to get a cottage food license in Connecticut
• The mindset you need to have as an entrepreneur
• The challenge with finding work-life balance as an entrepreneur
• Why you shouldn’t try to cater your products to everyone
• An alternate strategy to raising prices
• Why recurring customers are the lifeblood of a business
• How to streamline the packaging process
• Where to get ingredients and packaging for granola
• What you need to consider when labeling products
• Why a commercial kitchen can be “life changing”
• How to adapt recipes to a commercial kitchen
• What you need to consider when finding a commercial kitchen
• Resources for learning how to expand into wholesale
• How to win a pitch competition

Resources

Wildwood Granola website (Facebook | Instagram)

Women’s Business Development Council

Connecticut Small Business Administration

Recommended Stores:

• Aurora (nuts and seeds)
• Nuts (dried fruit)
• WebstaurantStore (coconut oil & Bob’s Red Mill)
• Amazon (craft paper bags)

Connecticut Cottage Food Law

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Get full show notes and transcript here: https://forrager.com/podcast/97