“I am Jennifer Krider, and I am the owner of The Kitchen & Company.”
“And I’m Kaitlyn Morgan, and I’m our Director of Sales and Operations.”
And Kaitlyn is my oldest daughter.
That’s where this story really begins–not in a storefront, not in a commercial kitchen–but in our home kitchen in 2017.
The Facebook Live That Changed Everything
We were standing in our kitchen when Kaitlyn convinced me to let her record me cooking dinner. She posted it live on Facebook.
I remember thinking, Why would anybody watch this? Why would anybody care?
Our first video had about 3,000 views. At the time, that felt enormous. Within 48 hours, Kate, being the marketing mastermind that she is, had created a Facebook page and named my cooking show From My Side of the Kitchen.
That name came from something I said all the time at home:
“This is my side of the kitchen. That is your side.” I needed my space.
What started as something fun quickly became something more. We filmed every week. The audience grew beyond our town, beyond Indiana–across the country, even internationally. It was surreal.
A Passion That Didn’t Match My Paycheck
I have an extensive culinary background and years of experience in professional kitchens. But at the time, I wasn’t working in one. I was an office manager for a local business. As wonderful as my employer was, I hated my job. I would sit in my car during lunch and cry because I had to go back in. But quitting wasn’t an option. We’re a blended family with five kids. Every dime was spoken for and then some.
So I kept going to work. And then I came home and cooked. And then we filmed.
And then people started asking,
“Could you cater my baby shower?”
“Could you do a graduation party?”
Pharmaceutical reps found us, that’s when catering began to take off.
For a season, our life looked like this: I’d get up early, prepare breakfast deliveries for Parkview or Lutheran, rush back by 8:30 to clock in at my day job. Kate, who was in college full time, would use her lunch break to run back and throw things in the oven. I’d take my lunch break to make another delivery.
We were exhausted. But it felt alive.
The Phone Call That Changed Our Trajectory
Then one day I got a call from a realtor.
“Hey, are you that lady that cooks and drinks on Facebook?” Because yes, I would usually have a small glass of wine while cooking.
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
He said he had a client getting ready to list her business. She followed me, and she thought I might be interested in buying it and felt like this could be my natural next step. Before it got put on the market, she wanted to know if I’d be interested.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, we were stretched thin at home, so money for another mortgage was not even a possibility. But I asked what she wanted for it. He shot the number out to me, and I internally chuckled.
The price was $130,000. We absolutely did not have $130,000.
Later that night, I flippantly said something to my husband, Ryan, and he laughed.
So I did what any rational person would do and posted on Facebook:
“Does anybody have $130,000 burning a hole in their pocket?” And then went to bed.
And for whatever reason–call it a God thing. It was God, courage and wine. I’m telling you, there are dynasties built on wine courage and God. The next morning, a local couple messaged me. They were looking for an investment opportunity. Two weeks later, they purchased the building. I purchased some equipment and started renting from them.
I offered to stay on part time at my job, but that wasn’t really going to be conducive to what they needed.
So I quit.
I had substitute taught in the past, so I renewed my substitute teaching license thinking I’d need something to supplement this until it got good–because I literally was taking pots and pans from home, utensils from home. I had no money to bankroll this. I didn’t take out a small business loan. There was no five-year plan. I didn’t go get investors. This literally was me just figuring it out–and probably some stupidity.
I never once had to use my substitute teaching license.
For a long time, I was a one-woman show. I wasn’t paying anybody. I was paying my rent, my utilities, buying supplies and I wasn’t taking any kind of pay per se.
But I wasn’t crying in my car anymore.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t tears. There were definitely tears. But the problem became that I loved being there so much, I didn’t want to be anywhere else–because I truly, truly love being at work.
The Grocery Receipt Moment
One day I asked Kate to look for something in my email on my phone, and there were all these unanswered messages. She said, “Mom, you can’t run a business without responding to people.”
I was like, “I really am doing the best I can. I just don’t have enough time.”
Then she’s digging through my purse looking for a piece of paper and finds a grocery receipt I had started in one corner and written all the way around until it filled the entire receipt. My personal cell phone number was my shop phone. If it rang, I answered. There were no systems in place. No standard operating procedures.
She said, “This is not going to work. Let me help you.”
So she started answering emails in the evenings, coming over on her lunch, and creating systems.
We opened in June 2019. Kaitlyn came on part time in November. That fall we hosted a big open house and ribbon cutting. 300 people showed up. We put up a tent. We had tent heaters. We rented cocktail tables. I did pulled pork, Monterey ranch chicken, apps–we did a ton of food, and we gave it away. If you came, you ate.
