Episode 653: Beyond Ads – How to Monetize Your Blog with a Product Line with Meggen Wilson

EBT653 – Meggen Wilson

Intro 00:00

Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth, and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom. Whether that’s financial, personal, or professional. I’m Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

Supercut  00:37

You are going to want to download our bonus supercut that gives you all the information you need to grow your Instagram account. Go to eatblogtalk.com/Instagrowth to download today. 

Megan Porta  00:52

I think we can all feel that 2025, is the year to branch out with revenue streams. There are so many different ways outside of traditional advertising, to earn money through your blogging business. And Megan Wilson from pine and palm kitchen joins me in this interview to talk about exactly that she has created a food product line for her business that she sells through her website that’s been very successful. And you guys, she does not hold back. She gives us every last detail, from start concept to the absolute finish line when it comes to creating your own product. And she tells you exactly what you need to do every step of the way. This is a very juicy, detailed, value, packed conversation, and I think you’ll come away inspired to create your own product in 2025. This can be a really great supplement to the other revenue that you’re earning. It is episode number 653 and I hope you love it. 

Sponsor  02:00

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Megan Porta  03:04

Meggen Wilson is the founder of Pine and Palm Kitchen, a specialty food company based in Northwest Montana that creates premium, small-batch vanilla and vinegar products using organic, locally sourced ingredients like honey, apples, and spirits. A retired real estate investor and dedicated advocate for Montana’s natural habitats, Meggen combines her entrepreneurial spirit with a passion for exceptional culinary craftsmanship. Her products celebrate the land she loves, inspiring home cooks and bakers to create with care and intention.

Megan Porta  03:37

Meggen, welcome to the podcast. It’s so good to see you in person. Finally, how are you?

Meggen Wilson  03:43

I’m great. Megan, yes.

Megan Porta  03:46

Have you noticed that there are a lot of Megans in our space? By the way, there are a lot of Megan food bloggers. 

Meggen Wilson  03:53

I haven’t noticed that.

Megan Porta  03:55

And we all spell our names differently. 

Meggen Wilson  03:57

I’m an older Megan.

Megan Porta  04:00

Well, I’m older too, so we can we represent the old Megan club, but there’s Megan spelled every way you can imagine. It’s so awesome. I love it. So I’m glad to connect with another Megan. I know, yeah, you live in my favorite you live in my favorite place. So I’m going to come visit you this summer.

Meggen Wilson  04:21

Definitely come visit me. I live in my favorite place. I my husband and I pinch ourselves daily. We can’t believe our view of Glacier National Park and big mountain, and we walk every night and every morning, and we just can’t believe we’re so blessed to live here. It’s and we have no one around us. We just have acres of trees and woods and lakes and it’s, it is, but don’t tell anybody.

Megan Porta  04:48

I know it is such a well kept secret. It is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. It’s my place of peace and joy and comfort. I love going there, which is why we do it every year. 

Meggen Wilson  04:58

Good. I love that. 

Megan Porta  04:59

Yes. So we’re going to talk today about monetizing your blogging business through a product line, before we get into that. Do you have a fun fact to share with us? 

Meggen Wilson  05:11

I do have a fun fact. And I really thought about this because I wanted to give something that really resonated with themes that you talk about. And one thing you talk about is the importance of community. So I grew up in the same house where Pat Frank, the author, wrote the novel, Last Babylon. And if you’ve never heard of it, it was written in 1959 and it’s all about a nuclear war between Russia and the US. And I know you’re thinking, what does that have to do with the importance of community? But it’s all about this dystopian society and how the community comes together after this nuclear war, like all the big cities are gone in this little town where I grew up in, he wrote the book in the house where I grew up in, and it’s all about how important the community came together. And that really resonates with food bloggers, because we know we just can’t do it on our own. We really have to reach out to other people and have a mastermind group or listen to podcasts like yours. So that’s my fun fact. I grew up in a house where a really cool book was written. 

Megan Porta  06:17

Oh my gosh. It’s built into your DNA to have core belief in you, almost, right? 

Meggen Wilson  06:22

Yeah, almost 15 years in that house, it’s a really cool house in tangerine Florida, very rural and out in the middle of the boondocks, but a lot of history in that house.

Megan Porta  06:32

Oh, that’s right. So you have a history in Florida, which is why your blog name is the way it is. So that leads great to tell us a little bit about your blog. 

Meggen Wilson  06:41

It’s pine and palm kitchen. Pine because I live in the pines in Montana, and palm because I’m a fifth generation Floridian. My mother has a cooking school. She’s in her late 80s. She’s had a cooking school for over 40 years. And so I really grew up around that culture and southern cooks. So my blog is all about taking my southern roots, but incorporating where I live now, in the northwest and Pacific Northwest foods as well. So you’ll see a lot of old southern foods, kind of with a Pacific Northwest, northwest, rocky twist to it.

