Our StoryFormer teacher and life-long foodie, SousKits.com founder Mary Reid was working hard in the Seattle tech industry. Like many 9-5ers, she often found herself stopping for take-out at the end of a long day, exhausted and unmotivated to cook. Seeking inspiration to get back in the Kitchen, Mary found a creative outlet in organizing a club themed around small, friendly cooking competitions. The “Cook-Off Club” took off immediately, growing to over 140 active members in a few short months.
The cooking competitions were a ton of fun, but more than anything, members were interested in learning new cooking techniques. Cooking classes abound in any big city, but unfortunately most classes were too expensive, inconvenient, and hard to book for even a subset of the large group. To get around this problem, Mary started offering “skill sharing nights” where one member of the group would volunteer to teach the rest of the group a specific technique for very little cost. These skills nights were a huge hit and by far the most popular activities for the group! Mary found that organizing these events often required that members purchase specialized equipment and ingredients that most stores did not carry, even in a big city like Seattle. At one point, after spending several hours driving to local specialty markets, looking up recipes online and watching YouTube videos, Mary was in the kitchen ready to teach cheese-making only to find that the temperature on her standard kitchen thermometer didn’t go low enough to accurately monitor the milk during the heating process. Frustrated, open laptop splattered with curdled milk, she sent one of the club members to yet another store to find an appropriate thermometer, thinking “Wouldn’t it be great if there was one place where we could go to get project ideas, solid instruction AND everything we need to practice our new skills?”. The idea for SousKits.com was born. |
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