November at Kitchen Table Projects

For many people working in the food and retail industry, November means one thing and one thing only: preparing for Christmas. Artisans and retailers may have spent much of the past month putting together their festive preparations, but there’s been plenty of events going on to keep the Kitchen Table Projects team more than busy.

November saw us welcome a new addition to our team, Clare, who will be helping out at KTP a couple of days a week. She’s just started a Masters in the Anthropology of Food here in London, and will be helping to further build the KTP community.

We had great opportunity to network with lots of different people from the food industry at the Roythornes Food Business Breakfast. Inspirational business stories were swapped over a yummy breakfast spread, followed by a morning of networking with faces familiar and new. If you work in the food industry then look out for the next Roythornes foodie event - they’re a great opportunity to meet like-minded people and pick up some invaluable insider tips and advice.

Although many of the larger trade shows concerning the food industry take place earlier on in the year, November offered us the opportunity to attend Food Matters Live and BBC Good Food Show. With thousands of the public flocking to see hundreds of producers and celebrity chefs, the Good Food Shows are always a firm fixture in any foodies diary. This year we saw some of our Amazing Artisans exhibiting their delicious wares, including Hershil, from Dips’, who had an amazing time meeting our favourite builder baker, Richard, runner up from series 5 of The Great British Bake Off. We have to admit Hershil, we were pretty jealous!

Then there were innovative artisans aplenty at the Escape the City Mini Food Festival. The event, hosted by special guests Georgia and Ben from the Kitchen Cooperative, and Max, a local soon-to-be-cafe owner, was driven by inspirational stories and pitches from innovative new artisan producers. Some of our favourites included Morse Toad (personalised chocolate messages), Sweet Hangovers Bakery (alcohol infused bakes), CELIA Lager (gluten free beer), The Grape Club (subscription-based wine club), Hello Sunshine (flavoured butter, whose business had been thought up only days previous to the event!) MoJu (fresh cold-pressed juices) and Kakawa Tea (Peruvian cocoa tea). The second half of the evening was given over to the artisans, allowing people to try their products, some of which were launching to the public for the very first time. It’s always fantastic to meet innovative new producers and hear their stories...we look forward to hearing more from all the businesses featured very soon.

So what’s in store for December? Things will be a bit quiet in the KTP office from the 19th December until the 5th of January - although we’ll still be twittering away and contactable by email, so feel free to drop us a line if you fancy a chat. In between consuming copious amounts of mulled wine, mince pies and turkey sandwiches, we’ll be around at a couple of events, too, including the Impact Hub Brixton Christmas Market Party on the 11th of December. Until then, we’ll be working towards the launch of our new website, and preparing some awesome things coming your way in 2015.

We’ve had a great year and look forward to all the exciting things that 2015 has in store. From all the team at KTP, we hope you have a fantastic Christmas and New Year!

Speciality and Fine Food Fair 2014

We may have had a pretty hectic couple of months, but we’re already gearing up for some pretty exciting events in the Kitchen Table Projects calendar over the next couple of months. This September, we’re really excited to be heading to the Speciality Food Fair - the biggest and most comprehensive fine and speciality food exhibition in the UK. Whilst the show will be a great place to be inspired by all things new in the food world, we’ll predominantly be on the look out for some emerging artisans who are interested in getting involved with Kitchen Table Projects. With talks, cookery demonstrations and business workshops scheduled across the three days, as well as over 700 producers showcasing thousands of new and exciting products, we’ll certainly be busy! If you're interested in attending the show but aren't quite sure what to expect, then have a little look at the video from last year's event:

If you’re an artisan who is exhibiting, or if you’re just popping along to take a peek into the future of the foodie world, then get in touch! We’ll be at the festival over all three days and it would be great to meet some of you who are interested in finding out a little more about what Kitchen Table Projects are up to. Drop us an email at hello@kitchentableprojects.com, or tweet us @KitchTablePro - see you in September!

Monday Motivation

...We couldn't agree more ourselves! Problems of a foodie eh?

What's your #MondayMotivation? Tweet us @KitchTablePro

Website Building on a Budget

Now let’s be honest, most of us would rather spend our time getting creative in the kitchen rather than dealing with our website. Whilst the daunting tasks are (unfortunately) necessary for any business, they don’t need to take over.  We've discovered that creating a website can actually be cheap, fast and quite a lot of fun.

With absolutely no budget and no coding knowledge, a small start-up like us needed to get creative. First impressions are everything, so here’s a little post about how you can easily build your own website in no time at all – it’s so easy we think you could even get your granny to have a go!

First things first, we needed to purchase our domain name.  This is actually a really simple process - we went to 123 - Reg to check that kitchentableprojects.com was available and it was! So we smashed open the piggy bank and purchased our name for a really good price (less than a tenner). 

The next step was to start planning our site. We tried a load of website builders: Weebly, Wordpress and SquareSpace, which, with our rookie knowledge of HTML coding (computer stuff) meant that our ideas didn’t always come out quite how we wanted them on the page.

Eventually, we came across WIX. They had hundreds of templates to choose from and personalise which made turning our ideas into a reality quick and easy. After just a few hours of exploring, we had developed the site in accordance with our brand - we knew we wanted it to be personal, so we used our own illustrations to supplement the pages. All we did was draw, colour, take a photo of our drawings and upload it to WIX! This was cheap, the options were infinite (because Tara could draw anything) and a lot of fun! We all got involved with the illustrations; why not take a look at our attempts here.

If you’re now thinking “that’s great… But I can’t draw” never fear, Canva is here! It’s an amazing site on a mission to make designing easy. It’s time to boot your designer through the door and wheel out granny again. Canva makes designing so simple that even if you don’t have great computer skills, you’ll definitely be able to create something special here.

Once we were happy with our final design, we linked it up to our domain and optimised our keywords and content for the best results with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). There are loads of guides out there that make this really easy too - have a Google! Just a few days later we were up and running on the world wide web with a website that we love.

WIX provide really useful video tutorials for practically every aspect of building a site with them, so if you ever get stuck just fix up a cuppa, sit back, and watch someone take you through the process step-by-step. If you'd like any further information about how we made our site, or have an idea of what you'd like to see in the future, just drop us an email- we'd love to hear from you!