Milana D’Aniello 5:22
Yes, the asin tobuok lady.
Odette D’Aniello 5:28
Right, the salt lady. Oh my gosh, I think I have one right here. This is called dinosaur salt. Yeah, I’m sorry, egg salt.
Milana D’Aniello 5:43
Pre-colonial traditional Filipino salt. So you take saltwater, like ocean water, and you put it in a coconut husk and you roast it and you put clay over it. So it’s this long, long process of like smoked salt. And it’s what Filipinos used to do to make salt like before colonization and before the Spanish came. So it’s this like, really cool, heritage, like salt product that I saw on social media, and it went viral on social media, all these chefs started using it. And then we met the lady who sells it in the US. So we were so excited to meet her. And I personally loved talking to her because she’s like me, she’s a second-generation Filipino immigrant and her grasp on the language is in a strong, which mine isn’t super strong. But she’s recently reconnected with her culture, we connected with her family. And it’s about her journey, like reconnecting and building a relationship with like her Filipino side and her heritage. And which I loved I loved talking to her. I love talking to her team, because it’s just this like, very familiar story of like reconnection and like being proud. And I thought it was amazing because she’s more middle aged. And so I was like, at any age, you can reconnect. And so I feel like very comforted that, like, I’m reconnecting everyone else is also on their like paths and on their journey. So anytime is the correct time to like, regain that knowledge and feel so confident and like your heritage. Absolutely. I
Odette D’Aniello 7:29
totally, I mean, I totally relate. And I’ve been raised you Milana in the US, necessarily being connected to my culture. I’m a third culture kid and listeners, a third culture kid is a kid who grows up in a culture that is not the same as their parents. So that was me and my siblings, my parents grew up in the Philippines. And then we moved here when I was young to work in a bakery, actually. So we grew up in a culture that was not ours. So when I raised my kids, you know, it was this. It’s like nebulous kind of culture. Although, Mama Mila and Papa Joe did watch you so you, you know, you heard the language or Skubana language growing up, and you know, eight lukau and all kinds of Filipino foods because your grandparents raised you. But, you know, identity is super important. And, you know, I’m so glad that you met Lenny, right. What’s your name? Yeah. That’s from and then what else? What else did we do after the fact as usual? We met our new broker, FoodLuma. The team and food Lumo was just amazing and incredible. And we also met the team from one of our distributors, a few of our distributors actually were there. Pearson’s was there and we met Tony’s fine foods. They were there. Austin gourmet was there. So we had really a fun time meeting with our brokers distributors meeting with other vendors. So if you’re in the, you know, specialty food space, if you’re around in January, it’s it’s in Las Vegas, a Fancy Food Show and then in in June, it’s going to be in New York City, which will be there too. Excited. Okay, so after the fancy wood job, what
Milana D’Aniello 9:36
do we do after the Fancy Food Show? We had our open house for her Maya.
Odette D’Aniello 9:43
Right. So we had our open house, which was very, very exciting, mainly because we had hired somebody who was going to be our chef and that didn’t work out and it was really super fast. Which we’re grateful for. Because you know, you don’t want to get into things and you know when the going gets going and it to fall apart, this actually just kind of righted the ship righted itself at the beginning. So then we had our menu, kind of revised. So we decided that I was going to cook. So I became the Himaya cook and I brought out all my Filipino food, and my friends from all over the country. I mean, they came and you know, these are friends of mine, who I’d grown up with on Guam and we all cook together in the kitchen and you know, just had a really fun time. And we had our guests come and we had the best time. So much fun.
Milana D’Aniello 10:56
It was great to because we had your friends there as like support, but it was also really good that we had a set date to like work up against because we just kept talking and talking about the menu and we kept changing it and changing it. We’re like, we want to do more like this more like this. But when the day came, we needed food. At the end of the day, we needed a food so worked
Odette D’Aniello 11:20
out really well. Yeah, we had cassava cake, which we creme bruled was amazing. We had something that we eat in Guam is called latiya its cake with custard on top and cinnamon. That was delicious. Chicken Adobo, which was a hit, and some puff pastry that I put tunap Tack in, which is like a ground. Normally ground beef, but I use ground turkey. And then you we wrapped it it was. So we kind of added a twist to things. It was really so fun. And you know what? I realized after that, that my love language, and you knew that you know this as my daughter that my love language is cooking. And I can cook all day, every day, all times all kinds of stuff, I can make anything out of the fridge, I don’t use recipes. So I was just in my happy place.