Megan Porta  07:15

That’s so cool. I love your recipes. They look so delicious. 

Meggen Wilson  07:20

Thank you. Thank you. I’ve been cooking a long time for a lot of kids, and so it’s fun to share it with people. 

Megan Porta  07:27

Absolutely. And how old is your blog? 

Meggen Wilson  07:30

I started my blog in 2017 and hired all the wrong people at the get go, like so many of us do, it was kind of, you know, a friend’s kid who kind of could make websites, and we had a Wix website, and it was just a train wreck. And I honestly thought back in 2017 if I put down my southern banana pudding recipe, millions of people would flock to it. And that was really before SEO or anything. And now I’ve learned a lot. I have a really good team in place, and I don’t know how I would do it without my web designer and graphic designer and virtual assistants and my mastermind group. I really believe how it’s so important to have another group of bloggers around you. And so I have a group of women around me that are all kind of my age, you know, late 50s, early 60s, and we’ve raised our kids and our kids are gone, and we really say, Okay, how does this work? And between the seven or eight of us, we figure it out.

Megan Porta  08:30

Right, no, it is. So I don’t know how people do it without community. It seems impossible. Now that I’m immersed in so many different groups of people. I don’t know how people function without it. It’s so imperative, I think, well, you make it look easy. Oh, well, good. Thank you. Okay, so that’s an awesome background about your blog. And so you’ve been doing this since 2017 So that’s seven, eight years now? Yeah, you’ve been doing it for a while. And at what point did you get into an ad network? 

Meggen Wilson  09:07

That was a few years ago, but when I launched my product line online, we paused the ad network because I didn’t want the ads to deter people from being on the website and really looking at the products. And I made more money online selling my own product line than I did from ad revenue. So, and we can get into that in a minute. Yeah, I actually am. And I talked to you a minute ago about that. We’re rebranding the product line this year to kind of separate it from the website, because we’re so immersed in Montana, and I source my products from Montana, like my vanilla paste. We use a local distillery, and we get our vodka from him, wholesale, our honey that we use. We get here in the Flathead Valley, my apples for my apple cider vinegar, I pick myself at this little farm, little orchard down on Findlay point on Flathead Lake. So we really wanted to take, you know, anything to do with the website, and separate that, so we’re rebranding the product line this year. So that’s a whole nother thing. Oh my gosh. 

Meggen Wilson  10:15

I bet, I bet that is a lot. So your, your website does have ads back. So the ads came back after a while?

Meggen Wilson  10:24

We’re gonna, once we separate the two, the ads will come back.

Megan Porta  10:28

Okay, gotcha. Okay. So what made you decide to start a product line? Was it the products itself, or was it just to add extra revenue?

Speaker 1  10:39

It was a complete accident. We never planned to do this. So my husband and I, one year, we were driving our youngest daughter from Montana to Washington. She went to University of Washington, and we were dropping her off at school. And anybody who’s ever driven on I 90 outside of Seattle knows Thorpe Produce. It’s this massive produce stand, and I’m really into canning and food preservation. We’ve got a barn, and it’s got a cold pantry in it, and it’s filled with tomato sauce and jams and all of my potatoes and garlic and all this stuff that I put in there all winter long. And so we picked up from Thorpe Produce 40 pounds of apples and peaches as one would, yeah. So I make chunky apple sauce, and I make this bourbon peach jam, and both those recipes are on my website, but I had all this scrap left over afterwards, and I was going through all my canning books trying to figure out what to do with all this apple scrap and cores and peels and stuff, and I discovered I could make an apple cider vinegar, and so I did it, and I learned all about fermentation. And solely by accident, I made this absolutely incredible apple cider vinegar, and it had a really soft pH. It wasn’t like a commercial apple cider vinegar that you know when you take a shot of it, it just burns your throat. It was really soft, very apple forward, almost floral. And my husband’s like, you know, quit making it and giving it away. Why don’t you sell this stuff? And so we decided to do that. And at the same time, I’d been making my own vanilla extract. And anybody you know, I know you have a lot of really sharp foodies listening to this, and we’ve all tried to make extract at some point, but it’s really hard. Extract requires a massive amount of beans, the right kind of alcohol. And it’s not just about sticking them in a bottle and putting them in your cupboard. You really you might want to sous vide it to really extract the flavor out of the pod. There’s so many things that are involved in it and then decanting it correctly, and so I just started leaning into that. So we make, you know, vanilla paste. We make vanilla extract, vanilla sugar, vanilla maple syrup, apple cider vinegar, and then we have two lines of a vinegar based cleaning product that’s all organic, and all of the herbs and oils and flowers that go into the cleaning product we grow here on our property in Montana, so we kind of just fell into it by accident, not meaning at all to really start a product line. It just sort of organically happened, just because I love food preservation.

