We recently connected with Heather Yoder and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Heather, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

When my husband and I got married, we wanted to give our guests something they could use and that would be memorable. The idea popped into my head to do flavored sugar and smoked salt, in mason jars! Five years later, people were still calling me to see if I had anymore of that amazing sugar or that fantastic salt. That sounded like a business opportunity to us, so I started piecing things together.

Naming is both incredibly important and incredibly difficult! We thought of calling it ‘Heavenly’ at first, because if you combine my name and my husband’s (Heather + Devin) it sounds like heaven! I joined a business mastermind to see if I could get some help with figuring out how to do sugars and salts in the retail space. On one of my first group strategy sessions, even before I could tell the group about my sugars and salts, a woman said something very curious to me. She said, “I don’t know if you believe or not, and this may be crazy, but I’m just going to tell you that I had a dream about you last night. You were walking around a small town square, and everyone was calling you ‘the Sugar Lady.’ Does that mean anything to you at all?”

There’s no way that she would have known about my sugars and salts – so that group of strategizers all agreed that it was divine! So to commemorate that moment of heavenly guidance, I decided to call this venture Divine Sugars & Spices.

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

Life is too short for boring food.

When we gave flavored sugar and smoked salt in mason jars as gifts for our wedding guests, we didn’t picture it making people as happy as it did. Those little 2 oz mason jars made stories; flavored sugar was making friend’s morning coffees more enjoyable; smoked salt was making family’s famous burgers famous-er. People were telling us that their family fought over the last bit of sugar and now have permanent nicknames from the tussle! We loved laughing with our family and friends around their stories of flavored sugars and smoked salts.

My customers have the best stories. I know, it’s just stuff you sprinkle on stuff, but this stuff is GOOD! A particular young lady just sprinkles the Simply Blueberry Sugar on the cheap-o store brand brownies…and her friends ask her for the recipe! The best part about these sugars and salts is that you don’t have to be a culinary wiz to use them, but the results you get are delicious! I love how easy it is to make things prettier, tastier, and more original. You can officially say, ‘this is MY recipe!’

