It began as a snack…

Posted By hiromi on May 6, 2011 in Food, Kinomi | 1 Comment

I’ve been running my cooking classes for about a year now.  Sometimes I have students, sometimes I don’t, but I figure it’s important to keep doing it so I do.   But a very interesting thing has happened as a result of my classes.

I have hinted in past blog posts about the flavoured nuts I do for my students being very popular.  Well, it’s official.  It’s now it’s own product called Kinomi which is Japanese for tree nuts.   How did I get here?  Let me backtrack a bit.  In December when I participated in the last Underground Market, I took part in a Dragon’s Den like panel which gave feedback on new products.  My flavoured nuts were very favourably received and a distributor saw real potential in them.  So we started working together to see if they could really be a product.  I discovered very quickly that my brain is not set up to process spread sheets.  I can read them (sort of) once they are done, but no way could I put one together.  Thank goodness for inhouse help in the form of my wonderful husband whose brain is structured that way.  I realized I could spend 2 days working it out for myself or I could ask him and have it done in 5 minutes.  Knowing when to ask for help is a humbling but essential part of setting up a business.

So many times, I thought the project had reached a dead end, the numbers didn’t add up and I was ready to give up.  But J from the distributor wouldn’t give up, showing me how to look at a problem from different angles.  Ultimately, we came up with a product that is very cool looking and will hopefully appeal to people.

I wish I had a photo to post of the actual product, but I am still waiting for all my supplies to arrive.  I’ll write more about it later as this could easily turn into something too long to read.  Watch this space.