Milana D’Aniello 12:27
It was it was really a fun time. And it was a will. The cooking part came was so much ease, which was amazing. Because we thought it was going to be so much harder than it was. And it did not turn out to be as hard as everyone said it was going to be at least for us, but maybe it’s because we like being in the kitchen. I made my mind. It was so much fun.
Odette D’Aniello 12:50
Like a cake from the Philippines, which is so hard to do. Like oh my god, there were like a trillion eggs in there. Well, Well mine was the reason why my parents were able to get out of poverty with my remember mama Mila made my money and sold it at the markets. And she ended up Wow, from that experience. Yeah, she made my mind that was her. That was her specialty. And she sold it. She was earning $1 teaching with Papa Joe in the province and couldn’t afford their third child, which is my little brother. And so my mom and dad started making my mind and sold it to like in the markets and then people just started just it was just became viral in that provincial way. And be the city started asking for it. And her cousin who was running her uncle’s bakery that she had worked in all her life, found out about it. And I called her and said, hey, I’ll pay you to mix my money and sell it at my bakery because you know, in the Philippines before recipes were gold. So she came and she would mix and then finally her cousin’s like, Can you can you work here? And then her cousin emigrated to Guam. So she’s, he’s like, Well, can you help run this place? So that’s how I ended up living in a bakery in the city. Because of my mom
Milana D’Aniello 14:25
I love that. I didn’t know that story. That’s amazing.
Odette D’Aniello 14:30
And she was also she also was her other thing was she sold atchara, which is a pickled papaya.
Milana D’Aniello 14:37
Which we also made.
Odette D’Aniello 14:40
Right I made I made pickled papaya. Atchara, which is a Filipino version of pickles, but it’s cooked. You know, it’s raw papaya that you, you basically cook and my mom saw that and then what else? Okay,
Milana D’Aniello 14:59
So next we packed up and went to San Diego.
Odette D’Aniello 15:08
Oh my god. After open house after open house, rented a car, okay, we rented a car, packed up, loaded the car. This
Milana D’Aniello 15:20
is the next day. This is the very next day we had our open house, working all the way up until the open house to like, get it ready. Make it cute in here, like cook. And then we cleaned on the day of the open house. Right. Next morning we packed up drove drove six hours to San Diego. Right. It was intense. We had a really intense year so far. Like, we were just going and going and going.
Odette D’Aniello 15:58
I’m tired thinking about it.
Milana D’Aniello 16:00
I’m tired thinking about it, too. We did it, though.
Odette D’Aniello 16:03
We went to we went to San Diego because there was a Tony’s Fine Foods UNFI Show, which we’ve never done before. And we went there with literally all kinds of stuff that we didn’t need because our table was so tiny. It was like six foot table. But we sure did glam it up. We had glitter fabric we had tutus on we had all kinds of disco lights. And we met new customers, old customers. You met the team from Tony’s Fine Foods who are so so fun and nice. And our broker was there. It was really so fun. And then Auntie came my sister MaryAnne. You’re anti. Right, huh?
Milana D’Aniello 16:54
Yeah. And I made everybody wear hot pink long tutus. Because I was like, if we’re going to this show, there’s going to be so many booths there. We may as well have a gimmick, and it may as well be a fun gimmick.
Odette D’Aniello 17:09
Yeah, we were like everybody else. And we’re the only kind of owners there. Everybody else was, yeah,
Milana D’Aniello 17:15
I didn’t do what we want other owner, or it was a consulting agency who was doing the show for them, which is amazing. But it was really fun to, like, be in the business, be the owners know exactly the story. You know, it was like, fun to be in control of our narrative. Because it’s our narrative. You know, it’s like, it’s our story. It’s our product, we make it we know exactly how it’s made. We’ve made it, we continue to make it and being the ones to talk about it and sell it was really, like amazing.
Odette D’Aniello 17:54
Absolutely. And I you know, I think that’s, that’s really important for people who are in the industry, that we basically abdicate all of marketing to a team. And sometimes they don’t relay the story, as well as one would, if you owned it. So it’s really important to kind of meet the customers shake their hand and say, Look, these are all handled by us. And we’re people and we’re fun people. We’re nice people. And but we also have the efficiencies to, you know, fulfill on all the orders. We have, you know, third party audits, we’re professionals. But,
Milana D’Aniello 18:32
but we’re finding just because we’re professionals doesn’t make us boring.