Megan Porta  13:16

Yeah, no, I love how that fell into your lap. That means that it was right. I think when those things happen, it was a passion, and it aligned with the passion. So now, do you where do you get your supplies? Now, do you go to the same place? Is there? Or do you go all around the Flathead area to get everything?

Meggen Wilson  13:36

That’s a really good question. Source as much as I can in the Flathead Valley. So all of my vodka that we use in our vanilla products come from Glacier distilling company over in West Glacier, right outside of Glacier National Park. And they sell me, oh my gosh, Megan, every time I pick it up. I think if I get in an accident, my car will blow up. They sell me 180 proof vodka. And then we cut it. We cut it and cut it and cut it and cut it. But it comes in this huge plastic container. It’s massive, and it takes like, two men to, like, lift it and put it into the back of our truck. Oh my goodness. So we store it, you know, in our cold pantry warehouse and and then we have, oh my gosh, 1000s of dollars of vanilla beans in anything from one to five gallon containers being extracted at any given moment. Plus, we always have vinegar in the works. It’s, yeah, it’s kind of crazy. But we we source as much as we can here in the valley. Obviously, vanilla beans do not grow in Montana. They’re a tropical product. But I belong to a vanilla bean Co Op, which, funny enough, is out of Utah, so it’s still in the Rockies. And I’m really picky about where we source our beans. We source them from Madagascar, Papua, New Guinea, Uganda, Tahiti. And beans are very much like wine. They have different. Flavor profile. Sometimes they’re smoky, sometimes they’re floral. So depending on what I want to do with them, how I want the extract to unfold, that’s, you know, the bean I’ll order. I’m really picky.

Megan Porta  15:11

Yeah, you should be right. If you’re putting the time and love into it like you are, you should be picky. What is your most popular product?

Speaker 1  15:20

For sure, the vanilla paste, it is so good you could just eat it with a spoon right out of the container. And then this year, we’ve really listened to our clients, you know, it’s all small batch. It’s all, you know, hand crafted, but we really heard our clients, and they said we just don’t want sugar in it anymore. So now I’m pivoting, and I’m going to do a honey based vanilla paste too. So I’m working with a honey provider here in flathead county to put in a really mild honey, because you don’t want to overpower that vanilla with a really strong, like a Blackberry honey that would overpower the vanilla. We still want something with a really soft profile. And so we’re we’re kind of shifting, so we’re going to have a sugar based vanilla paste for just regular bakers, and then a honey one for people who want that just extra elevated product. So I listened to my clients, and they really wanted that. And then the second most popular, easily, is our vanilla maple syrup. It is so good. I put it in everything from an old fashioned to waffles. I mean, put it in coffee in the morning. It’s incredible. It’s so good. And there’s whole beans in every bottle we pack, we hot. Pack it with a vanilla bean in every bottle, so it continues to extrude those flavors from the vanilla. It’s so good. And then when you’re done, rinse off the vanilla bean and stick it in your sugar bowl.

Megan Porta  16:44

Delicious. 

Meggen Wilson  16:46

Yeah, it’s like gift with purchase. 

Megan Porta  16:48

Oh my goodness. So who are most of your clients? How do they find you? 

Meggen Wilson  16:51

Kind of from everywhere. Yesterday, we shipped to Washington State. We shipped to Florida, Texas, New York. People find us, because I work out of the farmers market here in Whitefish in the summers. I also do pop up markets. I’ve done a pop up store in a wine shop in Orlando, Florida. And so people find me, and then they, you know, sign up for the newsletter, and they can go on my website and order online. So we usually, once somebody buys one product, they’ll reorder. We have, probably have, 80% of our clients reorder. We I have a woman drives from Missoula and buys cases of the apple cider vinegar and gives it out his presents, and I meet her at the parking lot at Lowe’s. Oh my god, oh yeah, I know it’s like, what shady business is that woman running out of her car just selling vinegar and vanilla.

Megan Porta  17:47

That’s so great though, that you have such a loyal customer base that they want to drive and meet you and get your product. That’s, yeah, your product. 

Meggen Wilson  17:56

I love my I love my clients, and I really listen to what they want. And, you know, it’s kind of like your community on your blog, you were really told, you know, to lean into your community. And I do that as well with this product line. I really listen to what people ask for I had some chefs in town who said, Hey, I really want to use your vanilla paste, but can you make it for me in a quart and I’m like, Yeah, you bet I can make a quart of vanilla paste for you. 1,000% I can.

Megan Porta  18:24

I am planning to get every product of yours because, no, I’m serious, because I I use apple cider vinegar all the time. Vanilla bean paste. Sounds like it’s amazing. It’s your I can not try that. And then I’m always using vanilla extract, yeah, and the vanilla maple, yeah, okay, I’m gonna be a client Meggen. I’m so excited. Thanks. Well, let’s talk about where your revenue comes from. So the if you had ads, or when you had ads, I guess you said that the products are bringing in more revenue than the revenue you got were getting from ads? 