We had a fantastic December. In January, Kaitlyn said to her employer, “I can’t be here full time anymore. I need to go work for my mom part time.” So she did both.
And I’ll add, she was engaged, leaving a job where she had guaranteed income, getting ready to start her own life. Why her husband-to-be ever agreed to that… I’ll never know.
Then COVID hit.
Events started canceling. We had a couple part-time people and pretty much said, “We’ll call you if we need you.” Kaitlyn’s wedding was supposed to happen in April. It was a traumatic time all around. And we were like, “Okay… well, that was fun.”
At that point, I knew I had enough money to pay rent and utilities for a few months–even if we had to close–I could still meet my obligations.
The Pivot That Kept Us Open During COVID
At first, we started getting calls for funeral dinners. Typically in churches, women’s groups take care of funeral dinners and most of those women are older and they were not willing to meet. So families had no one to do them. We thought, “This is it. We’re going to be the funeral caterers.”
And then there was our first funeral dinner. We realized we left their side salad sitting on the counter at the shop. People were starting to show up from the burial, and we weren’t about to tell them, “Oh, we screwed this up.”
Mom whispers, “Go get the salad.”
I heard, “Get in the car.”
So I go, and I probably sat in the car for like eight minutes. I thought she was going to tell them we forgot it, give them their money back and leave. No. She would never do that.
Finally, I went back in and she’s like, silently screaming, “Where is the salad?!”
I drove from Westgate to the shop and back in maybe six minutes. We still laugh about it — and the family was lovely and so sweet, they’ve continued to be good customers. Anytime they call, I think about that.
But here’s the real thing: catering wasn’t deemed essential. So we had to figure out how to keep the doors open. We thought, “We do our box and sack lunches for catering orders, why can’t we do it for Joe Schmo off the street to order a lunch and pick it up?”
So that’s what we did.
We would put out a box lunch menu every week and people would call and order. In the beginning, they had to wait in the parking lot and we would run it out to them. Eventually they could come into the shop. And then we started thinking: if they’re already here picking up lunch… why don’t we start adding products they can get off the shelves? That’s where the retail line kind of sprung from.
That lunch pickup is what kept us going through COVID.
Then a major healthcare system called. Their staff were basically living at the hospitals. We ended up doing executive box lunches for multiple locations–three days a week, sometimes four–hundred of boxed lunches a week. My middle daughter came home from Ball State because they weren’t having in-person classes. My youngest had been working at Bob Evans and had to stop–so I put them to work. We were deemed essential. We were all able to keep working.
It was huge. And it got our name out big time.
We got so busy we couldn’t keep doing the videos and honestly, I really, really would like to get back to doing it. People comment pretty often, “Oh, I loved watching the videos.” I really enjoyed doing it. It was just a tremendous amount of work.
The RAL Form: Random Ass Lasagna
During that season, we also started doing pickup-and-go dinners. Someone ordered a lasagna–a single pan of lasagna–and we didn’t have a form for it.
So Kate created the RAL form. What we called the Random ass lasagna form.
Everything’s an option. You want to call it, we’ll make it. Even today.
It wasn’t just lasagna. It was enchiladas, pulled pork, beef and noodles–on and on and on. It was just as easy to make five lasagnas as it was to make one. So I made the one being picked up and posted on Facebook, “I’m gonna have lasagnas to pick up if somebody wants them.”
On Friday nights, the parking lot would be filled with cars pulling in to pick up their orders and going.
And I’m pretty certain the people who lived next to us on Golden Avenue did not appreciate the chaos, but they were the loveliest, sweetest people. They let us park in their driveway. Culligan would let us park in their lot too. People were tremendously generous with us in the beginning.
And they got us to where we are today. Anybody that claims they built their small business on their own is either naive or lying because that’s certainly not our reality.
Lessons, Growth, and What We Know Now
Over the years, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve had opportunities that taught us tons. Some things looked like failures from the outside–but they were 100% lessons, and they’ve gone on to make what we do better and make us stronger business owners and leaders.
We say all the time our number one strength is our ability to pivot.
If there ever comes a day where the model stops working then we’ll figure out what the next thing is that people want. We’re here to serve our customers in whatever way they want to be served, and whatever products they want.
We’ve been in this location almost three years now. Seven years in business total. We don’t take it lightly that we are still here and still thriving.
We’re grateful and thankful every single day that we get to do this–and we understand it comes with responsibility. We take that very seriously.
And it all started from my side of the kitchen.
