The Paleo Palate Café is a revolutionary online kitchen with the goal to create the same or better-tasting products using all-natural ingredients essentially free from additives and artificial flavours. We spoke to founder Snehal Vaidya about her motivation and her experience running her own business.
Ownr: What inspired you to set up The Paleo Palate Café?
Snehal: While health had always been a priority, a couple of years ago I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. I started with conventional medicine and for about 2 years, however, my condition only seemed to get worse. I started to do some basic internet research and to my surprise, found a whole new way of treatment – simply changing the food you eat. And thus, began my journey of change…
The Paleo Palate Café initially started as a food blog where I started experimenting with different diets but slowly transitioned to Paleo. This is when my health started to improve and I was beginning to feel better, more energized and felt like I could get through the day without being weighed down by my body.
While I did continue with the food blog for a while, my husband Neil convinced me to get my products into the market as he felt clean foods were being underrepresented. And thus, The Paleo Palate Café turned into a tangible business.
Ownr: What do you love about being your own boss? What keeps you motivated?
Snehal: I love the fact that I can experiment with my ideas, take responsibility for my actions and suffer my consequences.
I am also super passionate about maintaining good health through clean eating. Our main goal is to increase the awareness of clean eating and seeing people continue to eat food filled with lousy ingredients keeps me motivated on how we as a brand have so much to do in terms of changing others’ mindsets.
Ownr: What has been your biggest success or earliest win?
Snehal: My biggest win, even today, is when a customer walks up to me, tastes my products and goes, ‘are you sure this is gluten-free? And Paleo too?’. People have a prejudice that gluten-free and healthy products don’t taste good and that is exactly the thing that we want to change.
Ownr: What do you remember about the initial days of The Paleo Palate Café? Anything you can share about your experience of using Ownr to set up?
Snehal: Frankly, we are still in our early days, but in the beginning, we had no clue about anything. We are not from a business-focused family and had so many inhibitions. When it came to packaging, labeling, and marketing, we had no idea how to handle it. We only knew our food, that was all.
All it took was taking that first step. We started approaching retailers and taking any advice they had to offer, such as ways to improve our product and make it more marketable. Ownr helped us register the business in the most legit way with a simple click of a button. It was almost unbelievable how easy it is to set-up your own business.
Ownr: What’s the hardest part of running a business of this nature? Is there anything you wish you knew before you started? Anything you would approach differently?
Snehal: With our bigger competitors taking over the health food sector, it is often difficult to get people to know that you even exist. As a company, we believe we have a niche (i.e. clean eating and paleo compliant food) and our goal is to reach the pockets of people who are conscious about what they eat and want to be aware of everything they are putting into their bodies. I wish we knew more specifics about who those people are but finding them is all a part of the learning curve.
Ownr: Are there any tips you’d like to share with other entrepreneurs starting their business journey?
Snehal: Don’t ever doubt yourself and say that you can’t do something. That inner voice might just be the motivation you need to get where you want to go.
Learn more about The Paleo Palate Café
Website: www.thepaleopalatecafeshop.com
Instagram: @thepaleopalatecafe
Facebook: @thepaleopalatecafe
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