Speaker 1  19:03

Yeah. I kind of wanted to back up a little bit and talk about that. So, you know, when we monetize our website, we have our ad revenue. We have digital products like your E cookbooks, you know, maybe a tutorial on pastry making or meal planning or how to have the Perfect Pantry. And then we’ve got your Amazon or brand affiliates, so you have all those streams of income, and those are fantastic, but you don’t have a lot of control over them. And when you launch your own product line or your own line of merchandise, you can completely control what you’re putting out there, what the price is going to be, how much you’re going to manufacture, who you’re going to market to, and you can be much more targeted, and it puts you in control, and maybe that’s who I am after 50 plus years. But I like that. I can really control what my website looks like and not have pop up ads and things and just make a really beautiful landing page for people looking for these products.

Megan Porta  20:06

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that’s a really good perspective to have. And I think as you do get to the point where you’re blogging longer, so you’re a more experienced blogger, those things are more important to you, versus when you’re starting, you’re just like, get my website up, get all the ads on. I want the money which. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. That’s just the stage that you’re in. So you’ve evolved into really focusing on your products and the quality of them. And would you say that your blog, what would be the main area of your business, if you were to say, would you Are you a product person blogging. Or are you a blogger with a product line? 

Meggen Wilson  20:43

I am a small food manufacturer at this point with a really beautiful blog that supports it and my community, my mastermind, my web designer, we all are kind of in agreement that all the posts that I’m writing moving forward really should be amplifying those products. So as much as I want to, you know, maybe do a pot roast, you know, if it doesn’t have one of my products in it, I don’t know that I’m serving my community well, but that’s really part of a journey. I really, you know, I’ve raised all my kids, and I’ve had so many dinner parties and entertained so much. I really look at the blog holistically. You know, what would I want if I was looking for something so, you know, I have, it’s a pretty well rounded blog in those terms. But moving forward, you see a lot more things that really elevate the product line. But it has been a journey to get to making apple cider vinegar and vanilla out of your home, from a cottage license to a commercial license, is a journey, and so that’s what I really want to share with your listeners today. Like, how you do that? Because it’s not just, oh, I want to make vanilla. How do I do that? Or whatever it’s there is a real process to it. 

Megan Porta  22:00

Okay, let’s talk about that. So where do you start with it? First, I guess concept you came upon yours accidentally, but that doesn’t happen to others. How do they go about figuring out what to create? 

Meggen Wilson  22:12

And that’s exactly the first word I was gonna use, is, what? And I’m gonna turn it on you a little bit, because I know you have a chili recipe on your website you were really proud of and I was looking at it the other day, and it’s a great chili recipe. I love all the fresh vegetables you put in it, and you have a really beautiful blend of spices. So I thought, gosh, if I was Megan Porta, maybe I would take that incredible chili recipe I have and put together a spice blend for people and upsell that on my website. So not only are people getting this amazing chili recipe, they’ve got a little spice blend that you’ve already got, and they can use it for fajitas or tacos or put it in chili or put it in a dip, and you give them recipes for that. So look at the what look at your website, and think what recipes really shine. What really resonates with my readership, what is something I’m passionate about, and maybe take it from there, then you want to look at the market share of that product. So I did a little digging. So if I was doing Megan’s, you know, amazing spice blend, I go to Fortune Business Insights before I ever add a product, and I’ll send that link in our show notes for your viewers. So fortune business insights, and I’ll look at a market study of where spice blends are in the US market. And I did so right now, spice blends are a $7.4 billion business in the US, and then I looked at what’s been happening in that market. So like last year, tab at the Brown, who we all know, she partnered with McCormick, and she’s doing a line of salt free spice blends. Kraft. Heinz is launching a US baseline of spice blends. So that says to me, Hey, this is a pretty hot area, and I have some chefs that I have shared spice blends with me, and I think that’s something you could offer up. So that’s where you go. You’re like, Okay, I’ve got a concept, I’ve got an idea, I’m gonna test it. And then step two.

Megan Porta  24:16

Okay. 

