Meet Patricia Gamboa of Working Woman’s Food in Orange County ~ Irvine

Today we’d like to introduce you to Patricia Gamboa.

Patricia, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
When I got married, my home life was filled with moments where friends and loved ones gathered around my table. Never was there a Sunday, holiday, or even a Friday Happy Hour that wasn’t filled with a big meal, a lot of people, and huge laughter.

Fast forward 12 years. I found myself divorced and living alone with a 7-day workweek.

Weekday happy hours, Saturday night dinners, and slow Sunday brunches were gone.

I knew the pain of eating alone, I also knew it didn’t have to be this way. Food became a reminder of the past, but I also knew food could be healing. I needed to get back to cooking and gathering.

I launched this blog amidst a long divorce. Working Woman’s Food is where I started slowly cooking and gathering for people again. It was nothing more than sharing simple gourmet recipes and stories of small gatherings.

One day mom and I were talking about how she managed our home when I was growing up with four brothers. All this while being the CFO to an international import and export business.

She told me about the way she would plan her weekly menus and how easy grocery shopping was for her. She reminded me I grew up in a home where we always ate dinner together. On Sundays was always when aunts, uncles, and what felt like a hundred cousins would descend on our home. It felt like we ate for hours. She managed all this with a simple method of menu planning and stress-free grocery shopping. I quickly learned her approach by creating my own weekly menus, and grocery shopping became easy.

Once I got the hang of this approach, I thought every successful working woman should have this in their back pocket. Every woman should be equipped and encouraged to cook and gather.

So, the Weekly Menu Guides and Shopping Lists email was born.

Today, Working Woman’s Food serves over 2,200 people nationwide. We send out Weekly Menu Guides and Shopping Lists. Our Shopping Lists are now linked to Amazon Fresh and InstaCart so you can shop for your groceries from the convenience of your phone. We now have a cooking shop where we offer the right kind of tools to make cooking and entertaining even easier. A pantry shop gets our customers the right ingredients, so their meals are even yummier.

Cooking with love and the best ingredients is key to nourishing. The way we gather matters. We’re here to make sure every working woman is equipped and empowered to cook and gathered so we all become better contributors to culture.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It’s been scary and chaotic from day one. Running a business is a balance between taking things one day at a time while still keeping an eye on the future. As a founder and entrepreneur, ambiguity comes with the territory. When I started Working Woman’s Food in 2015, I also owned a corporate event planning and production company. Managing both businesses was not sustainable. I had to make a choice between one or the other and at that time, I chose the events planning company.

I kept Working Woman’s Food on the shelf for five years before I found it was time to bring it back to the market. When the Covid-19 shutdown happened our events planning business dried up and it was time to shutter the business. Through a series of lucky events, I was able to put Working Woman’s Food back in the market. I found a lot of busy individuals struggling with the stress of cooking, menu planning, and grocery shopping. We want to solve this problem for them.

Raising capital has been a challenge. We’ve been denied bank loans. We ran out of money. We had to establish complementary lines of revenue to fund our launch year.

No one brought our first menu planning product subscription, so I had to pull this from the shelf and start over with its design.

When I wrote this business plan, our projections were based on assumptions. Now that we have real consumer data, it is going to take twice as long and twice as much money to get us to net positive on our balance sheet.

I know what we are doing will make a difference in people’s lives. It is going to take endurance, innovation, and resilience to see this tangibly.

Working Woman’s Food – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Menu planning and grocery shopping are stressful. That was pre-pandemic. Now meal planning and cooking happen in the midst of working from home, staying at home, schooling at home, and so much more. All of these activities overwhelm the already full plates of our customers. Working Woman’s Food is here to make meal prep, grocery shopping, and cooking stress-free.

The opportunity in the market: Convenience is available everywhere but in the kitchen.

We are surrounded by subscription services that automate everything from coffee to toothbrush heads to home fitness. Yet there’s no real solution for food. Meal kits try to solve this problem but fail. They cover 3-4 recipes each week, and prices are high. A person typically eats 21 meals a week. With a meal kit only taking care of 4 meals a week, what happens to the other 17 meals?

Menu planning and grocery shopping create more stress in daily life. The complexity of feeding ourselves and our households has yet to be simplified.

Our solution: Our weekly menu guides and gourmet grocery boxes is a turnkey solution.

● 28-min recipes
● Breakfast, lunch, and dinner menu items tailor-made to consider a customer’s dietary restrictions and
preferred diets.
● Our menus include leftovers you’ll love.
● Pandemic has accelerated grocery shopping from our screens instead of our stores, our grocery lists are
linked to and InstaCart.
● Subscription gourmet grocery boxes supplying a week’s worth of gourmet meals – available Q1 2021

Our menu planning and grocery box service don’t just figure out meals so our customers can eat, our service transforms customers from being hurried stressed-out individuals to being relaxed gourmet chefs.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Working Woman’s Food is the 7th enterprise I’ve put into the market place. This only means I have experienced a lot of failures, several near misses, and a few successes from which I can draw my definition of success.

Simply put success is something you share.

When a financial goal is reached ~ you share that win. When the team increases margins ~ you give them a piece of the profits. When one gets recognized ~ you acknowledge the individuals (by name) who got you noticed. When the product through the practice of refinement and iteration and finally becomes a great product ~ you share the product with the world.

Success is an outcome. It is on the way to making everyone (including yourself) win the day.

Pricing:

• Our daily recipes and weekly menu guides are free to our subscribers

Contact Info:

• Website: WorkingWomansFood.com
• Email: Hello@WorkingWomansFood.com
• Instagram: @WorkingWomansFood
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WorkingWomansFood/

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