We were lucky to catch up with Annie Henderson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Annie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

In 2014 I met Austin Jevne, while seeking out a locally made beer for a fundraiser I was hosting at my house. Everyone at the event loved the beer and Austin. The following week I met him for lunch to pay him for his time and proposed we open a brewery. Fortunately, we had very similar visions of supporting local vendors, creating a farm to table restaurant, foraging for building materials/décor as well as brewing ingredients and focusing on supporting our growing music and art scene in Rochester. It was a perfect fit. 9 months later we opened our 10,000 sqft brewpub. We feature a scratch kitchen that works with local farmers and has a rotating menu based on seasonal ingredients. Our brewery makes over 200 different beers a year, with barrel-aged beer being the most sought after, Customers sleeping overnight outside our brewpub before each release to get their hands on our limited brews. We work with local artist, Trevor Sim to create a new label each week for new beers, (52 weeks x 7 years), we are keeping him very busy. We host live music 6 nights a week and have 2 rotating art galleries in-house. We also have an in-house artist that programs events and helps with projects year-round.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have worked in the restaurant industry since I was 15. My first job was as a host at Perkins Family Restaurant. Throughout my academic career, I always worked at a restaurant part time. I worked in all types of restaurants, mom and pop restaurants, franchises and corporations. Each has very different styles of ownership, leadership and mentorship. I gathered the knowledge from my 17 years of restaurant experience to craft our ownership style at Forager. We are a small, family run business. We employee 50-80 people depending on the season. We offer health benefits, vacation, and other perks to our leadership team. We are constantly evolving our practices to ensure longevity within our staff and our business. The ability to evolve in an ever changing market has allowed us to stay current with trends for consumers and wants from our staff.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

COVID-19 pandemic taught us to pivot our business in 48 hours. It was business as usual on March 15th 2020 and by March 17th we were closed to any customers entering our facility. We began that evening with take-out food and started delivering our food. We created beers our customers couldn’t get anywhere else. We were able to keep all our full-time staff employed throughout the pandemic. This was our highest priority. We were so fortunate to have all part-time staff with other sources of income, step back and allow our full-time staff to have the hours. We had 30+ people still employed. We evolved our business daily. We started a program like HELLO FRESH that we sold weekly, we made videos of how to make the dishes, we sold as much hype beer as possible, we hosted online beer sales throughout the nation for barrel-aged beers and stouts and doubled our outside seating capacity. We did everything we could to stay in business and keep everyone employed. Over 2 years later, we have learned so much from our evolution throughout the pandemic and still have several of the systems in place.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

To start Forager, we sold shares to 17 families. The 17 families believed in our mission, goals, and business plan. 5 of the investors are staff members/owners of the business. This created a wonderful team, extremely committed to Forager and their careers. We raised about 35% of the capital from this investment group. The remaining 65% I funded by selling some real estate and was fortunate to obtain a private loan from my grandfather. To say we were 100% financially committed to this project would be an understatement.

Contact Info:

• Website: foragerbrewery.com
• Instagram: foragerbrewery
• Facebook: foragerbrewery
• Twitter: foragerbrewery
• Yelp: foragerbrewery