PestoGrino Recap
Reflections on Trying to Build a Sustainable Business from Scratch
How it started
Perhaps it was my time in AmeriCorps at Inner Harbor that preached “healing through experience” that influenced my decision to start a business. It was definitely all that time in my 20s working for nonprofits that led to my decision to go back to school to get my MBA in Sustainable Systems. A key takeaway from grad school? No one’s got it figured out; we’re all bozos on the bus. If someone had already cracked the code and climbed Mount Sustainability, then we’d be there. Sustainability in a modern context is very much the blind leading the blind, and anyone who says differently is likely not being honest with themselves. Our best examples are Indigenous Peoples, and Pachamama aka Mother Nature herself. Hopefully, we will wise up, listen, and learn.
I learn best by doing, so I started a little pesto sauce business out of a desire not just to study entrepreneurship, but to go out and do entrepreneurship. My grad school was teaching us accounting with a book based on the lemonade stand, and so I figured I’d just go ahead and start with the easiest thing I knew how to make, pesto. Our grad school encouraged us to embrace failure, to go out into the world and fail fast and fail often. So I did a glorified lemonade stand and made & sold pesto at 4 different farmer’s markets in the metro Atlanta area, with this elegant blueprint, thanks to our Marketing instructor:
Start small
Dream big
Scale conscientiously.
- Udaiyan Jatar aka “U.J.”
Side note: You might be wondering, what is a sustainable system anyway? In its essence and most basic form, for a system to be sustainable you cannot have more going out than is coming in. Whether it’s money in a bank account, nutrients in the Earth, water into a lake, or even energy and self-care. Flows are critical to understanding and creating sustainable systems.
Why pesto?
Maybe because I’m half Italian, maybe because it actually is quite easy to make, but pesto making has always been a very intuitive process for me. It’s simple, raw (no cooking required!), herbaceous, and versatile. I still see in my head this “periodic table of pesto” where there’s the cheese section, the nuts section, oils, and the herbs & greens. The combinations to play with are nearly endless depending on season, region, budget, and tastes. A portmanteau of the product and my last name, I launched “PestoGrino” in the winter of 2016.
I had more than a dozen varieties that I experimented with, launched, marketed, and sold. Of course I had your classic basil, but then went down the rabbit hole of basil varieties, allured still to this day with Tulsi or “Holy Basil” and its medicinal properties. I remember once I had a couple who were regular customers that had both grown up in India, tell me how their grandmother would always keep a Tulsi plant around. They said they would eat a leaf a day, much in the same way we take pharmaceutical medications. After all, where do the active ingredients in pharmaceuticals come from? Plants! Have our bodies adapted to the synthetic, concentrated form of plant medicine in pill form, versus ingesting it with all the fibers that the plant naturally comes with when we eat it? The growing list of adverse side effects would point towards no, but that’s a topic for another post.
The creative freedom to look at what was regionally abundant (like swapping pine nuts for pecans) and reverse designing my product launches, was nothing short of thrilling.
Parsley was poppin in the garden, cool, wonder how I can make that into a pesto...
…Oh, the lemon balm that’s growing right next to it is poppin too. Maybe I combine the two?!
And so I did, for what was one of the more foodie-esque pesto varieties that I sold, “Parsley Lemon Balm” (especially delicious in fish dishes).
I started thinking, how can I infuse my zero waste geekery and resourcefulness into this endeavor? What if I used traditionally discarded ingredients like carrot tops and beet greens in my pesto sauces? Radish tops, turnip greens, I even had a foraged line featuring wood sorrel, the pesto-bilities really are near infinite…
As we learned about balance sheets and COGS (costs of goods sold) I shrewdly decided to leave out cheese from my recipe rendering the pesto vegan, making it oddly both more and less marketable (remember this is Atlanta in 2016). Being in the southeast I didn’t lead with that in marketing efforts, but instead focused on flavor and freshness. After all, if the revolution’s to succeed, it’s gotta be tasty too, right?
Hippocrates, often credited as the “father of western medicine” is cited with the famous quote
“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.”
How it went
There is wondrous instant gratification in sampling and selling at farmer’s markets. Real-time feedback on brand new culinary creations was immediate. My conversion rate was probably around 60-75%. Most of the people that tried the pesto, bought the pesto. Yes I made good pesto, but there’s also a lot to be said about instantly being placed in a market with your ideal, target customer.
Thanks to the good folks at Community Farmers Markets I was selling at the East Atlanta Farmers Market, the Decatur market twice a week, and then I got into the big leaguer market, the Grant Park Farmers Market. We sold out on opening day an hour before the market ended! It was a wonderful feeling, but I quickly realized that I’d need to up the supply to meet the demand. How do I grow this and scale conscientiously? Particularly with an eye towards sustainability?
The biggest check I ever remember cutting myself was for I think around $1200… for the entire month of April. The realities of being a business owner tasked with being responsible for every aspect of the business and still not able to make a living wage, hit hard. I was getting help from many friends, and the numbers still were not adding up. While my grad school was teaching us that your people are your greatest asset, they technically end up on the balance sheet as an expense, and labor was my biggest cost. I was adamant about paying the friends that helped me out in the kitchen and at the market, but I hit an inflection point. I either needed to take out a business loan to buy more equipment and pay for more staffing, or I needed to figure something else out. I needed “balcony time”, more on that later.
It was around this time that the relationship with my significant other was coming to an end. There are distinct memories I have of being at the market and trying to sell sad pesto. To this day I’m filled with so much gratitude for the friends that came and ran the stand and helped me out in the kitchen during this time. But my heart was broken and I knew I needed something to be excited about life again.
