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Today I'm talking with Matt at The Cottage Foodie. You can follow on Facebook as well. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe. 00:29 share it with a friend or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Matt Rosen, also known as Sergeant Shortbread at the Cottage Foodie, because he has a new thing going on. Good afternoon, Matt. How are you? I'm doing fantastic, Mary. Thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. Just to catch people up, Matt and I talked quite a while ago about his business, Sergeant Shortbread. He makes fabulous shortbread, I have heard. 00:54 And then he decided he wanted to do this new thing called the cottage foodie. So this is kind of a catch up and to talk about that. So tell me about yourself and what you're doing now. Yeah. So like you said, I started out in the cottage food community or the cottage food industry as Sergeant Shortbread. I still am a cottage food producer here in Minnesota. Yeah, I love it. I don't know if I'll ever quit. 01:23 Physically, that might be the only way that I stop, but we'll have to see. Only time will tell, I guess. But yeah, I've been a cottage food producer here in Minnesota for, seven years now. Yeah, seven years in April 2018 I started. yeah, like I said, been a cottage food producer since then and about a year and a half ago or so just had a... 01:50 I don't know, a revelation if you want to call it. I'm not sure what exactly you'd call it, but I just felt like there was a need for a directory of cottage food producers. for those of us who remember the yellow pages, maybe I'm dating myself here a bit, but. I remember them. Yeah. There's no digital yellow pages for cottage food producers. look for. 02:19 for this and I saw there are some out there but it didn't look like they were really being managed or maintained and I wasn't sure if they were still being used and so I thought well I'm gonna do a new upgraded version of this and so yeah, joined up with a social media, a digital marketing company and we created a platform for cottage food producers to become members and have profiles on 02:48 the cottage foodie and then in return, what I do is I do some of their digital marketing forum. I don't take over their digital marketing and so I tell them, keep doing what you're doing. This is just gonna be in addition to what you're doing. So I run Facebook ads for them. Anywhere we have members, I run paid advertising in their areas. So for example, I think 03:17 in Minnesota here alone, we're close to 70 members. so essentially I just run it in the entire state of Minnesota, just because I'm not going to pick and choose little communities. Once I do that, I'm going to be covering the whole state practically anyway. But take for example, California, I think we have four or five in California. Two or three of them are in kind of the Los Angeles area and that surrounding area. And then two or three of them are up in like the San Jose Sacramento area. So 03:47 So I just run specific ads within those areas. I'm not running in the entire state of California. I mainly just want to highlight the cottage food producers within their areas. So for example, I might put San Jose in the Facebook when I'm doing a targeted audience, I'll put San Jose plus 20 miles. And so it'll be San Jose and then 20 miles from downtown San Jose, it'll cover that. 04:16 So yeah, that's what the cottage foodie is all about. I grew my business, my cottage food business from being a cottage food producer to moving into a commercial kitchen. So I do have a wholesale food manufacturing license on top of my cottage food producer registration. So I just wanted to help other cottage food producers grow their businesses if that's what they wanna do. If their goal is to... 04:46 move into a commercial kitchen and sell in grocery stores and coffee shops and things like that, then I just want to be able to help them achieve that. And I know that one of the hardest things that we as cottage food producers will run into is, and I hear it all the time, how do I get my name out there? Nobody knows I exist. I can't hire somebody to do my marketing and I can't afford. 05:...