We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Patrick & Sommer Caldwell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Patrick & Sommer thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.
We are very passionate about serving our Lord and His people in a multitude of ways! We participate in community service, givebacks and discounts for a wide variety of situations & people like schools, churches, outreach programs, youth organizations, people in need or sufferifn a tragedy, emergency workers, nurses, community service workers & foodbanks! We believe if your not serving your swerving, so our mission is to be hands and feet for Christ and our offering just happens to be great tasting and good for you food! We pray over our food & products, asking that it bring joy, love and blessing to whomever chooses it; someone who chose to support and love a local! That to us just seems to be a pretty beautiful circle of good vibrations right there! 💫
Patrick & Sommer, 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?
Patrick has been cooking since he was around 12 years old. It started as a healer for him and it grew into a love of his throughout the years! He absolutely loves to grill and smoke meat but he truly loves baking and “indoor” cooking as well. One of his many gifts is his ability to flavor-play, experiment, fuse & create some outrageous dishes that definitely bring those Funky, Original & Real Flavors, also known as FORK😁 Sommer has a deep passion for the healing side of food! She loves to ensure that the behind those flavor packed bites comes some healing and goodness for your body, mind & spirit! I also absolutely love to connect with our customers! I love to hear all about how life has been to them and I alwasy try to take a lil snippet of them with me to add them to my prayers. Extremely thankful for our amazing customers and regulars!! So with our gifts brought together we have been extremely blessed and been able to bless other by creating and serving!
Services that we have &/or currently offer are:
●Breakfast Burritos & Sndwchs Tue-Sun to the public
●Corporate, private & public Catering
~We cater: Breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, sweets, Sides and more!
●Food Pop-Ups & Markets
●Merchandise
●Flavoring Blends
●Munchie Mixes
●Salsas, Sauces & Syrups
●Cold Lunches & Cold Snacks
●Meal Preps
●Presale Holiday Meal Pkgs
We have several partnerships around the west valley that carry a variety of our products and we’re alwasy looking for more people interested in partnering and growing!
We are just a husband and wife team that gives everything we have and are to our business, customers and products offered! We try to overfill and pack our food and treats with love that we hope you all can taste! We offer customizable menus just becaue we want to be able to offer an elite and topshelf type of product to everyone;truly everyone!
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
Our passions had been a side hustle and evena different course of food before we handed everything to the Lord and He amplified our dreams and allowed for us to experience things we had always been praying for! I, Sommer, used to run and elementary school kitchen & Cafeteria from 2007-2012 and while working here we would take pre-orders for plate style lunches, prepare them at home and them bring them to the awesome teachers at my school every Friday for their lunch, this definitely was the bug that bit us bcuz even though it was an outrageous amount of work and not much money in it we absolutely loved to hear how they loved it and watched the presale list grow every month made the dream feel like it was right there within reach! Although we had a long way to go doesn’t change the fact that Hurtshine Productions, our original name because it was half Patrick- “Hurt” a baseball nickname and half Sommer- sun”shine” a nickname was created and we were off. We were blessed to be approached by an investor for several years about our food a d opening a restaurant and finally in 2012 we decided to take our first leap of faith and milestone which was to quit both of our jobs so we could open and run our BBQ Restaurant, called Tha Spot BBQ.
We had a huge amount of obstacles to tackle and so sorry bee things to learn and that we did! It was literally a year and half of running a scratch kitchen, very small restaurant with just Patrick and myself from open to close each day. To be honest we eagerly jumped into the deep end with both feet and even though we were successful and experienced so many crazy & Beautiful things in that time span, the truth is we didn’t really put the Lord first & this just wasn’t what He visioned for us. The restaurant was sold in 2013 and we had a realization that we were not in control of our lives, so we tried to pray and just follow what the Lord called us to. Within just a couple months Sommer was given an opportunity staright from the man above and blessed with a culinary arts position at the high school level and Patrick was blessed with an opportunity to be a kitchen manager and gead cook for an elementary school. God is so amazing! I genuinely thought God called us into the schools until retirement, but that bug I spoke of earlier had never stopped biting us through the journey, through every closed window and opened door through the years! So we dreamed and prayed of an opportunity to serve our loved filled food to the public! We were determined to not rush and not let anything or anyone lead us except the Lord! We Wanted to be his hands and feet and serve Him by serving others! So we started doing holiday sales to teachers at both of our campuses and then other schools and then we stepped out on faith and decided to go completely legit on 2019. Even when we went through the crazy process of paperwork, inspections, licenses and certifications the Lord was leading and showing up big time! We then both worked our full time positions while side hustling our dreams and continuing to pray! By October of 2020 it was time for another milestone leap of faith and that was Sommer walking away for teaching, which meant pouring love into our youth, guaranteed income, health insurance, which to me seemed sad & scary. That’s when Patrick told me.. Wife your always telling other to trust God.. it’s your turn now💖 and with that and all his love and support I stepped away from teaching and followed God’s lead into our business full time. Since then He has blessed us, guided us, spoke to us, worked through us, forgiven us, grown us, encouraged and loved us both.
What a blessing to say we’re living what we’ve always prayed for💫
We sure hope our lil love filled Catering and more company is blessed to serve many many more as the years go on!
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We offer a delicious product that has been thoroughly thought out from the highest quality ingredients going into it, to how it will be prepped, to then prepared, then how would the customer most enjoy it, how will it be held or served and most of all, will this be good for the body!? We also set out to do this every single time we have the opportunity to serve someone! We find it very important to be able to offer the same style, quality and flavor any and everytime you choose us to fill your belly and spirit!
We had a vision of our little company doing things the “old school” way, the way that made cooking a genuine labor of love! So we set out to be a brand that created as much as possible from scratch, which definitely keeps us feeling exhausted but oh so grateful for a job well done💖
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @fork_az
- Facebook: The FORK Catering
- Other: Forkcaters@gmail.com
Image Credits
@slimsnapped