MORE PRODUCTS, MORE PROBLEMS

Stella Vanstone and Emma Kula reflect on how far they've come from the early days in commercial kitchens at 2am, hand pouring product, and hand-stickering bags.

Come along as we discuss the early days of Stellar Eats and some of our biggest kitchen mishaps and fails. We've come a long way.

But growth in the business also means...growth in the scale of problems.

To put it simply -- more products, more problems.

----- 

Storytime. When we started Stellar Eats, we had JUST enough money in our bank account to buy our first round of ingredients, print some stickers, and to buy some white pouches (to apply said stickers to). With just enough leftover to rent a shared commercial kitchen in “off hours” AKA 8pm - 8am. Queue the worst night of our lives….

It’s hot. It’s dark. We’re wearing hairnets and lugging 50lb bags of cocoa powder down a dark hallway.

We thought the 3 of us were going to make our first 1,000 mixes.  We had brought a big metal bowl and a giant whisk.

Help. lol.

To say it went badly was an understatement. Tears were shed, cockroaches were trapped underneath crates, powder was spilled, and turns out trying to mix 25 lbs of baking mix by hand with 1 whisk was not the most efficient. Our 1,000 mix goal quickly became 500, then 300…

100 mixes later…It’s 4am when we finally leave the kitchen. Covered in powder, sweat and tears we silently walk towards our cars ready to head home. Ultimately defeated and questioning what we have done.

As we’re about to leave, Michelle says, “well….can’t say we killed it. But we can say we did it.” and the 3 of us burst out laughing. We laughed for a solid 5 minutes straight. It was the worst and the best. We had just made our first Stellar Eats products.

We got into our first 5 stores and sold out of product within 2 weeks. So, back to the kitchen we went. This time to one without cockroaches.