Business in Vancouver's “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, Catherine Anderson, owner of Hidden Garden Foods, talks about leaving her career in law to produce cookies that would get her kids to eat more vegetables.
“I was a practicing corporate lawyer for seven years or so. It was a good job, but at the same time it was pretty demanding, and after having kids I was just feeling like if there's going to be a time for a change, this is it.
“And at the same time, I was experiencing how hard it was to get [my kids] to eat food with vegetables, and the idea just came to me: if we could actually make something that tasted good that had a good amount of vegetables in it, that would be really appealing. And so I left my job and set out to try and come up with a cookie that tasted good.
“It definitely is the riskiest thing I've ever done. I was overwhelmed with excitement just because [I] didn't know what the next day was going to bring. I can't say I've made very many cookies in my entire life before, but it was fun because it was just like a crazy science experiment.
“For six months after I left my job, I was in my kitchen like a mad scientist just mixing up various combinations of cookies and vegetables, and a lot of them were really, really bad. But some had enough potential that it kept me going.
“Every month it's been a new challenge that we're dealing with, to be honest. It took a lot longer to develop the product than I first anticipated.
“We have a half-serving of vegetables in each serving of the cookies, which is a lot. We get them dehydrated and then ground up into a powder and we put them in.
“Getting it on the store shelves wasn't actually the hard part, because it's a new, different kind of product where we don't have a direct competitor doing exactly the same thing. The grocery stores [have] actually been really receptive to bringing it in.
“One challenge we have is getting people to actually taste it. .... The sampling has been critical to actually getting people to buy them.
“Two key things that I've learned [are] to just get comfortable with risk and uncertainty. You never know what's coming the next day when you're doing this. And then the second one would just be the value of perseverance. There [are] certainly a lot of people who think I was crazy to leave the certainty of law to go off and do something that's pretty random, to be honest.
“To me it was more just starting off on an exciting new chapter. It's been really cool to see it coming together after this period of time.”
