You can buy happiness
By BILL SPURR / Features Writer
Chronicle Herald Sat Sept 24, 2005

Some foods just aren't very well-suited to summer.

Meat loaf. Turkey dinner. Soup.

So it was perhaps predictable that Mary Hamblin's fledgling soup business that started in July had its best day so far at the Halifax Farmer's Market this past Saturday.

"People are coming back from cottages, and college students are starting to buy food," Hamblin said between sales at the downtown Saturday market located in Keith's Brewery.

"They didn't buy food last week because they didn't have their apartments. Now, they're starting to get settled in and people are buying food for their freezers, and buying soups."

Hamblin was a university administrator for five years, until an unexpected layoff ended that career.

She decided that rather than chase down another job, it was time to take stock of her strengths and do something that would make her more than a wage earner.

"I thought 'Why not do something that would contribute to the world?,' and there was a gap in the organic market; you couldn't always get good organic foods," she said.

"My daughter is a vegan and has been for many years, so I was cooking vegetarian and vegan foods for her and couldn't get really good quality foods.

"I did a list of my strengths and I love to cook and I thought I could do something with food, to sell it and also do something for positive thinking in the world."

The positive thinking part of the equation comes from the soups, which Hamblin sells not by variety, but by name.

"My soups are called Happiness, and Comfort and Joy and Success and so on. They have names so people can come to my business, Life's Good Soups, and buy happiness," she said.

"Every soup is named very specifically for its characteristics. So, tomato soup is called Abundance because there are so many tomatoes when you grow them. The Happiness soup is the Asian soup, it has so many different chunky bits of sweet potato and squash and cilantro and noodles and coconut milk. The Success soup is the beef barley, and the chicken noodle is called Comfort. The names kind of lend themselves to the soups."

All the soups are organic and each flavour has a vegan option, something that appealed to Paul Falvo, who visited Hamblin's booth Saturday.

"I saw that it was organic and vegan. They've got a sign up that says 'Vegan Spoken Here' and it's nice to not have to explain vegan," said Falvo, who has a harder time getting vegan food in his hometown Yellowknife than he does when visiting Halifax.

"I just read the menu and got the More Abundance with roasted garlic listed as the first ingredient. I've got a bit of a cold right now so I went for garlic."

Both for storage and transportation reasons, all of Hamblin's soups are sold frozen. She says they'll keep for a year in the freezer and can be heated up on the stove or in the microwave, something that appeals to her customers.

"I have students, then I have students with small children, single professional people who are on the go who want good organic food when they go home," she said. "I have mainstream people, and I have totally . . . non-mainstream vegans."

A first-time entrepreneur, Hamblin is learning as she goes about how to run a business, and so far, the biggest surprise in the whole enterprise has involved the production side of it.

She just assumed that if she had a good recipe for 10 servings of soup, all she had to do was multiply the ingredients by 10 and she'd have 100 servings.

"But what's ended up happening is that if you have produce, carrots or onions (for example), if they have less water or more sugar - the apples that I used last week for my spicy squash soup were more bland so I had to add more vinegar to bring it up to a cutting edge because the previous apples I'd used were really tart.

"So when you multiply these ingredients, everything gets magnified so I can't just use a recipe.

"Every time I cook, every week, I have to change it to make up for the differences in the vegetables that I'm using. I never knew this would happen, it's really a chemistry question."

In the near future, Hamblin plans to start selling soup subscriptions, with deliveries to condo complexes, apartment buildings, senior citizen homes and office buildings.

But she doesn't plan to get too big.

"My production is limited," she said.

"I really can't produce more than 300 (two-cup) units a week myself. To do 600, I'd have to have an employee working with me and, after that, I'd have to get into mechanized production, which I don't want to do."

Contact

Life’s Good Soup PO Box 33141 Halifax, Nova Scotia B3L 4T6

(902) 422-6994 lifesgood@ns.sympatico.ca

Proprietor: Mary Hamblin