Lemme tell you about the year I sold a thousand burritos out of my van.
(It’s a good story.)
In 2017 I realized my town was a food desert.
Joseph City, AZ has about 1,200 people, one gas station and (at the time) one pizza place that was only open three days a week.
I had some leftover pulled pork from a family barbecue so I thought, “I bet I could make burritos out of this.”
So I took homemade burritos to every small business in town.
They were good burritos, stuffed with pulled BBQ pork and homemade Spanish rice, from-scratch refried beans and cheese.
I sold twelve burritos that day and—drunk on my success—packed up the rest of my fancy homemade birthday cake and sold it too.
Those food sales were the first of my small business that I named The Vain Cook.
In order to set it up properly, I:
Filed an LLC and EIN with the Secretary of State
Become a certified food handler in the state of Arizona
Hired two part-time employees
Built a robust Facebook following and monitored social media engagement
Delivered dozens of lunch orders 2x weekly
Became the designated “burrito lady” for APS Cholla, a 200-employee power plant
Registered as a caterer with Cholla for multiple training lunches
Sold hundreds of dollars of homemade Christmas candy, including shipments aross the U.S.
Then I did a Kickstarter.
After a year of recipe requests (especially for my Big Pig Burrito and my Vietnamese-style egg rolls) I decided to self-publish a cookbookwith a Kickstarter campaign for printing costs, just $1200.
That cookbook sold 150 copies, and some of the people who bought it I didn’t even know.
And, yes, I sold a thousand burritos that year.
(I counted.)