Today we’d like to introduce you to Claudia Chambers Beach.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
It started with sickness. My mom (Claudia, the owner) was always either at work or in bed. I remember that I didn’t see her very much even if she was just through a wall in our house. She was sick from all the different medications she was taking. A pill for her mood that caused unwanted side effects. Another script for pain. So many meds that just made my mom even sicker. For almost two years, Mom didn’t even go to work. I only ever saw her when she decided she needed a cigarette or something to eat. Then, in the summer, she took to gardening. The garden was where she was for a huge chunk of the day, weeding, watering, squishing bugs, and picking green beans. She really took to being outside with the dirt and the sun and the rain.
Behind our garden is a huge Cherokee Sandplum patch that had been putting on fat, tart, juicy stone fruits for years. We had never done anything with them before other than maybe eat a handful when they first ripened in the summer. They are sour, with a little bit of sweet and a flavor that isn’t really much to write home about. Eventually, Mom started experimenting with making jams and jelly out of the fruit, and to our surprise it was really good! But what were we, a family of three, going to do with gallons and gallons and gallons of these plums? My mother, being the resourceful creature she is, took to selling it online to people on Facebook. It was incredibly popular, and people loved it.
We decided to start picking wild blackberries from our woods and out of my grandmother’s pasture to use for our jams too, and people (literally) ate it up.
Several hard worked hours and farmers markets and pop-up shows later, we were able to get into our commercial kitchen that we operate out of now. We are since long passed the days of picking our own fruits wild in the hot sun, and we have since generated over $800,000 in total company sales since we’ve been open. We have added pickles to our product line, using old-fashioned recipes from our own family that had been passed down and other recipes that we added our own country girl twist to 😉
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Every small business has its ups and downs. Any small business owner will tell you it’s a lot of downs though. We struggled to find a kitchen big enough with the right equipment to do big batches of jams, we struggled to find enough jars, we struggled with cash flow and finding decent people to work for us. Even today, we struggle and the hurdles we must jump almost always seem hopeless. But every time we’ve pulled through. We always find a way over the hurdle, even if it means we have to just knock it over and break it.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Prior to entrepreneurship Claudia was a supply chain professional with 15 years management experience in warehousing transportation and logistics as well as working for a private label food manufacturing company JC Potter Sausage and these experiences have all translated very well into starting her own manufacturing firm
How do you define success?
🙂 that is a work in progress
Pricing:
- 9 oz jams for 7.99
- 9 oz stevia jams for 8.99
- 16oz pickles for 9.99
- 23oz pickles for 10.99
Contact Info:
- Website: https://kayterrafarms.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kayterrafarms
Image Credits
Sierra Haney Photography
Songbird Shots
