about how it's like to start a business and how you can really get going and vocation sometimes is everything as well as having a good product and i think one of the great things about this segment tonight is that we'll be talking about i said before she's owner and head baker of the ginger peach and she graduated rutgers university with a b a in economics and an m b a in marketing and for five years she was in the restaurant management and three years in corporate operations before taking the plunge and starting her own business she's a self taught baker and she studied and they from home and she perfected all the recipes until she felt they were ready and she started her business in two thousand and twelve in ewing before moving the bakery to lawrenceville about three years ago so i spent a majority of my college time waitressing waiting tables so food i was involved in food really early on and i enjoyed it i was on the customer service end of it versus like the production end but i always enjoyed what food did like when people come in and see how happy it made them to sit down and have a meal or families with celebrate so at the time i was working for bed bath and beyond corporate headquarters is a project manager i opened new stores all over the country and while it was good work and it was a good company to work for it my heart just wasn't it wasn't there i baked for fun and i realized it made me really happy so one day i just said i'm going to i'm going to try i'm going to try this and i quit my job with bed bath and beyond and i took a training job with thin air bread and kiss kind of kept baking but i got to see the behind the scenes of how a very large company does it so it also let me kind of figure out and my grandfather's italian so food was just the topic of conversation all the time all day every day and my grandmother used to make you know pineapple upside down cake in a cast iron skillet and she was yeah she'd make biscuits rechecks throw there's no measuring anything just through flour in the middle of the table and chop the butter and it was just always so interesting to me how it always came out the same right and that was always delicious and so it just brought me it i'm originally from the hoboken area and anyone who's familiar with hoboken you know you can walk two blocks in any direction and hit a decent bakery if not great bakeries so i was so sick spoilt that my guy had this constant access to you've got a time people in chambersburg and i'm like where where elf and i realized that there was there was nothing there was nothing like like what i wanted to eat and then i thought well if people if i want to eat this maybe other people want to eat this so that's what made me can say well maybe there's a market for what i want to do right so and that's yeah that's that's what that's where the idea for the ginger peach came from and the gendered peach is actually named after my grandmother she's from the south she's from georgia commerce georgia so she'd always refer to herself as a peach peach and she had this saying of if you didn't have something like that say we were going to make i don't know irish soda bread and you didn't have the currents and i said well grandma what currents can make this she's like oh darn we'll just use raisins we're going to ginger it up so that was her way of saying we'll take what you have and make it into something great so the ginger peach the whole concept of it is taking every day regular food flour sugar i had the idea had the concept of ok you know we're going to we're you know it originally started off or we focused primarily on cakes the business was originally called when it was a new ng let them eat cake so we did cupcakes cake it was teeny tiny i had negative funds then there was there was like no money i think i had ten thousand dollars total to make it happen and i was very fortunate that i have no problem asking people for things so i happened to be in arctic ice cream in ewing picking up ice and i saw they had so it was maybe five hundred square feet it was already twice the size of the studio and they said yeah i was shocked so i just started going to auctions in buying used equipment so i couldn't get a big loan because you're a new business they really don't want banks besides you could have a solid business plan you know you could have all your ducks in a row you could have an undergraduate degree in economics corporate retail restaurant management experience and they're still like  in business three years we'll know that we don't want to get out so i kind of had to fund it myself thank you american express discover card so max out my credit cards and i was able to get you know the first store opened so it was rough you know you're on a shoestring budget  d you just got to you have to kind of work with once again what you have and then just hope that as we grow you know then i can get the real of it i want to get you know that piece of equipment that i want well i know in the beginning the big is always tough the you know there's a lot of struggles so low in the struggle with some of the stories that you can some of the stories you can share with us or any of the struggles that you had to get going you know like this the struggles are it's one of those situations you're in a catch twenty two in the beginning where you want all this business right i want people to know exist i want to be like you know their first choice for for everything right and then you look around and you're in a tiny space so you know our struggles in the beginning were one not having the capital to really invest in equipment that would make us efficient it's you know every bakery has a piece of equipment called a sheet or he basically use it to roll dough out so that you know when you do hundreds of pounds of dough a day you're not with a rolling pin trying to make it happen we couldn't get it in the building because it was too small so that's out so we were legitimately doing everything by hand from the beginning which was great because that helps you learn how to control the product but also everything takes five times as long so you're struggling with that and then if you're lucky enough that it does pick up what you get stuck with is you saying no to customers because you can't do wouldn't do that much in the space that you're in so you know the  yeah they were crazy and it's also it's tough we were hidden so we were inside of another business so spreading the word about it we didn't have a very big was going to get the word out so the people who were you were you know something the universe i  know i don't even know how it happened i'm