Today we’d like to introduce you to Tawny Darling

Hi Tawny, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.

My partner, Robert, and I share a love for the outdoors and we often have fun foraging for edible plants in our area. When Covid hit, we were both laid off from our jobs. With our newfound abundance of time we began making syrups and selling them at the local farmers market. First, we sold our products in Mason jars, with Sharpie labels. Then the next week, we added ribbon and hand-written tags. We began adding new products reflecting whatever was growing as the season progressed. We found someone selling hot sauce bottles in town and we winced at the thought of using up $300 to buy bottles when we were already hurting for money, but we took the leap anyway. Robert would make the syrups, we would bottle it together, then I would hand-write and cut tags, and tie them on with a ribbon. I would say after that first year, I am now an expert at bow-tying. How’s that for a line on a resumé? Our most exciting purchase in the first couple of years was when we bought a label printer. I was able to design all the labels, then print them up ourselves. I’ve since made many iterations of labels as we’ve grown. We still sell at the farmers market, but we also sell our products in shops all over Alaska.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

There are a lot of struggles when starting a business. There was a large learning curve and figuring out everything we needed to become legal. Hiring employees was a major challenge because there is a lot of paperwork and money that goes into that. Balancing time was a struggle. The two of us were foraging, cooking, bottling, labeling, marketing, sales, doing local taxes, doing federal taxes, everything involved in starting and maintaining an LLC, figuring out the different insurances we needed, finances, maintenance on machines, managing employees, then even simple things like cleaning, merchandising, and being present and friendly at our shop and events in order to sell things. I don’t think we slept much. Even now we are having a hard time finding balance. Our location in rural Alaska adds extra challenges because shipping is difficult and sometimes we’ll need a part to fix a machine and they simply won’t ship it here. Another silly challenge we hadn’t anticipated was the cold. There have been days that were so cold that our heater couldn’t keep up and eventually stopped working. Our office was so cold that our label printer wouldn’t work and we had to heat it with an electric blanket to get it to print again.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?

We are a little business that makes small-batch products like spice mixes, bbq sauces, syrups, dressings, and more from ingredients we forage for in our area. Our favorite ingredient to use is spruce tips which are the new growth on spruce trees.

This year we are running our local farmers market and we also started a makers market to give small entrepreneurs more of an audience to sell to. We have always been supported by our great community and we want other entrepreneurs to feel the same. We love our town and want it to thrive.

We have made many different products to see what people love the most. Our pride and joy is what we call “Alaska Spice Mix” which uses spruce tips, porcini mushrooms and a mix of about 13 other spices. It is so good sprinkled on just about anything savory, or mixed into sour cream for an excellent dip. We love making products that make people smile and it’s so fun hearing the different applications our customers try.

What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?

What we love the most about our town is the people. Everyone is so kind and it’s impressive how many creative people live here. It’s really inspiring. The thing we like the least would probably be how difficult it is to order supplies and get it shipped here. I guess that’s not really a problem with our town, it’s a problem with the shipping companies 😂.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.adventureharvest.com
• Instagram: @adventureharvestalaska
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/AdventureHarvest/

Image Credits
Tawny Darling