So in the Fall of 2018 I did what I now know to be a fantastically cliched thing to do. I bought a one way ticket to Rome, determined to hit the reset button on life. I had hope that I’d maybe find a business partner while abroad, or at the very least set out on an exciting adventure WWOOFing around Europe while doing a deep dive on perhaps the most critical ingredient to a good pesto, olive oil. I had the pleasure and honor of helping out with the olive harvest at 2 different WWOOFing spots- the first was a Sufi Meditation Center on an island off the coast of Italy called Sardinia, and the second was an off-grid bed and breakfast in Monti Pisano just outside of Pisa called “La Lucertola”.
There are boatloads of stories from this time, I even started a multimedia concept piece I called “Adventure Medicine” posting vignettes of my trip on youtube. However it was not without its share of adversity, like getting lost in the woods in Cinque Terre, and being detained at the Cardiff airport. But I am a huge proponent of everyone taking a “gap year” or gap season, or month, whatever you can afford. There are so many benefits that come from doing some type of travel & service via programs like AmeriCorps or WWOOF, during life transitions.
I did AmeriCorps right after undergrad, and I WWOOFed shortly after grad school, and both were extremely informative and instructive times in my life. I recognize that it takes some privilege and capital to make both happen, and I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my parents for their support during this very difficult time in my life. Reflecting on this is quite humbling, to say the least.
And so embarking on that adventure was pretty much the end of PestoGrino. I never found a business partner, and I never figured out PestoGrino 2.0. I also never communicated to my customers and community that PestoGrino was officially closed, hence part of the catalyst for this reflection piece. The most important takeaways from the 2 year journey being a local food entrepreneur that I feel compelled to share are the following:
There is a massive (mostly missed) opportunity for local food entrepreneurs to form symbiotic relationships with houses of worship to leverage under-utilized commercial kitchens. The Atlanta Friends Meeting gave me a sweetheart deal making it economically viable to start PestoGrino out of their commercial kitchen. This partnership can easily be replicated between other local food entrepreneurs and houses of worship, it’s such a win-win!
Me with a big bowl of basil in the Atlanta Friends Meeting kitchen
We are in the midst of a labor reckoning. The power dynamics around who does what work, and who gets to make those decisions is being rightfully scrutinized and questioned. This has been at the rotten core of capitalism and slavery, and all the layers of complexity involved make it far from reconciled. I experienced firsthand the challenges of balancing labor expenses with profitability while trying to start a socially and environmentally conscious business. My little pesto operation was no match for the systems in place that favor industrial efficiencies and economies of scale. The “Amazon-ification” of commerce is not only accelerating us towards the climate change cliff, but dehumanizing us all in the process. We’ve never had more tools to organize but it seems we are more fractionated than ever. What will it take to bring us together?
How it’s going now
I have since done the Heroine’s Journey, having returned to New Jersey to work at TerraCycle for 3 years. An even greater homecoming has been returning to the state I was born in, currently residing in Newburgh, NY in the heart of the Hudson Valley, Munsee Lenape land. I now work for the Center for EcoTechnology, a nonprofit that has been helping people and businesses save energy and reduce waste for nearly 50 years.
I get to literally talk trash everyday, and ways to eliminate it. And fun fact: I am over the moon in love with my fiancé and we are saving up for our zero waste wedding that we plan to have on land we purchase.
Since I closed up shop with PestoGrino, my oh my how the ecosystem has grown! There has been an incredible boom in the world of upcycled food brands. These are startup companies that are built around discarded ingredients, a culinary solution to food waste. There are too many to list here, and so many in fact, that there’s now even a trade group certifying, connecting, and promoting these businesses, called the Upcycled Food Association.
Some of my favorites, and I encourage you to give their delicious creations a whirl, are:
ReGrained making granola bars from spent beer grain
Spare Food making probiotic drinks from the whey byproduct in the production of Greek yogurt
Renewal Mill upcycling byproducts from food manufacturing into superfood ingredients and premium, plant-based pantry staples
Matriark Foods making upcycled vegetable broth concentrate
So back to “balcony time”- In this wildly brilliant 1 minute and 50 second clip-
Bill McDonough speaks to the pitfalls of being on the narrow pursuit of “efficiency”. Yes of course, we all want to work smarter not harder, however, as Bill points out here we must be asking ourselves “What is the right thing to do?, not just the right way to do something. Because if we’re doing the wrong thing perfectly, we become perfectly wrong.”
This leads to the need for “balcony time” - time to reflect and to be still, not just doing things in action mode just for the sake of being busy. This is a concept I picked up from a speaker at a conference that I attended some years ago in Atlanta, called Plywood Presents. One of the speakers was Bishop Robert Wright who introduced me to this idea of “balcony time”. Our culture favors action and doing, especially in the name of productivity; idleness makes us uncomfortable. I think that’s some of what’s gotten us into this mess where we are literally destroying the planet that feeds us. Cue the “Capitalist Blues”…
I’ve come to deeply value questions. In many ways I see questions as the answers. The right question at the right time can be completely transformational, and I think it’s time we all start asking “Why?” again.
Let’s not only favor efficiency and working smarter not harder, but ask what are we working efficiently towards? Between the digital and physical, we’ve never had more tools, but to what purpose are we using them? Why are we doing what we do?
My hope is that anyone who’s read this piece can take time for sacred rest and reflection to integrate all the lessons from the doing. I know I’m still coalescing and incorporating takeaways from all the work of my 20s and 30s. I’m curious and eager to explore what will emerge as the next iteration in my quest to transform waste streams into supply chains, to turn ugliness into beauty, and pain into possibility.
“We must have action & reflection in balance, for effectiveness” - Bishop Robert Wright