a firm believer in even to this day the peach spends no money on marketing or any what i consider our marketing is i invest in good ingredients king arthur flour caliber chocolate i also use our marketing budget for donations so i donate to this organization or we send our left over to the trained soup kitchen because i believe that our product is good enough that people will speak for yes and i don't  be loud exactly i need to be loud and have my logo plastered everywhere you know i'd rather whisper and then have someone share you know bring a box somewhere and say you have to try this so that's that's what we did in the beginning and that's what we still do  abut what we spoke about what i spoke about before which was you know the outgrowing the space right it was just it was too small i can even get in the refrigerator and it was if you saw the operation that we were you'd like how on earth do you make anything out right it was time to renew my lease a new ng and i just kind of had to i want to sign on for another three years and struggle for another three years and it just didn't seem like a good fit for me so i made a decision to close that location while i look for something up still with no funding and still kind of like we're just kind of breaking even here i was very fortunate that the whole fish family which they want to realty company that operates in lawrenceville  they actually like recruited me to come to lawrence their family has lived there for one hundred years and they've always had its home bakery and for the last two two and a half years there was no town bakery so they saw my website and they see on my website a briton hey we've closed down the shop because i'm looking for a new home and they emailed me and said do you want to come look at our space we were trying to get a bakery here so i came and looked at it and i said close enough to you this is i'll say the biggest the biggest ways are you know our business has increased substantially because we can we can make more than we can there were certain products i couldn't do when i was in ewing because i couldn't get a proofing wanted to be because i was just i felt by by the size back then you know one of the best things i can talk to how things have changed i had one full time employee actually person with my intern who works like four hundred hours for free and then i ended up hiring her i think at like nine dollars an hour and my sister helped out too so she works for me part time kind of from the customer service aspect so i could bake i now employ twenty people college you know you're wreckers and then you're doing your be in economics you know and your m b a marketing how did that play a factor in what you're doing right now do you think it was a necessary you know requirement to start a business i don't think it's necessary ok because i think that with the right amount of effort i think that a corner school the one thing i noticed in my bio is i've got a hole in our school i taught myself i bought the textbooks the corner schools were using and dedicated the time to learn it so do i think going to college is necessary no it's got the right attitude and understand that this is going to be work it's not necessary was it helpful absolutely for instance  doing a degree econ i know what commodities are going to do i understand that anderson has seasonal fluctuations change the price of butter so i'm able to be smart about the way i run my business for instance i know every july butter is going to go up forty percent in price why because what else becomes popular in the summertime ice cream we compete for the same butterfat there's this much supply but now the demand has changed so what i do now is i buy huge amounts i mean thousands of pounds of butter yeah in june ok at the low price and then we storage in refrigeration so that we don't have to pay the high prices and so they come back down again as a temper so having the having that degree give you gave me the ability to be a better business owner but what i learned is something that anyone can learn by just sitting down and taking the time and even searching the internet and just studying and getting to understand like the ins and outs but you know once again the prepare financially for it but i got myself like pumped up at the time of if you don't do it now you're never going to do it so i don't even know if that's something i would change but if it's the one thing i really look i'm going you know i may be able to save more money because you know things could've turned out differently but then again i did it right and things still turned out pretty good if i were to say look pretty good and also those struggles that i went through m better business owner now so you know that's tough i think i would have hired more people i wouldn't say i would have wanted to stay so i could have had more employees in the beginning because it racks your personal life being an entrepreneur is push through that but being an entrepreneur it takes great and aaron and it takes dedication but you also say bye bye to being able to go out on a saturday if you want to for a couple of years so you know planning better you know planning better from a financial standpoint is something i would have changed but in retrospect in all honesty if you said what you're trying to say nothing because all of those little lessons has gotten me to be where i am now in fighting go through them something else would've gone wrong it's tough it's tough you know baking is still a male dominated industry you know i still go to i go to the baking expo in las vegas every it's every two years it was two years and i've been there three times and every time i go and i'm inquiring with vendors not the big guys like king arthur about the caliber of the smaller vendors who sell either equipment or you know they're like oh well who's your boss or you know why do you have your boss get in contact with us and i'm like  me just just me right here perception just me yeah you know i've i've had people in the beginning come into the bakery and say you know i want to be a winner and i'm like oh that would be mean there was like no not the manager  owner and i can't help but think why why why not me like why couldn't that have been me so it makes things so it made it made things in the beginning a little bit more difficult you'll have to prove yourself you have to work twice as hard ok and i'm a minority on top of that so it's like three times as hard to that's why everything that injured peach is consistent and excellent all the time because i can't rest on my laurels for was a moment because somebody's just looking to