Question
Terrell Clarke
What were the challenges along the way of making your passion into profit, and how did you overcome these challenges?
Answer
Making my passion a profit. And how did you overcome these challenges? So that's an interesting thing because I had a kind of a different ap like, uh, way of coming into food as a living. I didn't ever consider, uh, food as a living when I was growing up. I actually went to school, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. So I went into journalism, um, right outta school. I, you know, went to New York City and worked for Rolling Stone right outta college. So it was kind of a different thing for me. And I found food after, um, going into another career. I was in real estate, and when the economy crashed in 2008, I was looking for something else to do. And, um, after a lot of kind of soul searching, um, realized that Whole Foods market was a good fit for me just in my, uh, in my thinking and the way that I liked to approach kind of life. And they just had a really interesting way to be able to, uh, look at different things as a grocery store. And I thought it was a cool company, um, knew a lot of people that worked for it as well and had some, um, connections there. And so kind of like was a little bit convinced, uh, by some other people that worked for Whole Foods to go work for Whole Foods. Um, now some of these people were kind of higher up in the company, so I didn't want to, um, I didn't want to really, you know, go out there and say, Hey, you should hire me because I know so and so. Um, I started as a dishwasher literally, um, and worked my way up as quickly as possible. So I worked my way from a dishwasher, like within a week, literally days to a waiter, which I'd never been a waiter before. And then, um, started working, uh, at a restaurant within the store at Whole Foods Markets, um, that vegan and raw food place that I was talking about. Um, uh, pretty quickly I had been, uh, you know, a vegetarian for 20, like, well now it's like 25 years, then it was probably 15 or so, um, you know, years. So I knew how to cook vegetarian, um, was a good cook. My mom, you know, uh, was, helped put herself through college and law school by doing a catering business, and I helped her out with that a lot. So, um, I was also a vegetarian at a time when you couldn't find vegetarian food, uh, at a restaurant. If you did, it'd be like a side of mashed potatoes or beans or something like that, right? So it was a harder time. So because of that, I had to take those challenges in front of me and just learn how to cook. Um, and I took those and used it to my advantage. And because I knew how to cook and go with big flavors, um, the restaurant basically brought me right into it. And it evolved me to another position where I started doing the job. I was talking about where I was doing cooking demos and then, uh, evolved my career basically, you know, from there. So it was really interesting for me because I wasn't really looking for a profit in the food world, it just kind of found me. Um, but then I took it and started at a very small place and made it go as big as possible as quickly as I could. So I was at Whole Foods Market for about, uh, I guess that was probably about six years, and then went to Whole Kids Foundation, and I think I was there for another seven years or almost eight. Um, and at Whole Kids Foundation, I specifically worked with, uh, educating teachers on, um, the benefits of good nutrition so they could be better mentors to kids. So I did cooking demos for them and then developed a, a program for, uh, uh, food service workers where I basically did the same thing for them, wanted to show them how good nutrition can be a huge influence over kids, and they as food service workers could do the same. And specifically had an emphasis on scratch food cooking. And that emphasis on scratch food cooking, uh, basically helped me to be able to travel around the country and train, uh, over 45,000 school food professionals, um, at various school districts around the country. Um, and so that kind of kept evolving. So each kind of thing over years kind of kept gradually taking me to different places. Um, now of course, there were things in between all of those. I've been board member on Slow Food, I've been a board member on the Child Institute of, uh, nutrition, um, you know, a lot of different things in between there just because of those passions. Now that passion really led me to all of those, right? So following your passion, I think is probably the best thing you can do, um, even if you have to have something else to supplement it out. Like a lot of these jobs that I had, I was doing other jobs to be able to supplement my passion, and finally my passion paid enough to be able to do that, but it took years to be able to get to that point.
