Hey There Y'All...Welcome Back to Que-Licious!
Okay! I know by reading the title of this blog post you may think I have had a sip or two of whiskey instead of cooking with it; but trust me...it will make sense after you read through the post – hopefully – especially after reading my previous post, Creating My Own Opportunities.
As you know, I am on a mission to earn the funds necessary to purchase my first food truck outright without financing, which brings me to my "barbecue bakery", so to speak. In my last post I touched on an opportunity to sell baked goods from my home kitchen through several local markets as well as online through two very specific venues; Etsy and Crowd-Funding.
I was already familiar with Etsy; but for those of you who are not, I encourage you to check out this wonderful site of talented Artisan Entrepreneurs. Etsy is an online marketplace where you can find everything from handcrafted jewelry to gluten free cookies; and the Artisans selling on Etsy are as unique and individualized as their products. What I like most about this site is the Artisan community feel for an online environment and that feeling is carried over into every part of the site and not just the shops. I have found Etsy to be a supporting, encouraging online assemblage of talented crafts-people; which persuaded me to choose Etsy as my preferred online platform to introduce a “Sweet-Heat” product line. Additionally, once the requirements and licensing is complete to start production for our barbecue sauce; those items can be sold on my Etsy Shop as well.
So, you may be asking yourself why sweets? I say why not! With the Holiday Season just around the corner, I knew I would be spending a lot of time in my kitchen anyway so I just decided that this year I would try to make so extra “dough” while I’m there. (Yes people…I am that flaky!) I love infusing unusual ingredients together and creating unique flavor combinations that enhance foods natural flavor and it’s not restricted to just our barbecue. Okay…it’s kind of my obsession! Once you taste my Ancho-Orange Chocolate Dessert Sauce…you’ll be glad I’m obsessed! Deciding to introduce the “Sweet Heat” product line of Whiskey River before the sauces and dry rubs was born more out of convenience, timing, and necessity rather than perfectly planned marketing. People tend to buy more sweets, candies, and such during the holidays and are looking to fire up the grill in the spring; timing truly is everything. It just happened that finalizing the legal’s for producing the sauce was taking a little longer than anticipated. (Apparently government agencies don’t really care about your deadlines only theirs)
So I decided to make the best of it and start with the “Sweet-Heats”. Our dessert line and snacks tie into our barbecue through infusing chilis, bacon, and bourbon in our sweets just as we do in our barbecue. Opening a sweet shop on Etsy just seemed like a logical step to take for two reasons: 1) the startup process was more streamlined and easier to establish than mass producing bottles of acidic sauce and less regulated, and 2) introducing these products on the cusp of the holiday shopping season has the potential to generate enough sales to purchase our food truck before spring, or as I like to call it…Barbecue Season!
Opening the Etsy shop was a much easier decision than developing a strategy to market my fundraising food truck project through crowd funding. In my next post, I will share my insights regarding crowd funding and why I decided to give it a try. Until next time…
…keep cookin’ y’all!
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