Overview: Adapting Through Flavor
Editor Jasmine McBride reports on how Minneapolis entrepreneur Honey Price pivoted her local catering and bakery business into a growing seasoning line after facing a life-altering health setback. Read how a single bottle is taking Twin Cities soul food across the country.
Honey Price didn’t set out to build a seasoning line. She set out to run a restaurant, or a bakery, or something, anything, that let her cook for a living.
The seasoning came later, born out of necessity rather than ambition, and it’s now become one of the signature products of her Minneapolis business, Honey’s Soul Food & Bakery.
Price’s path into food started early. She earned her cosmetology license in high school at Simeon Career Academy in Chicago, graduating with a trade in hand before she ever set foot in a Minnesota kitchen. But cosmetology was never where her heart was.
“I always had a business mindset,” Price said. When she moved to Minnesota, she knew she wanted to run a business. She just didn’t know which one yet.
She enrolled in school and started visiting different restaurants, testing ideas, taking some hits and some misses along the way.
Somewhere in that process, cooking became the constant.
“I started cooking all the time,” she said. “And when I started cooking, I said, ‘Hmm, I should share this with everybody in Minneapolis.’ And that’s what I did.”
That’s how Honey’s Soul Food & Bakery came to be: a catering business built around soul food, cakes and pies that Price began selling at farmers markets around the Twin Cities.
For years, that was the whole operation, cooking, catering, baking, and selling directly to customers who found her at pop-ups and markets.
Then her health changed the equation. Price became disabled, with the condition primarily affecting her arms and hands. Some days she didn’t feel good enough to bake at all, and even basic cooking at home became harder to manage.
She needed a way to make cooking easier without sacrificing the flavor her customers expected.
“Seasoning is half the battle,” Price said. That idea became Honey Soul Seasonings, a line built around a simple premise: one bottle should do the whole job.
“I made sure you just need one bottle. You don’t have to use anything else out of your cabinet, because I don’t like buying seasoning that you still got to season,” she said.
The lineup includes three all-purpose blends, each one distinct from the others, along with specialty mixes built for specific dishes.
Asked which one is her personal favorite, Price doesn’t have a straight answer, and she says that’s by design.
“I actually don’t have a favorite. Everybody asks me that, but like I said before, I cater, so I use all of my seasonings in my own food, so I know it works. It really just depends on what you’re cooking.”
If pressed for a bestseller, though, one stands out. “My collard green seasoning is one of my best sellers,” Price said. “When I made it, I said I could put this on everything.”
Price has been serving the Twin Cities food scene for years now, catering events, selling baked goods including her well-known Five Flavor Pound Cake, and building relationships with customers at markets like West Broadway Farmers Market on the Northside.
The seasoning line grew out of that same community, an extension of a business built one plate, one pie and one pop-up at a time.
These days, the seasonings are the one part of the business Price ships beyond the pop-up circuit.
Everything else, the catering, the baked goods, stays local and in person. But the seasonings travel. “You can purchase everything and see everything that I have to offer on my website,” Price said. “I cater; my seasonings are on there, and my seasonings are the only thing that I will ship.”
For a business that started with a young woman testing recipes at Twin Cities restaurants, not sure yet which direction to take, that reach says something about how far Honey’s Soul Food & Bakery has come, and how a health challenge that could have slowed things down instead pushed Price toward a product that’s carried her name further than a single market stall ever could.
Honey’s Soul Food & Bakery products, including Honey Soul Seasonings, are available at honeysoulfoodbakery.com.
Jasmine McBride welcomes reader responses at jmcbride@spokesman-recorder.com.