We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Molly Wilson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Molly, appreciate you joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?
Growing up, I always had an eye for design, a knack for working with my hands and a passion for delicious food. In high school, my favorite class was visual arts, but at the time I thought, “What the heck does someone do with a visual arts degree?” So, off I went to college and decided to be more practical with my career ambitions.
In 2002, I graduated from Indiana University with a business degree. Over the next decade, I moved from retail to banking, and then to marketing, where I spent the majority of my career. But the truth was, none of these career paths fulfilled me. I knew there was something more, but I didn’t know exactly what it was.
While I was working in corporate America, I picked up a side hustle doing meal prep for a handful of clients. My first client was my sister-in law. I would prep meals for her family and tuck them in her fridge each week. Her only stipulation was that she not spend more than 15 minutes hands-on in the kitchen. Little did I know we were establishing the basis for how our meal prep kitchen operates to this very day! My second client was my boss, followed by a few friends, and news started to spread by word-of-mouth. I didn’t have a website, or a business plan, or even really any idea what I was doing. I kept just “saying yes to the next thing that made sense.”
A full year into meal prepping, a client asked me to make a “meat and cheese board” for an event. Although I had never made one before, I had been hosting parties for years, so I said yes. Instantly, I loved it. It was as though the creativity within me that had been lying dormant suddenly awoke from a long slumber. Before I knew it, I was designing charcuterie boards every week for events of all sizes.
In 2016, Sprig + Plate was born, and I have never looked back. Today, I combine my experience in business with my passion for visual arts and food. I like to call it, “art you can eat.” Today my team of 20 preps 200-300 meals weekly out of a commercial kitchen on the north side of Indianapolis, in addition to charcuterie boards to feed anywhere from 5 people to 500!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Our meal prep business allows busy families to order prepared meals each week. Each Tuesday, we send out an email with a menu of five meal options for the following week. There is no minimum order and no obligation to order weekly. We make it so easy – place orders when you want food and skip the weeks you don’t. It’s that simple. Complete the order
form in the weekly email, and we get started prepping! We offer three entrees per week plus a soup and a salad. Most offerings are gluten-and dairy-free, or can easily be modified to be. We offer meals in sizes small to X-Large to feed families of all sizes.
On the charcuterie side, we offer boards, boxes, cups, and spreads of all kinds to feel small groups up through large corporate events and weddings. Our corporate offerings are a great fit for office meetings, team building, client appreciation events, and staff lunches. Whether someone is looking for a small board for their monthly book club, an appetizer before a dinner party, or the cocktail hour during their wedding, our customized options offer solutions for events of all shapes and sizes.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
My business was growing steadily — one meal prep client at a time, one charcuterie board at a time. Then Covid hit and people stopped getting together. The get-togethers that did happen suddenly had to look very different. People had to stay 6 feet apart. No one could touch anyone else’s food. This was a huge challenge for the charcuterie side of our business. Two things saved me. First, our meal prep side was still going strong, so we had a supplemental side of the business helping us pay our bills while the demand for charcuterie vanished almost overnight. Second, we got creative to find solutions for people to get together without sticking their hands in the same board of meat and cheese. We began to offer individual charcuterie in cups and boxes. This allowed people to provide a beautiful food option without putting people at risk. These innovations allowed us to keep the charcuterie side of the business going — and growing! Now, cups and boxes are still a major part of our offerings. We have set up beautiful spreads of charcuterie and veggie cups for wedding receptions, and boxed lunches for office meetings, or a fun mix of boards and cups for larger events where a varied aesthetic is preferred. What could have been a huge blow to the business actually forced us to innovate, problem solve, and come up with new and creative options in a challenging time, and those options remain super popular today!
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Our clientele is extremely enthusiastic and very loyal. Our target charcuterie market is made up of people who love to entertain, so every time someone purchases a board and sets it on their table, anywhere from 5-500 people see our exact product, and they get to personally experience it. This has allowed our business to grow almost exclusively from word-of-mouth referrals. Just the other day, one of our longtime clients was hosting a neighborhood get-together. She lives in a very affluent neighborhood that is filled with our ideal potential client. We were able to set up a beautiful spread with charcuterie boards, cups, and sandwiches. The next day, one of her neighbors came into our shop to seek out our chicken salad because she loved it so much, and our client was only too happy to let her know where she could find it! We have hundreds of stories just like this, from friends passing our name around their book club or volunteer committees, to clients sharing some of their meals with their neighbors, and those neighbors turning into meal clients. Our clients know we care, we listen, and we will bend over backwards to make their events and time around the dinner table special.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sprigandplate.com
- Instagram: @sprigandplate
- Facebook: Sprig + Plate
