From our series on culinary entrepreneurs on Martha's Vineyard more today on the Mederios family. The story comes to us from oral histories in the Martha’s Vineyard Museum archive located Edgartown, Massachusetts. Barber Allen Mederios was born in 1903. She grew up on Martha’s Vineyard on a family farm. She says, Her, “mother made seven pies every week, and she had a lovely little pantry where she” stored her pies. She also made cookies and cakes. Farm wives like her mom made their own butter for baking. Mederios reminiscences, mother “made all the butter and put her butter in little rolls about so long and about that big around and packed them all in a jar with brine in it we had butter all winter long.”
Takeaways: Making and selling homemade pies as well as homemade butter can be extremely profitable if it is done well and marketed with savvy. In contrast to Mederios’ mother, today we have the advantage of the internet to help they would be entrepreneur know the best price for their product and places to market the product. Although selling locally could be a great opportunity, you also have the ability to sell products even like pies and butter online. I’ve seen entrepreneurs selling perishable products like cakes online on the show Shark Tank make a killing. Just start out small, stay at a debt, and build as you go. Perhaps most critical is both hard work and a willingness to learn from others, from what you can find online, what’s available in terms of resources locally. One of the greatest treasure in US towns and places like Martha’s Vineyard is the public library where one can find thousands of books on baking and butter making, sales, marketing, as well as other topics.
