Stories: How Melanie Geist built a health oriented community with her meal delivery business.
We're interviewing Bottle customers to learn how they started their business and built successful communities by telling their brand story. Conversations have been lightly edited.
We invited Melanie Geist, the woman behind Golden Roots Kitchen, to offer insights as a meal delivery owner, about how running her local meal delivery business on Bottle has connected her to her local community. She shares how she uses Bottle to run her business and how switching to a membership model led to significant growth.
What is your business about in one sentence?
Golden Roots Kitchen is an organic prepared meal service that sources local ingredients to prepare seven days worth of healthy, nutritious, and mostly plant-based meals for pick up and delivery once a week.
What’s the background for Golden Roots Kitchen?
Before I learned to cook I was a yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. I had done a teacher training in India and I was really in a drive to create community. I wanted to do it in a holistic way, to help people feel better and be more connected to themselves in their communities. The aha moment came when I realized how food was the key to my own journey to health and wellbeing. Soon after, I moved to Berkeley, CA to enroll in Bauman College, a culinary program rooted in holistic nutrition and health-minded cooking. While in school, I became inspired by Three Stone Hearth — a nourishing prepared meal service that targets people in recovery from various health issues. I used it as a jumping off point to create my own offering, and moved to Santa Cruz to put roots down.
What were the early days like?
The first six months of Golden Roots Kitchen was the testing phase where I cooked out of my home, got feedback from friends and family, and began selling food for pick-ups and delivery. Then I found kitchen space with street visibility and word of mouth began to build. I chose to move to a community that was underserved with food and that I wasn’t really tapped into at all.
During that first year, we didn’t do much marketing. We were risk averse, we didn’t really want to take on debt, so slow growth was the only option. I also wanted to make sure our process and our food was dialed enough that an investment in advertising would pay off. We still needed a way for people to discover us online, so we created an Instagram account, not to run paid ads — yet — but as an aesthetically-driven landing page. Almost like a business card.
What led you to use Bottle?
When I first started Golden Roots Kitchen, I had a business partner who handled the administrative side of things. When she transitioned out to start a family, I needed someone — or something — to replace her. I also needed a way to more cleanly connect with my audience and to streamline the backend — the compilation of orders and figuring out what I was actually going to be doing in production.
What do you like most about Bottle? How does it compare to Shopify, your previous system?
Since onboarding, Bottle’s focus on memberships has enabled me to create the sense of community that was so important from the get-go. It really helped push us toward more of a community-based feeling, where people were in the service, ordering every week or even three times a month. Bottle has also allowed us to stabilize production, and helps me understand how much help I’ll need in a given day at the kitchen.
I think the automated ordering system, and just how clean it is, really increased people’s willingness to use the service on a weekly basis, because before that I was using a Shopify form so every week they had to re-enter all of their information.
What does the future look like for Golden Roots?
As the business grows, I have a few ideas for long-term growth. All of them are geared towards building and deepening community around food and health. For example, a franchise model where people could create similar prepared meal services in their own communities based on our template. Or even building upon what we’ve created in Santa Cruz, where we are the anchor of a larger community center with a yoga studio, a forum for events, and health and wellness practitioner offices.