Odette D’Aniello 18:37
We’re not boring. not boring at all. And then, so after that, what did we do? After that?
Milana D’Aniello 18:47
We had a little break, because the wedding, the Tony show, was like next level,
Odette D’Aniello 18:54
a lot going on. Oh, because we had to drive back. Not only going back, did we spend two days on our feet the whole time, whole days. We actually drove back to Tucson for seven hours. But we did stop at a sand dune.
Milana D’Aniello 19:15
We did stop at the sand dunes. That was my favorite part of the drive was the sand dunes. They were so beautiful in the middle of the drive from San Diego to Tucson, the middle of we’re tired,
Odette D’Aniello 19:25
but we stopped at the sand dune ran up the sand. Take photos, and then we saw that group of people who had costumes and Star Wars costumes.
Milana D’Aniello 19:39
photo shoot, they’re doing a photo shoot or we’re doing a photo shoot or maybe a
Odette D’Aniello 19:43
film we might be in the next Star Wars Episode. Yeah, we’re so adventurous. And we didn’t have all that cake behind us. We would have rented a dune buggy and gone up and down those dudes.
Milana D’Aniello 19:58
We definitely would If we didn’t have cake in the car, we would have been on those dune buggies
Odette D’Aniello 20:05
we were. But we did stop. So that was good.
Milana D’Aniello 20:10
We got a little break. We also stopped the date land. Right?
Odette D’Aniello 20:17
Anybody ever drives from Tuscon to the San Diego there’s a place called Dateline. I’ve been in a town Dateline, but they literally have like a patch of dates.
Milana D’Aniello 20:35
They have, like an acre of dates, maybe less than an acre of dates. But the whole town is called date land for this state farm. But you can
Odette D’Aniello 20:48
plug in your electric power. We didn’t have the electric car, but you can plug in your house. You can get date ice cream, and you can get really, really good coffee.
Milana D’Aniello 21:00
711 coffee, but it was really good.
Odette D’Aniello 21:03
Cappuccino coffee. Okay,
Milana D’Aniello 21:07
So we did a ton
Odette D’Aniello 21:10
this winter. Then after that, I took a sabbatical. Took a week, a week off, and I went on a meditation retreat. Oh, yeah. You didn’t bother.
Milana D’Aniello 21:22
And then after that, we went to Japan.
Odette D’Aniello 21:26
Yes, for an Entrepreneur Organization retreat, which was amazing. So that is the reason why our podcast didn’t kind of coughed a little bit. Because we’ve been busy.
Milana D’Aniello 21:40
We’ve been really busy having all of this going on, and you still scheduling podcasting interviews was so like, it was very impressive. But it was also like, we just need a little bit of a break. We just need a break. Oh, yeah. I know. So then speaking of breaks, that’s why we took a break. But we also want to pivot right? A little bit. Yeah, we
want to pivot. So like, we’ve been talking to so many people, not just in, specifically the bakery industry, because we know that’s our bread and butter. We talked to them all the time. But we’ve been talking to a lot more people in just general CPG and specialty foods. And we’ve been having really amazing conversations with people that are entirely outside of what we know really well of bakery. But these are amazing conversations with amazing people that we wanted to bring on to the podcast and like talk to you more and learn more from right
Odette D’Aniello 22:46
and then so Yeah, exactly. Because we need to learn more and I think that our listeners could do well would do well learning from people in the industry distributors, brokers. You know, ingredient, purveyors because you and your Oh forgot you and your aunt went to the IFT Yeah,
Milana D’Aniello 23:07
we did. It was really cool. It was all the ingredients show. Yes. All clean ingredients. So we saw so many like natural colors and natural flavors and flavors of all times. It was really a cool small show. With just like this high caliber ingredients that you could use of all kinds like you want vanilla there was for vanilla vendors. Where do you want your vanilla from? from Madagascar? from Tahiti? Do you want it? Clean label? Do you want it in an oil form? Do you want a water based it was just like, all like, going down to the very most niche of each ingredient that you don’t really think of when you’re making a product. But like, when you’re making a lot of cake. I didn’t like think about it. But like vanilla costs a lot. And you need to like really source your vanilla. So super cool. I learned a lot at that show too. Good. Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello 24:10
I mean, there’s just so much so much to learn. And then there’s also like these issues that I want to I also want to learn about and I think our listeners who want to learn about just like what’s the status of the supply chain? Right, Milena, you have a degree in supply chain management. Tell us about that.
