More Than A Cookie

Stella Vanstone & Emma Kula

A podcast about running a healthy food brand by the founders of Stellar Eats.
We’re here to disrupt the way brands speak to consumers so we figured, let’s start the conversation via a fun podcast full of industry disrupting hot takes, business BTS, and so much more. More than a cookie resonates with us for more than just our mission. It’s also about empowering other young entrepreneurs. We want to shed light on entrepreneurial strength, resiliency, and even though we might look sweet, we’re tough cookies.

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BusinessBusiness
Health & FitnessHealth & Fitness
ArtsArts
EntrepreneurshipEntrepreneurship
NutritionNutrition
FoodFood

Episodes

MORE PRODUCTS, MORE PROBLEMS
Apr 8 2024
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.