Use your loaf: Female entrepreneurs
What do you do if you've just undergone a serious life change - had a baby, become a single parent, suffered a career crisis - and found yourself at home without the security of a regular job?
Increasing numbers of women are discovering that just such an upheaval can signal the beginning, rather than the end, of their working life, and can lead to an improvement in career and salary that could never have been achieved in a regular nine-to-five.
Starting from their own kitchen tables, they've used their knowledge of cookery to make, sell and write about food - moving into niche markets that have opened up over the past few years.
Meet the food entrepreneurs:
- Dounne Alexander, Gramma's recipes
- Alison Blunt, Cheese maker
- Anissa Helou, Food writer and cookery teacher
- Adriana Rabinovitch, Queen of brownies
Dounne Alexander, Gramma's herbal remedies
Dounne Alexander, now 52, had recently become a single parent and was sitting at home wondering what to do with the rest of her life when inspiration struck.'Everybody was going so crazy about health, health, health… how to eat and how to live - and then it came to me.'
Dounne went into her kitchen and cooked up a batch of concentrated hot-pepper herbal sauce using a recipe her herbalist/spiritualist grandmother swore could improve your health. She gave the results to a few friends and asked them what they thought.
'They loved it!' she giggles, admitting that her guinea pigs were probably more attracted to the delicious taste than the potential health benefits. 'That's what convinced me that maybe I could make a business out of the same sort of recipes that my grandmother used to do.'
Today, Dounne includes herbal seasonings and a selection of herbal teas and drinks in her range - all of them made in her own kitchen from her grandmother's recipes, and available by mail order. 'The most difficult part was getting the financing,' she says. 'As a black woman and a single parent, despite however many years of equality, we still have the problem of being taken seriously by the banks.'
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