Milana D’Aniello 24:29
I know. But it’s changing so fast and so rapidly, like the supply chain looks entirely different from when I was learning about it and during COVID. And it looks entirely different from what my professors knew about it from like pre COVID. It’s just so much changed so rapidly.
Odette D’Aniello 24:45
Right? So those are the kinds of interviews that we’ll be having in this podcast. And sometimes it’ll be me sometimes will be Milana sometimes both of us. So anyway
Milana D’Aniello 24:59
thanks You. Yeah, thank you as I am the host today, thank you so much for being with me here today
I have one more question. Yes. Because we did so much. We did so much for like work, you know, we did so much action we did so much moving forward. But something that is not really captured in the actual things like the tangibles was we got really inspired. We saw so much art, we saw some beautiful gardens, we saw a lot of stuff that really inspired our artistic side and our creative side. And what our vision is for Himaya, what our vision is for Dragonfly, what our vision is for Celebrity Cake, what our vision is for Celebrity Gourmet as a whole. So that could be an entire podcast season on its own talking about our inspiration. But what is one thing that really like stuck with you in terms of like, inspiration this winter?
Odette D’Aniello 26:14
Well, we were in Japan and and a lot of our tours were art tours. And there were these. We went to this island called Teshima Island, and it was an island that was a dump. They had dumped a full bunch of garbage into this island, Oshima. It’s Teshima Ashima. And now, Shama. So there’s these islands in Kagawa Prefecture. And what they’ve done is somebody had a vision to create beauty out of it. And they started with rice paddies, they put the plants back and said, pull all the plants out. So they put plants back in, they put trees back in and made it green. And then they invited all kinds of incredible artists to come and do installations. So I was so inspired by the conversion of, you know, what was once like a dump into the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen in my entire life, like, literally experience such incredible beauty. And it gave me a lot of inspiration of like, you know, when you see something that doesn’t look good, or doesn’t look nice, I mean, the potential of it, it could be gorgeous, and beautiful. You know, it’s like, we all have the capacity to create beauty within us. We just need a vision. That is what I was inspired with. How about you? What made you inspired? Well,
Milana D’Aniello 27:45
I was really inspired by just the level of like, I mean, I was inspired by a lot of things, a lot of stuff has happened. So many things have been really cool and amazing. But I was really inspired by like, a lot of the artists that we saw, when we were in Japan, they dug deeply into what they did well, you know, they like we saw this we saw a lot of contemporary art. And like before this ship, I was never really much of a contemporary art person. It’s like a really like impression is like older stuff, you know, not to be snobby or anything, but that was just like what I understood and knew. And then like more modern stuff was like, I don’t get it like not for me, we saw so much amazing contemporary art that was so unique and so clearly made by this one specific artist. And so like thought out and well designed, and everything was in place for a reason. And just like really dug into the concept and the skill set and the passion of this like particular artist, like no one can recreate these amazing, like works of sculpture and like collaborations of like nature and concrete and water and just like these art pieces are so unique, and I have no desire to recreate them. But I felt as though I had something that I could make that was as like, unique and uniquely me and that I could be uniquely passionate about but look nothing like what we saw. You know, it was just really inspiring to see this like digging in of like artistic expression. Yeah.
Odette D’Aniello 29:48
I hear you. It was it was really amazing. And you know, we make art. We make
Milana D’Aniello 29:55
art. That’s our job.
Odette D’Aniello 29:57
That is our job and it really is It kind of bring that, you know, brought that home. It’s okay, we’re artists. We’re not just, you know, we don’t just bake cakes. We’re don’t just schlep, you know, cakes here. And there it is our art and artists, and we express our art through food. That’s what we do. So, all right. Thank you, mom,
Milana D’Aniello 30:23
Mom for being a special guest here on the celebrity gourmet ventures podcast. Is there anything else you would like to say before? No, we’re good. All right.Thank you so much. Take
care. Bye. Bye.
Outro 30:43
Thanks for listening to the Celebrity Gourmet Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.