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I’m sure every small business owner, in fact every human, has almost as much unlearning to do, as learning! I’ll dive into a big one – validity. There are many ways the world chips away at our value, convinces us of things that aren’t true, and throws us into experiences that build ‘proof’ into the narrative that says we’re not enough and that we aren’t valid. That’s a slippery and terrible slope, because the truth is we all need to grow and improve, so it’s in fact ‘true’ sometimes that we aren’t good at things. Sometimes we rightly come in last place – but the lie is that we are the equivalent of our performance, the sum of our work. It’s not just that we failed the test, but that we fail to be worthy of love. It’s not just that we didn’t make the team, it’s that there’s everyone else…and then there’s me. Rarely are those the actual thoughts in our conversation with ourselves, but that’s indeed what it feels like. Sometimes we’ve gained so much experience with the outside’s version of ourselves, we just can’t see the real person being slowly buried beneath.
So how do we unlearn something that we may have a lifetime of ‘proof’ of, something that we’ve resigned to believe because the contrary option seems impossible, or even foolish? It’s like trying to see a photograph pinned to a wall – in an apartment, on the other side of the city, on a rainy night. Can you see through the hard rain? Through all the buildings and trees between you and that photograph? One of my favorite speakers said something simple yet profound, that started to unravel the narrative of lies that had been stringing me along my entire life.
“God loves you, and you love God – therefore you are already successful!” I was caught off guard by how much that affected me. My husband encouraged me saying, ‘see? It’s not about pressure, it’s about discovery. Life’s not about getting it all right, but discovering who you were always meant to be.’
That was so freeing, and sent me on a rocky road of unlearning what’s not real, and giving myself permission to make my own decision to hold onto what’s true. One thing that invalidation does well, is that it robs us of our right to decide for ourselves. When you don’t make the team, invalidation says ‘see, they’re acceptable, and you’re not!’ While it was highly probable that the coaching staff made the decision based on your try-out, the lie of invalidation makes it about your whole life and not just that one swing, that one miss, that one afternoon.
So learning to work from a place of success, with the aim being discovery, I’ve restarted my business. Give this a try – say out loud ‘I was always meant to be loved, I was always meant to succeed.’ If it’s hard to say, if you feel a twinge of disbelief in your heart, if you hear yourself say ‘but you don’t know my story,’ then friend you and I are on the same road of unlearning! I haven’t gotten it all figured out, but I’m committed to a better road than I was on before. I’m choosing to believe that success is not only possible, but it’s inevitable with some hard work and the transforming belief that I was valid before I ever took a test or tried out for a team.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Pivots: that’s what some people call them, but in my life it’s been a series of ‘oh my God – what am I going to do NOW!’ I’ve lost everything 3 times in my life; I’ll share with you one of those times in hopes that you are encouraged! “Call Chance.” That was what the Lord said when I asked Him what I was supposed to do. I was sitting in a transmission shop, in a scary part of Detroit, with no way home. The dismantling of my life began when I tried to buy some cereal at Walgreens the day before.
I was a delivery driver in the Detroit area, working for a courier service delivering pharmaceuticals to local drug stores and hospitals in the morning, delivering office supplies in the afternoon, and picking up bank paperwork in the evening. I drove 1500 miles a week easily, so the highways and byways of the D were my office. I was friends with the local radio traffic and weather reporters (their chopper could spot my delivery van on the road!) as well as the midday talk show hosts. On a Monday morning I stopped at Walgreens to buy some bottles of water and a box of cereal, and my debit card was declined. I had plenty there, so a decline was a bit jarring. I paid cash for my breakfast, and jumped in my delivery van to call my credit union.
As I explained what just happened at the local drug store, both I and the bankers were shocked to discover that all my accounts were negative. By a LOT. My checking had overdraft protection from my savings – also empty – which had overdraft protection from my credit card – now maxed out. The banker said she didn’t know what had happened or how to fix it, but assured me that my directly deposited paycheck on Friday wouldn’t cover the negative balance so I wouldn’t have access to my paycheck funds. She was also kind to inform me that the bank had no procedures for fixing this, so I’d be ‘earning’ overdraft charges on all 3 accounts, daily. Someone had stolen my card and had quite the party at my expense!
Since I had to pay for my own gas in my delivery van, I had to take out a quick loan from one of those dodgy ‘cash for your title’ places, just so I could go to work. Well, the story gets better (better from a storytelling standpoint, not in real life).
Tuesday after my deliveries were done, my van started having trouble shifting. It was bad – engine revving, speed declining, transmission shaking…I was a bit panicked. I decided to head to work Wednesday morning anyways, but the van ended up limping into a tiny transmission shop at the corner of Scary and Deadly in Detroit. As I talked to the owner and explained the trouble, he sternly warned me to stay in the waiting room and not go outside until we figured out what was wrong. The techs determined that the transmission was completely shot and needed to be rebuilt, a $2500 bill that I could not pay. “Can you guys give me a Care Credit or whatever that car repair credit card is called?” I asked hopefully. The reply was pretty fate-sealing: “we cannot extend credit to you, nor can anyone else, since your bank has you listed as under fraud investigation. And, since your delivery van is a fleet lease, Dodge informed us that you are in breach of contract that requires you to keep it functional, with just 5 days allowed for repairs. So unless you can come up with $2500 cash in the next 5 days, Dodge’s Fleet Lease Department will be here to pick up the van.”
I couldn’t come up with the money, no way, no how. So I emptied the van of my personal belongings, the empty delivery containers from yesterday’s drop offs, and set myself down in an extremely grungy chair in the barred up waiting area. With a deep sigh and a feeling of blankness, I said “God, what am I going to do NOW?”
I had no checking, no savings, no credit, no vehicle (I had just sold my personal vehicle the week before, intending to buy a new truck on the Friday of all this craziness), and therefore no job. I had a horse boarded at a local farm, and when I told them what had happened they told me if I was 1 penny short on my board they’d take ownership of my horse and have him euthanized immediately. My landlord generously said he’d work with me so I wasn’t homeless – but his wife overruled him in an immediate follow up phone call and informed me that if I was 1 day late on my rent they’d lock the door and keep all my stuff. That was a rough moment, there in that little transmission shop.
“Call Chance.” That was what the Lord said when I asked Him what I was supposed to do. Chance was a friend of mine that worked about 2 hours away from where I was. So, I called him up. Turned out that on that particular day, he wasn’t 2 hours away, but just 2 blocks away! He was a manager at Enterprise Rent A Car, and that office in the sketchy part of the D needed a manager for just that day. So for whatever reason they sent my friend 2 hours away to manage for a single day. I told him what happened, and he came and picked me up. He was able to rent me a car for a while so I could get home, and get things figured out! So suddenly I had to figure everything out from a completely different starting place. I’d call that a huge pivot!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.divinesugars.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/divinesugars/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DivineSugars