Hidden Gems: Meet Miriam Lando of Zippie’s Creations by Double M

Today we’d like to introduce you to Miriam Lando.

Hi Miriam, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Our family comes from a long line of professional and semi-professional cooks spanning across Poland and Ukraine through at least the end of the 19th Century. Our great-grandparents were known to have owned the largest Kosher food establishment at the time in the city of Warsaw. Later on, those very same great-grands were forced to relocate to the now famous city of Odessa (in south Ukraine) while fleeing the persecution of Polish Jews in the 1910s. There they briefly owned a hotel in the very heart of the city before it was confiscated by the upcoming Russian Bolshevik Revolution. That hotel was a local attraction – thanks, of course, to the homemade food prepared on the hotel premises! A quarter of a century later, now in the World War II era Russian Ural Mountains, our grandparents managed to create something out of almost nothing in terms of ingredients and extremely scarce vegetation to support wounded Red Army soldiers at a local hospital.

In the decades that ensued – through regimes and their collapses, and, of course, economic woes and upheavals – our own parents were following the same direction of the lineage before them – creating scrumptious something out of almost nothing! Actually – scrumptious everything! Fast forward now to us coming to the United States in the mid-1990s – luckily with our parents – we had to put their knowledge of cooking “on a shoestring budget” to the ultimate use while living on State Welfare as immigrants for the first couple of years. Once we were on “our own”, we continued their tradition of inviting troves of guests and cooking Sabbath food at our local Jewish Temple. This time, though, the somethings” weren’t made with nothing; they were created with the American dream abundance of everything! Years later, along came the COVID-19 pandemic and all three of us active working adults found ourselves out of jobs for an uncertain period of time.

Old skills to the rescue! We started volunteering to cook at home and drop off/deliver our food to those affected by the pandemic; Weekly meal prep, Sabbath food, birthday food – any kind of food – we enjoyed the process so much that we finally decided to open a catering business! It took us about a year-and-a-half of research to develop our truly unique concept of clean, healthy, 100% Kosher multi-cuisine food that, first and foremost, resonates with who we are. “Nothing by the book” has become our motto, although it sometimes “bites us back” when we have to deal with “purists”, and “traditionalists”! *wink wink*!

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
In the beginning, the road was surprisingly smooth! In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic – when 3500 LA food establishments closed down and people were sitting at home and were not going anywhere – we totally and euphorically enjoyed our early BIG SUCCESS!! 96-97% of our customers would return again and again!

Well, the real problems started in the end of the pandemic, when people stopped sitting at home, the food establishments began to re-open, and, on top of everything – food prices skyrocketed. Our old now loyal customers returned less often than before – don’t take me wrong – they still do, but by far not as they used to. The new prospects were exhibiting some pickiness in terms of pricing requests; even if the prices were right and the menus were good – prospective customers were dropping us like hot potatoes without an apparent reason!

We hit some very choppy seas in a very un-euphoric way – very much according to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s saying, “…a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor”.

Those stormy seas made us not just stronger in our profession but also much more nimble, agile, and waste-free. Our Menu now consists of more than 800 items, and we love discovering our prospective customer’s particular circumstances. We thoroughly enjoy designing solutions around our client’s specific needs and wants and, most importantly, around their realistic budgets. Remember our great grandparent’s principle – CREATE SCRUMPTIOUS SOMETHING OUT OF ALMOST NOTHING?!!

We’re on a much more even keel now – old customers are still returning and new coming in at a steady pace!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Zippie’s Creations by Double M?
First and foremost – we are Agile! We provide and sell custom Solutions Not only around the food itself, but around the customer’s realistic budget – in iterations if necessary. And we just LOVE to assist the newbies who never hosted a catered event themselves! Going into the “heart of the matter” and being able to co-create a custom, waste-free optimized solution can bring so much joy! Well, not as much as just being able to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes and simply caring about our fellow human beings! :))

Secondly – we found ourselves bringing extra value to and elevating events and hosting businesses themselves! For example, our new client who is an emerging Greater Los Angeles getaway destination, has included our food as one of their features. We basically create a “modular”, “self-contained” food service “plug-in”, specifically customized for someone else’s business or workflow. And we can be “tone-setters” or “influencers” too if asked or allowed, of course!

Thirdly, our food is very, very “clean” – we do most of the cooking ourselves – no “pre-processed” ingredients used. Additionally, everything, including the food production itself, conforms to the strictest of Kosher law standards. For example, we have an appointed person who specifically inspects and cleans produce from possible bugs. We are also very careful to choose antibiotic and hormone-free meats and wild-caught fish from our suppliers. We won’t serve what we won’t eat ourselves! And we love to use more expensive wines in our cooking. Kosher, of course 😉

Finally, we are very much concerned with eliminating any possible excessiveness, waste, and unnecessary overheads so as to make our prices at least 20 – 25% lower than our competitors or to give more bang for your buck! That’s why we always ask our prospects to share what our colleagues from other catering brands have offered them – to either match or to exceed! I would say – price reduction by design!

Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Collaborating with our customers is at the center of our work – they are our project sponsors, stakeholders, and teammates all together. We need their input on all stages that leads to the food preparation and ends with on-site service.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.zippiescreations.com
• Instagram: @ZippiesLA
• Facebook: Facebook.com/zippiesla
• Other: https://goo.gl/maps/BQfAmGUMKxGYMVs99

Image Credits
Zippies Creations by Double M