Welcome to a place that offers ideas of the best places to live and work for makers of those crave-worthy, sustainable food products you seek out in specialty food shops, farmers markets and at farmstands.
Cutting my teeth in the chocolate business; cutting into chocolate bunnies with my teeth.
The FoodStarter blog is brought to you by Susie Wyshak, California and Maine residential and commercial real estate agent with Compass* and author of several books:
- Good Food, Great Business: How to Take Your Artisan Food Idea From Concept to Marketplace (Chronicle Books)
- TJ’s Then & Now: How Trader Joe’s Changed the Way America Eats
- Chocolate Chip Cookie School, teaching Critical Thinking Through Cookies
A California native living bi-coastally in the San Francisco Bay Area and Maine, Susie connected the dots to combine her loves of supporting food entrepreneurs, places and marketing to become a Good Food business strategist and real estate agent for food entrepreneurs and people aspiring to live large!
*California DRE #02144226 and Maine Lic. #929575
Dreams begin by talking to strangers. Let’s talk!
A few other highlights of Susie’s food-filled life:
The moment I decided I’d rather consume goat cheese than raise goats. Although the novelty of milking goats is undeniably fun. Once. 🙂
- Packing hundreds of chocolate boxes at a family-run candy store / factory (when the only day she got to skip high school was to see Julia Child.)
- Helping Copia as a culinary docent at (where she and Julia Child again crossed paths) and volunteer at SF’s 18 Reasons
- Hawking for various food producers at farmers markets and Rockridge Market Hall
- Hosting local homemade food barter exchanges
- Co-founding Epicuring.com, a culinary travel blog for California and beyond
- Relentlessly spotting trends at industry and consumer food and agricultural fairs around the world
Susie sourced artisan food for several online marketplaces (like Foodzie), planned (and scrapped) her own snack-food business, co-chaired the Good Food Awards Confections committee, kicked off the U.S. Fair Trade cocoa program early on, was the Food & Beverage Industry Expert on The Balance (now called Live About), and wrote her MBA thesis on Consumer Attitudes Toward Giving Chocolate as a Gift.
