Transcript
A (0:02)
Hey, sweet friends. My name is Chef Schomburg. I started my baking business with a bottle of Di Sereno and one bundt cake pan. Fast forward to today. From news to magazines, speaking on national stages and more, I can truly say that baking has changed my life. So now as a bakery business coach, I get to help others have the same success. I've helped hundreds of my students across the world and my global membership program create six figure businesses, mainly from home. The Baking for Business podcast is an extension of from actionable tips to valuable tools and resources that can impact you as a business owner. I truly believe y'all, we would never have been given a gift if we couldn't profit and prosper from it. So come on, darling, what are you waiting for? Hey, what's going on, you guys? And welcome back to the Baking for Business podcast. I'm super excited because we have an amazing guest today. So Rishi is actually one of the co founders of Hot Plate. And Hot Plate is a software company, an online ordering platform which is dedicated specifically to helping those chefs and bakers with pop ups and online ordering. And so as we know right now the porch pop up movement, or any pop up in general, is really booming, especially when it comes to cottage food operators, cottage food producers, and just food entrepreneurs in a whole. So to find out more about how Hot Plate can help us, I decided to bring Rishi on. So, Rishi, you so much for being here.
B (1:37)
Thank you so much, Amanda for having me. Super excited to chat. This is gonna be great.
A (1:42)
Absolutely. And so for those who are a little unfamiliar with Hot Plate, how did this kick off? Do you have a love for food or what really inspired you guys to, to start it off?
B (1:53)
Great question. I'm a huge foodie, so, like, I think we both share that same sentiment. I think anyone listening to this podcast is probably gonna be a huge foodie, I'd imagine. Right. And no, I'd always been obsessed with food. I come from like an incredible background of Indian immigrants and my grandmother, you know, was like a personal chef of mine for years. Right. Like, cooked for a whole family. And I just got to experience the love of her cooking and the familiarity and the, the family bonding that it created for our whole family from both her and my mother. So just come from a long, beautiful background of incredible cooks. And that love of food really translated into like the work I wanted to do. So I was soon at UT Austin and that's actually where I met my co founders at the time, Ben and Andy. And we kind of just, you know, we're all really into food, but. And we're all, like, tinkering around with different ideas. But the actually first version of hot plate actually came from my mom. So my mom had this idea for a marketplace of home cooked food because she was actually trying to find authentic Gujarati Indian food. I'm Gujarati, by the way, from Gujarat, India. And she was trying to find authentic Gujarati Indian food where she was getting treatment at the time. She's totally fine now. But when she came to me and she was like, you know, there's no way to get authentic home cooked Indian food, I was like, that's a really good point. Like, why is there an easy way to be able to access the regional cuisine that I grew up eating? Right? So the first version of hot plate was a way to solve that problem for her and others like her. And so to test it, we want to test the ability of, like, can I just start a food business out of, like, my house and just start selling food? We actually, like, rented an apartment, like, in West Campus.