Megan Porta  24:18

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Meggen Wilson  24:58

So step two. You’ve got to do your product testing. And one thing I I really love is Shark Tank. And I know that’s going to kind of sound funny, but go and look at Shark Tank and see the successes and the failures, because you’ll learn a lot. You’ll learn about does something need to be refrigerated? Is something shelf stable? And it’s a really good resource. You can just, sort of, you know, fast forward through old ones, and kind of see what things really worked in that market. And you can also learn a lot of industry lingo too. So that helps a lot. Then you need to have access to capital. So this is where a profitable website can really help your viewers. And I would recommend you have five to $10,000 in capital, not a credit card, but capital cash on hand, because in the beginning, you are going to run in the red. You’re not going to be in the black for a year or two, and you don’t want to pay interest on a credit card or be worrying about a line of credit on your house or something to launch a product line. So if you have a product you’re really excited about, maybe really take six months to plan this out and set aside five to $10,000 in capital, because you will burn through that pretty quickly trying to set everything up. So that’s the what, and capital is the next one. And so then you got to think about where you want to go on a license. Do you want a cottage license or commercial license?

Megan Porta  26:26

I don’t know. How do you decide that?

Meggen Wilson  26:28

I always recommend to folks to go cottage at first, because you really need to have a proof of concept on your products. So we’ve got Megan spice blend, but how are we going to know if it’s going to work? So we need to test the market and see if people want to buy it. So if you get a cottage license, and you get those through your local health department, your county health department, they usually cost anywhere from 25 to 100 bucks, and a cottage license allows you to manufacture at home, it says this is a product that has approved that you can manufacture label, put it in a little container, and the labeling on it is very different than a commercial label. So it allows someone who’s a food entrepreneur to take baby steps, you know, you have to walk before you run. And so a cottage license is a really low investment to see if your product works. So say you’ve got your labeling done, you’ve got to get your packaging. I always tell everybody, just order one or two packages at first to make sure the label works, and then you have to show that to the health department, and they approve the label. They have very specific language on a cottage license. And you can design a label on Canva, or you can do like we did. I mean, we hired a graphic designer to do our labels, and we trademarked them right away. It was just such a beautiful label. We wanted to invest in that and have a really gorgeous, sexy product. And I just couldn’t do that on my own. I didn’t have the skill set to do it on Canva, so I hired somebody to do it. Yeah. So if I were Megan Porta, and I have my amazing spice blend, and I’m trying to figure out where to test it, you can go to farmers markets. You can go to little pop up markets. There are festivals all the time, especially in the summer. Another idea is to maybe reach out to a little shop, like maybe a local butcher in your town, and you say to him, hey, it’s Father’s Day weekend. It’s Super Bowl weekend. Let’s make a big batch of my chili. Let’s give it to your clients, and have my spice blend right there. And I’ll advertise on my social media. You advertise on yours, and let’s see if this product goes anywhere. And so maybe you can do that. That’s a great way to test a product without investing that whole five or $10,000 you’re maybe in 500 bucks at that point. So that’s a great way. And then you get some feedback from some clients. They’ll say, Yeah, need it was too salty. It was too spicy. You can adjust and really make that proof of concept, you know, nail it. Absolutely nail it. And that’s something I constantly, you know, I had somebody the other day email me and say, Hey, I have a really good idea. What if we did vanilla bitters? And I was like, oh, vanilla bitters. That sounds interesting. So now I’ve got to, like, get the team together and say, okay, under my license, can we do bitters? You know? So, so, always looking for things like that. So if you do cottage license at first, it’s a great way to just, sort of, you know, put your toe in the water without drowning.

Megan Porta  29:30

Is it easy to go from cottage to commercial? 

Meggen Wilson  29:35

I think it helps a lot. You just know more of what the county wants. You know what the government’s going to require from a licensing point, and it just gets you down the road a little bit that being said, the goal for your listeners is to get their product on their website and sell it. To do that, you have to have a commercial license. And there are two ways you can do it. You can go where you get the commercial license yourself, or you can use a co-packer. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with a co-packer, what that is, but I can talk through that a little bit? 

Megan Porta  30:07

No, go ahead and talk through that. 

Meggen Wilson  30:09

So a co packer is just basically a factory where they manufacture your recipe at a large scale. And they are all over the country. There are two places where you can go looking for co-packers. One is specialty food copackers.com and that’s where I found one of my co-packers. And then another one is partnerslate.com and you just enter your zip code, and they’ll tell you, Hey, Megan, there’s a spice co packer, you know, outside of Texas, and you call them, you probably will call a dozen of them, and maybe two of them will call you back. So something to think about. So a co-packer will take your logo, your packaging and your recipe, and they will make it at a large scale, and that’s when you really need that capital to scale that company. So then they get the licensing for you, all you do is store it and then fulfill the orders. So that makes it a lot easier. Now, I am a food manufacturer myself. I had one product we tried to do with a co packer, and I can talk about that later if we’ve got time, but I am too much of a control freak, so I went and got a commercial license myself. I have a food safety handling license myself. I went and had to take a test and study for it. It’s called serve safe and so I’ve got, you know, a food management certificate. I’ve had a commercial kitchen inspected. I have an A plus rating with the health department, and I’m registered with the state. Those fees are not very high. Maybe all of that cost me $300 to do all of that. But that way, I manufacture everything myself in a commercial kitchen that I lease.

