We recently connected with Germaine Blasius and have shared our conversation below.

Germaine, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

The answer to this question is easy, Stoneridge is the name of the street where I grew up. Both of my parents came from very large families and it was common to have relatives stop by. My mother was always in the midst of brewing coffee and putting out a plates of food.

My mother was a wonderful cook and baker and we grew up eating traditional family recipes. It was my father who did all of the shopping, purchasing ingredients from local farms and family owned shops from all over the area. Everything was fresh, homemade and had a special story behind it. 

It seemed only fitting to name my company after the place where so many of my food related memories began.

Germaine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Given my introduction to food and entertaining when I was growing up it seemed appropriate that my first job was in a grocery store, which led to a position with a food wholesaler and then years later with a food broker. I love everything food related, eating , cooking , baking and travel. I always knew I wanted to start a business and my plan was to  become a food broker, traveling, finding new food products, sourcing unusual ingredients and finding small vendors and introducing them to gourmet and specialty food stores.

Unfortunately I didn’t know where to begin. I started producing baked goods under a cottage food license, outgrew cottage foods and moved into a shared kitchen so I could expand my business from local farmers markets and gift shows to retail and wholesale across the country. We have met a number of amazing makers and vendors along the way and are now moving to sell their products through our retail and wholesale website with the goal of creating a marketplace for other small manufacturers and makers like ourselves.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Selling fresh baked goods at a farmers markets was quite the challenge.  You sell out one week and then the next week it rains and you have to throw out a the all the products we spent so much time making.  It simply wasn’t sustainable unless we were willing to change our recipes and add ingredients to make our products more shelf-stable and freezable.  We simply were not willing to make that kind of compromise.  A few years ago we had to make the very difficult decision to drop our line of fresh baked goods and to focus only on our spices and seasoning blends.

The spice and seasoning blends are shelf stable, have a longer shelf life and are easy to ship. This allowed us to sell online and create a wholesale business.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

Figuring out the manufacturing process had it challenges.   We started under Cottage Foods which was not a problem but limited where and how we could sell our products.  It was moving into a shared commercial kitchen that forced us to make significant changes in our processes.   The shared kitchen has opened up many new markets and sales channels but still limits our ability to automate as much of the process as we would like.  We still hand-blend our products and manually fill each package so it has been critical that we work together as a team, and have a clear separation of duties in order to make the most of our time in the kitchen.   We also have put together a great team of vendors and suppliers that understand our business model and work with us to ensure we get the highest quality ingredients and materials exactly when we need them.   None of this would be possible without the support of our family, friends, and suppliers.  We look forward to the next steps in our journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.stoneridgefoods.com
• Instagram: stoneridgefoods@stoneridgefoods
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/stoneridgefoods