Eva Thorne – The founder and CEO of the Garden of Eva talks about bringing flavours of the American South to the UK, the challenges of scaling, and lowering food waste while making delicious products.
Our mission is to bring the preserves and condiments of the American South, which is my family’s heritage, to kitchens in the UK and beyond, through flavour innovation and lowering food waste.
As a founder you need a lot of support. Figuring out how to get that kind of support requires research. What are the right food business incubators? What are the mentoring networks? Where are the investors? And you actually have to spend time digging to find them, because they’re not always obvious and self-evident.
I use research every day, all the time, whether I’m looking at prices for competitor products, or looking for buyers, finding programmes or grants that might be helpful. I use research all the time, and for me, it’s been an indispensable skill.
The inspiration came I needed unwaxed lemons to make a Moroccan tagine, and at that time in Boston, in 2012 you couldn’t find those lemons already preserved. I was going to preserve them myself.
I was sitting in the car, and memories of traveling all over the world collided with the memories that I had of preserving and pickling with my Southern-born mom, my father and my sister and, in that moment, the vision for the Garden of Eva was born.
Be prepared to make lots of mistakes, even when you’ve done lots and lots of research.
It really wasn’t until the lockdown in 2020 that I made concerted efforts to launch the business.
I had done day long incubators, day long rah, rah, you can do this, launch your business. But Mission Kitchen had a program called Launch Your Food Hustle that started in September of 2020 and ran until December, and at the end of each week, I had a critical building block for the business.
I’ve lived in the UK for 10 years and I noticed that there really wasn’t anything from my family’s heritage, which is Virginia.
When people in the UK think of southern food, they think of gumbo, they think of New Orleans. Maybe they think of macaroni and cheese, maybe barbecue sauce. But the very rich and diverse and gorgeous heritage around preserves and condiments is something that I think was lesser known.
I’ve done extensive research. The kinds of products that we’re making at Garden of Eva literally don’t exist here in the UK. There was a gap in the market.
When I look back at my professional career, I’ve spent decades building other people’s houses. I’ve learned a tonne from all those experiences, and I was happy to be part of someone else’s causes that I believed in, developed incredible skills, incredible networks, but there was a hunger in me to do something myself and have creative control and see if I could build a successful business.
I really have a heart for women. I’ve mentored younger women all my life, and I want Garden of Eva to be the kind of business that provides economic opportunities for women in need. Those could be women returning to society from jail or prison, women fleeing domestic violence, women who are returning to the workforce after maternity leave, women who are refugees, or women who maybe want a career change and want to gain some work experience in an area that they really don’t know that much about.
Sadly, food waste is a significant contributor to climate change. One of the biggest culprits for driving greenhouse gas emissions is our food system, which is very, very broken.
Is there a way for us to lower food waste while making delicious products? One of the products that we make at Garden of Eva takes the rind of the watermelon, which is usually discarded, and turns it into a gorgeous cinnamon infused pickle.
I grew up making pickles and preserves with my mother all the time, but when we made them, we didn’t talk about upcycling or food waste. It was just “we pickle watermelon rind” because that’s what you do.
There was a desire for my own creative control, a desire to do something to support women as the business grows, and a desire to address some aspects of our broken food system that contribute to climate change.
Count the cost in terms of the amount of time that it’s going to take to get your business off the ground and get traction. It’s really expensive, so don’t underestimate how many costs are going to come out of your pocket.
Find support. The highs are really high, and the lows are really low. You just need support, whether that’s from founders who were successful and maybe exited, founders who failed and could provide that insight in those lessons, or peer founders, other women who are in the space along with you.
I’m very, very fortunate that I have a very strong network of mentors and advisors and other women who are at similar stages in their development with their business.
Honest Burgers wanted to use one of our products, Chow Chow, for one of its monthly specials, and I couldn’t make 1.3 tonnes myself. It took a full nine months to be able to find someone that was willing to work with me to scale.
There’s a particular challenge in the food industry when you’re at that in between phase where you’re too big to make the product yourself, but you’re too small to meet the minimum order quantities of some of the bigger manufacturers.
Everything comes down to the money, in some sense. You need investment to be able to fuel your growth, fuel marketing, fuel inventory, building all the parts of a business that you need to build.
When you’re starting, it’s really hard to have enough money generated by pure sales to be able to support what the business needs to grow.
People can support female founders by making a conscious effort to find brands that are started by women and buy their products. It sounds like a small thing, but it’s not.
People like being asked to help. They like being asked to make a contribution. Inviting them into that process by asking them to buy a jar helps to bring them along on the journey.
We all know that the statistics for investment going to female founded business are absolutely abysmal. We need more investors in female founded business.