Megan Porta  31:52

And is one more I assume it’s more affordable to go the route that you went.

Speaker 1  31:57

It is a co-packer will generally have a minimum order. So a co Packer we worked with, we have this apple cider vinaigrette, and it is absolutely incredible. And it was a way I could kind of get my apple cider vinegar in front of people, and they could try it out. You know, I mean, who wants to take a shot apple cider vinegar? And nobody. But I put it in a vinaigrette, and kids would dip it, carrots in it, and stuff, and they thought it was amazing. So I wanted to manufacture that. Everybody said, I don’t want the recipe. I just want to bottle this stuff. So we went to a copacker in Washington state, and we invested quite a bit of capital, and they could not get the recipe right. They used seed oils. They used canola oil. They were using granulated garlic instead of fresh garlic, and they were using a commercial apple cider vinegar, and not mine. So we decided to part ways, and so my husband and I are just putting that on the back burner. So sometimes a copacker works and sometimes they don’t, and it might take, you know, finding a couple of them and figuring out which one you want. So if you’re trying to make your spice blend, you might want to actually schedule a time where they’re going to manufacture your spice blend, and you’re there in the factory on the floor supervising it for the you know, one day that they’re making it for you. A lot of, I mean, big commercial companies do this, and sometimes small people do it, so it’s just kind of all over the place. But I like manufacturing myself. I think there’s a little more of an art to it, and a little more nuance. And I can every batch we can test and taste and make sure it’s absolutely perfect, but it’s and it’s not a control thing. It’s just it’s a lot less money to do it that way, a lot less. 

Megan Porta  33:37

Yeah, absolutely. And you said you rent a commercial kitchen for that?

Speaker 1  33:41

Yes, so when you start to get your cottage license, you can do things at home. Most counties allow you to, but if you’re going the commercial route, you know, for all of your folks listening and they want to manufacture this spice blend, you can rent out kitchens all over and they’re called ghost kitchens, and they lease out to catering companies, you know, people who are small batch food manufacturers, like in town, there’s a guy at a ghost kitchen in Columbia Falls here, there’s a salsa company, a hot sauce company, a cookie company, and they all share this commercial space. And then you schedule the time you want to go in, and it’s maybe $150 every time you’re in there for three or four hours. It is incredibly affordable to do this. Other places that are really good to reach out to are churches. A lot of big churches have those huge commercial kitchens, and they sit empty. So you know, maybe while your kids are at school on a Tuesday, you go in and maybe you’re making a strawberry jam. You can go in there manufacture all your strawberry jam, the county will come in and inspect it one time a year. That’s it. Then you’re done. And so that’s a great way where you can get it into a commercial kitchen without having to go out and lease a brick and mortar space and pay, you know, for a hood and all the things that maybe you don’t need. I manufacture out of a guest ranch here in the valley, and they’re closed all winter. And so we go in in the winter, and we batch, batch, batch, batch, and work all winter and spring, and then when they open back up, I’m done, and I’ve got everything in storage, and I’m ready to sell. So we, you know, the only thing that’s bad about that is like we ran out of inventory December 8 this year, we were completely sold out. So that was, like a good problem and a bad problem. I just didn’t have enough time to get back into the commercial kitchen and manufacture more and vanilla you can’t rush and vinegar. You can’t rush everything else. I can pretty much we can crank out. But so a ghost kitchen is a really good way. And then there, there are, if you just Google, you know, say, if you’re in Minnesota, whatever county you’re in, you can just Google ghost kitchen or commercial kitchens that you can lease. And there’s usually a list of them. Community colleges are a great place to look for a ghost kitchen, cooking schools. Those are really good places where you can crank out product without having to, you know, open up a brick and mortar store.

Meggen Wilson  34:05

Okay, so once you have tested and you feel good about you’re either doing all of that, or a co packer is doing it for you, yeah, you’re set on that, then where do you go from there.

