Hello! I’m Catherine Moran, founder, writer and content curator for www.myartisanbusiness.com. I am the host of the podcast The Artisan Food & Drink Business Show, which you can listen to on this website.
Although born and bred in Mayo, I live in a deeply rural setting of the UK, which straddles the English counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire, and which is in sniffing distance of Wales.
I’m a keen vegetable and fruit grower and am lucky enough to have a three-acre garden to grow seasonal and (unofficially) organic produce.
A labour of love has been to reinstate an old, derelict orchard on my patch of ground. I’ve planted about thirty fruit trees so far. The fruit enables me to make good things to eat and drink.
Shortly after buying my property I discovered several old damson trees on my land. I found out that my property (previously a sixty-acre farm) used to be a damson farm and a damson collection point. The damson trees are an important variety known as Shropshire Prune. Because of their provenance I subsequently helped the local Slow Food group, Slow Food Ludlow Marches to get the Shropshire Prune into the Ark of Taste.
Well, I’m going to sound like I’m food obsessed. That’s probably true, and food isn’t a bad obsession to have, is it? I like eating seasonally and being in control of what does and doesn’t go on my produce, so I also grow a lot of my own vegetables. Making the raised beds for the vegetable patch nearly finished me off. But I’d do it all again.
I’m a dog lover, and Darcey, my young kooikerhondje spaniel ensures I get well over my 10,000 steps per day. My dog is good for the body and good for the mind-soul.
So, apart from growing fruit and vegetables and going on long dog walks, what else am I interested in? I’m an Apple fangirl and love tech in general and the intersection of tech and food and drink promotion and production in particular. Revolutions will happen in those spaces.
I’m fascinated by entrepreneurship and the opportunity being an entrepreneur gives you to be (more) in control of your own destiny. I find the business of food and drink especially interesting. I love reading about and talking to indy food and drink producers. A good enough reason to consume artisan food and drink is that generally, it tastes a hundred times better than mass-produced food and drink. As importantly, for me, it’s also a way of kicking back against the blandness, the sameness and the soulessness that results from a handful of big food companies controlling what we eat and drink.
Bear with me while I mention that in my own food producing days I won a ‘Best Producer’ award from The Observer and a ‘Food Producer of the Year’ award from Waitrose/Country Living.
Winning the Observer Food Monthly ‘Best Producer’ award was equally thrilling and opened the door to several prestigious food outlets.
OK. Bragging over. As an ex-artisan food producer I am uniquely positioned to talk to other artisan producers about their business, and the challenges they face. That’s why you should subscribe to my email newsletter on the top right of this page (it’ll be short and snappy and spam-free) to find out when I release a new episode of The Artisan Food & Drink Business Show. You just never know what you might learn 🙂
Thank you for reading to the end and I look forward to talking artisan food and drink with you soon.
Catherine Moran