Key ingredients of a successful food business to be served at local festival

Whether opening a bakery, café or food truck or selling home-made biscuits from a market-stall, the recipe for success is the same according to The School of Artisan Food.

The school, who will be delivering classes at Sheffield Food Festival later this month, has had a huge impact on the local food scene with entrepreneurs from Forge Bakehouse, Seven Hills Bakery, Sunshine Pizza Oven, The Bake Lab and Ren’s Cakery all being alumni of the School’s courses.

These are as well as staff from Depot, Tamper, Hagglers Corner and Rude Shipyard are among those who have trained there.

Yvonne O’Donovan, Head of Business and Enterprise at The School of Artisan Food will be at Sheffield Food Festival sharing her expertise into how to make money from food on Sunday 28 May at 4.30-5pm.

Yvonne O’Donovan

Taking place in the Kitchen Theatre Marquee, the ‘Making Money from Food’ 30 minute talk is open to anyone who has an interest in discovering their inner entrepreneur and will offer a taster of the type of invaluable guidance offered by two-day Food Business Start Up at The School of Artisan Food.

Yvonne has worked on numerous community, culture and agriculture projects as well as founding her own companies in food, music and education. At the School, Yvonne delivers the Food Business Start-Up course as well as the ‘setting up an artisan food business’ module of the full-time Advanced Diploma in Baking.

She said: “I’m delighted to take this opportunity to pass on my knowledge to anyone planning to set up their own artisan food business. It’s great to see that some of the alumni of The School are now exhibitors at the festival having taken a successful leap into setting up their own food venture and I hope this year inspires more people to take those next steps.”

The School’s baking tutor David Carter will also be delivering a mini-masterclass on how to make the perfect sourdough in the Theatre Kitchen Marquee in Peace Gardens on Sunday May 28 from 4-4:30pm.

Julie Byrne, managing director at The School of Artisan Food said: “Sheffield has a vibrant independent food scene and the festival is a lovely celebration of food in all its guises.

“As we have played an important part in the development of many of the artisan food businesses across the region, the event is a fantastic way for us to share our knowledge to help support the development of artisan food production skills and the building of sustainable businesses.”

Sheffield Food Festival is taking place at Peace Gardens in the city centre from May 27 – 29.