Speaker 1  36:18

from there, then you want to get your if you’re going to sell like at the farmers market, like I did, you’re going to get a little square a little credit card processing thing, and you can buy them at www for 20-30, bucks. So you want to get a Square account, you’ll link it to your bank account and make sure you have Food Safety Insurance. There’s a company called FLIP and that stands for food liability insurance protection, and it costs me a few $100 a year for a lot of coverage. They cover caterers and private chefs and small food manufacturers. Once you hit a certain number, you’ve got to go out and get a little bit more liability insurance. But that company FLIP is really good. You get everything online, just enter what you make, and it’s super easy to insure with them. So I highly recommend them. Almost every small food manufacturer I know uses flip so they’re a great resource. So you’ve got your Square account set up, you’ve got your insurance, you’ve got your commercial kitchen, you’ve got your license, and then you’re ready to sell. So if you’ve got a farmer’s market in your area, try that out for a year. You know, sell at the farmers market and little pop up markets before you put it on your website. I just think it’s a really good way to connect with people in your community. If you live in a touristy area like me, even better, because you have a huge, you know, swath of people that come in from all over, so you can really build your brand that way. But I just love doing a farmer’s market for, you know, three to six months. It really helps you tweak your product and make sure, in real time, your customers are getting a really, really good product. If you’re going to go to all this trouble, you want to manufacture something manufacture something really special, then if you want to put it online, work with a web designer to set up a Shopify site. Shopify is absolutely the easiest way I have WordPress, and Shopify works pretty well with WordPress. We had a couple of little instances where Shopify and WordPress would fight each other, like my search engine on my website completely shut down. And it really took it took my web server, it took them a while to figure out what was going on, and it was something with Shopify. So you set up your Shopify site, and you figure out your packaging, and you figure out your shipping. I shipped through Pirate Ship. I don’t stand in line at the post office or UPS. Pirate ship for my company is a discounted shipping I ship only pretty much UPS, and you print the labels out at home, and then you drop off dozens and dozens and dozens orders every day at UPS, and they get to know you really well, but that’s kind of, you know, my husband’s, you know, 2.0 it’s because it’s going to be his next act is just going to UPS for me, 2.0 Yeah. And then you got to figure out, you know, how are people going to find me if I’m online? And so you’re going to have to probably invest some time in social media, really promoting those products, promoting recipes with them. I have, like, I have, I can’t remember what it was. It was I have a homemade vanilla coffee creamer. And I did a really cute video of how I make it with my vanilla paste. And it’s so good. So I did that, did a couple reels of that, and then I did, I did something with oatmeal, but I put the vanilla maple syrup in it. And I had some beautiful photography of the maple syrup drizzle. And so, you know, you got to invest some time and some photography to have some really great images for your website. And, you know, putting ads on Google, Meta Pinterest and getting reviews, those are the keys. Once you have a product out there, ask your friends, you know, you know, hey, give me a five star review on this product. That’s huge. And then, of course, register with Google, so Google knows you’re out there selling Megan’s amazing spice blend for chili and fajitas and tacos. 

Megan Porta  40:15

I love your idea, and I love that you have researched this and formulated a business plan for Megan.

Meggen Wilson  40:22

It’s all yours. No charge for that.

Megan Porta  40:26

No. I mean, you really do take us through a fairly straightforward process. It’s not like there’s anything weird. It just seems like you need to be patient and go through the steps and give the testing and getting feedback some time, right?

Meggen Wilson  40:42

Absolutely. I think listening to the customer is so important. I’ve tweaked that over and over again. It’s like, you know, shifting our vanilla paste to a honey because people just didn’t want even though we were using raw organic sugar, they see sugar on any and it kind of freaks them out a little bit. So it is, it’s steps, and it’s really being patient. I think it’s a really good idea. I loved your podcast you did the other day about goal setting, because I have a five year plan from actually started last year, but another, you know, I look at it and really set five year plans where the company wants to go, where this food brand is going to go. And so part of it last year was saying, you know, we need to rebrand. And so we’re in the process of doing that, but it’s taken me years to get there. So, you know, you really do need to walk before you run, and plan it out and be willing to pivot. When I first started making my apple cider vinegar, we had three varietals, we had a Fuji, we had a Pacific rose and a honey crisp, and they all sold fine, but that was so much work sourcing organic Pacific roast apples or Pacific rose apples that were grown here in the Flathead it was just getting impossible. Everybody was spraying with copper and everything. So we just said we’re just going to do honey crisp. And then we also had some failures. We tried to do a Ruby Mac apple cider vinegar, and we couldn’t get it to turn it just it just tasted like dirty water. We could not get any acid coming out of it, and that’s okay. So I’m letting your listeners know. You know, we invested a lot of money in these beautiful Ruby Mac apples, and they were a bust. So they went, I mean, oh my gosh. I don’t even want to think about how many gallons we we had to dump, but it was a lot. 

Megan Porta  42:34

But that’s part of the process, right? The experimentation. You’re not always going to hit a home run 1,000%

Meggen Wilson  42:39

it’s kind of like this co-packer I worked with in Washington. They came so highly recommended, and they actually had the name gourmet in their company name. And they were like, yeah, if we use olive oil, your cost per bottle is going to be 8.99, and you’d have to retail it for 20 and no one’s going to buy a bottle of vinaigrette for $20 yeah. And they’re right. So that was kind of we’ve got to figure out what to do with that vinaigrette. So it’s right, it’s on the back burner for now. It’s not a priority. So we’re working with the products that sell.

