Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in food and beverage but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Tatianna Vassilopoulos, founder, and owner of JP's Delights, located in Davie, FL, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

JP's Delights creates premier preserves for the adventurous palates. We supply customers both directly from our event and farmer's market booths and indirectly through luxury hotels and upscale eateries. Our unique preserves cater to the environmentally conscious and those with special dietary needs, whether due to health or religious reasons. They are so much more than just preserves; but can be used in every step of your meal to prepare a wonderful treat. Our real value is in our distinct flavors.

Our consumers are bored with traditional flavors and hungry for new preserve options that are healthy and interesting. Busy consumers want the convenience of fast meal preparation options. They want to save money by only buying one option for everyone in the family while being reassured that it's a healthy choice respecting their special dietary and religious needs.

We're one of the only companies to present options other than sweet. We created 82 deliciously unique recipes of savory, spicy, & alcohol-infused flavors of organic preserves, jams, jellies, chutneys, confits, conserves, fruit butters, and marmalades. They all currently come in glass jars that are 1.25 oz., 4 oz., 8 oz., 12 oz., in variety packs, or in gift baskets that range from $5 to $125.

Our goal is to make distinctive specialty preserves for the environmentally conscious, religious needs and restrictive diets in unusual flavors. We have a vision of helping and serving people by improving the quality of life for others, individuals, and society. We want our purpose to be to provide excellent food to excellent people. As we grow, we plan to employ women, minorities, and people with disabilities to create quality preserves.

We source our seasonal ingredients locally to bring fresh, tropical, and unique delights, straight from farm to table, small-batch goodness using our multicultural family recipes to your family. We cater to special needs, including organic, kosher, vegan, and gluten-free. We are on a mission to create a better world by employing fair economic and labor practices, promoting and incentivizing recycling, reusing, and reducing, and donating 10% of profits to cancer research, making a healthier world around us.

Tell us about yourself

My name is Tatianna Vassilopoulos, and I'm the founder and baker in chief of JP's Delights. My talents are in creating distinctive recipes. I draw on my family's international recipes to create preserves that have won prizes at cooking competitions and received rave reviews in our taste testing. My Monkey Butter and Eggplant Cinnamon Jam both won back-to-back 1st place awards at the South Florida Fair. After a couple of weeks of reflection and serendipity, JP's Delights was born. I named the company after my dad, John-Paul. Since then, I have spent the following years taking various business courses and seminars such as the City of Fort Lauderdale's BEAM's Academy Series, SCORE's Simple Steps for Starting Your Business, and the Start-Up Now Entrepreneur Program through CareerSource Broward.

I surround myself with an amazing team of family, friends, mentors, and advisors who are always teaching me. Together we have come up with a fresh concept, a popular flavor catalog, and an ambitious but achievable plan to build it into a thriving new business.

I have applied my background as a researcher to my new venture through transferable skills. As a good researcher, I am open-minded and must also adopt a critical way of thinking. It has taught me to be detailed oriented, meticulous, hardworking, diligent, focused, and devoted to a specific field of interest. Constantly updating knowledge is of utmost importance and can be accomplished in several ways, such as following the current literature, attending conferences, and exchanging ideas with colleagues working in a relevant field which all will come in handy in my new venture. Furthermore, a modern researcher must be resourceful and inventive in order to transform scientific queries and hypotheses into a realizable protocol which is exactly what I have had to do as an entrepreneur.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

I'd say it would be gaining the necessary education, skills, and experience to bring my ideas to life. In addition, it would be having my mission validated by the people we worked with, stores, restaurants, etc. I was proud when all my research paid off, my taste tests went well, and then going on to win two first-place awards really made me ecstatic. However, when it went beyond just the flavors, and I gained that support for my vision, that's when I knew I was on the right track. Nothing beats the feeling of your first organic customer finding you.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

One of the hardest things is being disciplined. I want to make my dad proud, as well as all those who support me, so there is no room for slacking. I have to be focused, manage my time, prioritize, persevere, and work hard. I thought I had done challenging work before, but it's nothing compared to working for myself. It's funny because I wanted to be my own boss and set my own hours to be able to work from anywhere and travel, but as it turns out, that just means I'm working 24/7 as there's always more to be done behind the scenes. I love the creativity of creating recipes and the hands-on part of interacting with our customers, but mostly it's a lot of responsibilities I don't necessarily relish and duties that are beyond my scope like marketing, contracts, accounting, being a secretary, handling finances, etc. It also gets expensive quickly with investing in yourself in the beginning, making mistakes as you learn, and while you're pushing to grow.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Stay optimistic.
  2. Strengthen your network of co-founder industry friends.
  3. Don't underestimate yourself.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

Lastly, I want to share something my teacher told me. I struggle with a stutter at times, and that has made being the spokesperson for my company challenging. I would always try to get out of public speaking in school, but there is no hiding now. He told me, "You are a CEO. What you have to say is worth the wait." That really put things into perspective for me, and it lets me focus on what's important.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://store.jpsdelights.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JPsDelight
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jpsdelights/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JpDelights
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jps-delights/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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