take your place before before you realize it and as a woman you have got to work harder because we're often underestimated but i will say in general for this area it's a tremendous strength because the feeling of girl power is so real women just are so supportive of the ginger peach and i love that that's so it's also it's one of my biggest assets as well i think also if you're good at what you do and people recognize that you know you know you're good at what you do you know right people come up yes i said marketing is not swerve you know word of mouth yeah you know if you're good at what you're doing and you talked about your grandma well i think it will be a role model for you yeah you know i think as we thought we talked about before the show you said she was able to bake and there's no measurements she's put things out there and it just came about and i was so she she learned something that she did something that she may have passed that they can gina yeah you my grandmother had like a sixth grade education and but man was she was the wisest people and she was just so connected to food it was amazing what just what she could do with she how she would turn a bunch of junk into something else like my favorite meal i was just like that's i don't know where that comes from but like i knew i wanted it there as i want to be that i wan to feel that way and with my bakers i'm constantly working with them i connecting with what they're doing to be present in what's happening because the results are going to be outstanding if you really understand what's going on here and that's what she was great at she was a tremendous that so you know over that whole problem we had in ewing of all those years none of spaces so we moved into a space three times the size of our other space well now there's not enough space anymore on the yeah so we're in the situation again sorry everyone sorry customer sorry where we are turning things away like cakes like unfortunately we can't bake anymore we've been we've max out our capacity ok so you know for the peach our next step is to set up what we refer to as a commissary kitchen wares we kind of go off site to do some of the baking and then we would haul it to the shop every day so that we can make we can take more orders and fill the need of the community because you know like i always when i talk to my husband i said you know that person you keep inviting to the party and they keep saying no when they were just stop inviting and we don't want to get to that point where you stop inviting us you know we are first choice for a cake and we keep saying no because we're too small and we can accommodate it also in the future of the ginger peach kind you know the direction we're going is there's a savory side what i do that it's kind of been like a secret only you know the people of lawrence get to get like a little taste of it it's once a year there there's something they have called music in the park in lawrence township and the first year they invited us to participate they invite all the food the food restaurants on main street to participate  each get a night and there's music and then you're the food vendor so when they invited me i said great i'm going to make big right and they're like no you have to make like a meal meal i'm like i'm a restaurant so i just cooked what i would i learned at home to cook and the response was in it was crazy and thank you like this this is like regular food like regular for this is what i make in a home and we've done it for three years and the pressure of no we want we want to see that we want to see more of that has just gotten to the point that i'm like ok well why why why not so i think that's the next step for the ginger peach is to let people where we take the two brands  and you know sometimes you have to moderate your growth yeah or that you don't overspend that's right nice loans you know i should have expanded according to everyone from the outside running in over a year ago you had to get this done and we're what's your favorite with some of the favorite things that you are alluding to live a purist so i like things i like to get a little crazy i'm not i'm not going to lie but when it comes like my personal taste  one thing that i love to make is the goat cheese brownie i just think it's unique i think it's different i think it's this wonderful balance of flavors and texture and it's so leiber intensive and calculated process i could whip up a cake batter in five minutes but to make one croissant takes three days and i like that i like that every now and then i have to jump into it because it keeps me on my toes and makes me and it was it was the one product that proved to me i could do this when i started trying to break out of textbooks right back you know six years ago i said if i can do this i can do anything and it took like the year and a half it took forever but the day that it clicked i went i'm unstoppable now like that's it it just sets the attitude in the framework so for me i really enjoy filmmaking that because it's like it's a gentle reminder of how far i've come but having worked in the big room myself when i was in high school ok i knew that's a tough business and i remember i didn't like getting up at i i went to work this morning at two am so yeah you know but that's what it requires but i it's this is so overused and i'm even mad at myself for saying this but i'm  say it it's not work when you love it right not work yeah dr i wish i could do that better tie one of those around two pm but it's a feel good still so for me i'm like i was inconvenient but that's about it it's inconvenient but i love what you do do it that's right that's right hopefully everybody will have a chance to take the trip down route two zero six to learn still and visit joanne at the ginger peach tree ginger peach disappointed mark my words and if you do i'll be more than happy to have a conversation with you but you're not so you know if you list the show i know you get a little hungry right now talking about so tomorrow morning you get up you go that route to  stuff in lawrenceville right across from one for prep right that's right and you can say hello to joanne and she'll be there or somebody there and you can say you know i saw you on the show and should be happy to take care of you and your order and then you can try from there and judge for yourself but  in the meantime joanne congratulations thank you you know on keeping the ginger peach alive and moving on and expanding it and growing it and being at the forefront you know in your in your business and i'm sure we're going to hear good things in the years to come