Megan Porta  43:08

Yeah, absolutely what is working and run with that. I can see this being a new pursuit for a lot of food bloggers, just with all this stuff that’s going on with Google and the HCU updates constantly coming at us. I I know that a lot of food bloggers are so creative, right? They have so many ideas. So I think every food blogger could probably come up with a handful of ideas on the spot about what to create for a product. So I can see this being a really viable pursuit for people in 2025 and I don’t know if I mean, I’ve had the ideas in the past. I’ve never had Megan spice blend idea before. That’s that sounds like a home run, but I think this is such great information. And just thank you for sharing all of what you’ve learned in your journey. You’ve been through the whole process from start to finish, and you’re still operating this business.

Meggen Wilson  44:07

Yeah, yeah. I think if your listeners are really interested in it, go to Fortune Business Insights, search for the product they’re looking for, and do a little digging. And I don’t necessarily, you know, don’t ask family and friends. Sometimes they always say, oh, there’s a million hot sauces out there. Like every dad was making hot sauce out of their garage. So probably not a hot sauce, but, you know, they might have some absolutely incredible jam, or they might have a catch up, they might have a spice blend, and then they might have a product line. Maybe you’re going to design an amazing apron, and it’s got a pocket for your phone and pockets for pencils and things. So it could be, you know, maybe a product that’s not necessarily food. And then you control it, you control distribution, you control what the price is set at. You control shipping. You control everything you’re not dependent on, you know, whether or not your store. On Amazon is selling your Dutch ovens that you put out there. So I like that idea of, you know, being in control and putting something out there that people really love. I’m very proud of the product line. We’ve worked really hard at it, so it’s been probably one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done as a business person, amazing.

Megan Porta  45:17

And it all started with that accidental find.

Meggen Wilson  45:21

Thorpe, produce, I bought way too much, way too many apples.

Megan Porta  45:25

What a great story. It’s all come together for you. Meggen, is there anything else you feel people need to know about the process or getting started, or anything else before we start saying goodbye?

Meggen Wilson  45:37

I think just you know, really contact your county health department, the people who work for your county extension offices and the county health department, I cannot say enough nice things about them. The woman I work with at the state level, her name is Sadie, and she really helped me get my labels right. You know, they do an incredible job. And so these people, these local health departments, sit behind their desks all day, and they want you to be successful. So definitely reach out to them if you’ve got an idea, and say, you know, hey, Has this come across your desk? Actually, in the state of Montana, they did not know how to categorize me at first, because there’s alcohol and vanilla. And at first the state was saying, well, we need her to pull a liquor license, which is hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And then finally, I called my senator, and we made some phone calls, and they said, no, no one’s gonna get drunk off of vanilla. So they kind of created a brand new category for me. I was the only manufacturer with a commercial license in the state of Montana, so, and that’s because the County Health Department and the State Health Department really wanted us to be successful. So definitely make those phone calls. Yeah, you’re paying you’re paying taxes for it, so absolutely they’re happy to help you.

Megan Porta  46:51

Yep, make the most of it. Yeah. Well, thank you, Meggen, this is amazing. And yeah, just the value you share. Food bloggers are so good at being generous with their information, and you have done that today. So we appreciate you, and best of luck to you in your continued journey with product sales. And I hope to see you this summer in person.

Meggen Wilson  47:14

I know, I know we’ll have to go for a hike in Glacier. I’ll show you where all the grizzly bears are.

Megan Porta  47:18

Gosh, I would love it. I love hiking around that area. It’s my favorite. Grizzly bears we I can do without. But do you have a favorite quote or words of inspiration to end with today? Well,

Meggen Wilson  47:30

I really have to end with Teddy Roosevelt, speaking of national parks, and Teddy Roosevelt has this quote about do what you can with what you have where you are. And that has been such a part of my journey. And every food bloggers journey, you know you can only do what you’ve got with what you have and where you are in this journey. And of course, I love Teddy Roosevelt because he gave us our national parks. So yes, that has taken that one full circle for you. 

Meggen Wilson  47:59

I love it. Great way to end. We will put together a show notes page for you. Meggen, so if you go to eatblogtalk.com/pineandpalmkitchen, you can find those. Tell everyone where they can find you and how to get to your store and all of that. To buy my products. Go to Pineandpalm kitchen.com, and you’ll see store, and you can go there and order everything. We usually ship same day. We ship only in the US. We aren’t shipping to Canada or overseas right now. You used to be able to find me at the Whitefish farmers market, but I don’t think I’m going to be there this summer. You can also find me on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.

Megan Porta  48:39

Great. I hope everyone goes and orders the vanilla bean paste and or the vanilla maple syrup or whatever strikes your fancy. This all looks so good. I’m gonna place an order after our call. Can’t wait to get it well. Thank you again, Meggen, so much for all of this, and thank you for listening food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro  49:02

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. Please share this episode with a friend who would benefit from tuning in. I will see you next time you.