Nov 11 2024 74 mins
Today we are chatting with Donna Del Rey, owner of Relish Culinary Adventures.
Relish Culinary Adventures (love the name!) is a culinary program that brings together talented chefs and fabulous cuisine at a variety of captivating rural locations including farms and orchards, to create one-of-a-kind authentic cooking classes, culinary tours and excursions, and catering services.
Based in Healdsburg, California, in the heart of the Sonoma County wine country, Relish offers culinary events on a wide range of topics from wine country cuisine to ethnic specialties, cheese making to wild mushroom foraging - the mushroom foraging is one of my favorites! . In addition, Relish hosts activities that bring people together in the kitchen, such as private cooking parties and corporate team-building events.
Donna has such an authentic and transparent nature. Owning your own business is hard and requires a lot of resiliency, risk, leaps of faith, and strategic thinking and planning. But it sometimes requires you to react and do things that are not aligned with the initial vision and plan. And when you need to do this, you sometimes feel a sense of desperation, that you are doing everything to make your business survive, even if it doesn’t completely align with the vision. However, I believe that pivoting and diversifying is sometimes necessary in order to survive and eventually thrive. And that is what happened to Donna. She pivoted, she diversified her income streams…she survived…and now she is thriving once again. That is the real journey of an entrepreneur.
And, although Relish Culinary and its mission to connect people to where their food comes from is at the forefront of our discussion, I think Donna’s openness about her business challenges and ability to be flexible, are truly at the heart of our discussion and is such an important story to be told.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Donna!
Relish Culinary Adventures
Relish Culinary Calendar of Events
Culinary Tours
Relish Culinary Instagram
Relish Culinary Facebook
Dry Creek Peach
The Global Agritourism Network (GAN) was created to support agritourism worldwide through education, research, and advocacy. Everyone with an interest in agritourism is welcome to join for free by completing the form online at Global Agritourism Network (GAN) Registration (google.com).
Thank you for taking the time to listen to The Agri-Tourist Podcast, for supporting our inspirational guests, and for sharing my personal journey back to agriculture.