Chef Tammy Maki started her entrepreneurial journey as the owner of an electrical contracting company, but she always knew her true passion lay elsewhere. After long, grueling days running her contracting business, Chef Maki would return home and head straight to the kitchen to bake. She decided to channel her passion for food into a new career path and enrolled in culinary school in her 40s. After completing her program, she spent years honing her skills at some of the best restaurants and bakeries in Canada. Today, Chef Maki is the founder and CEO of her own growing business, Raven Rising, an artisan chocolate shop that pays homage to her Indigenous roots.
Now a Red Seal Journeyman Pastry Chef (a national standard for the trade across Canada), Chef Maki opened Raven Rising in October 2020. Her chocolate features traditional ingredients sourced from Indigenous people and businesses both in Canada and across the world. More than just a business venture, Raven Rising is Chef Maki’s way of honouring her heritage. Chef Maki was adopted by a Finnish family in Sudbury during the Sixties Scoop and learned of the circumstances around her adoption as she was starting her business. Her biological family is Salteaux Ojibwe from White Bear First Nation in Saskatchewan. By working with Indigenous suppliers, Chef Maki says she has an opportunity to not only learn more about her own culture, but find ways to share that knowledge with others through her chocolate.
Raven Rising opened its first retail location in September 2022. While it was an exciting move for Chef Maki, it also created a number of operational challenges within the business that needed to be addressed. Eager to find a way to overcome these hurdles, Chef Maki came across the Racialized and Indigenous Supports for Entrepreneurs (RAISE) program on the Digital Main Street Facebook page. RAISE is a provincially-funded, comprehensive grant initiative that supports Indigenous, Black, and other racialized entrepreneurs in Ontario who are on the road to starting or scaling their businesses. In addition to grant funding, the program provides entrepreneurs with access to business development training, business coaching, and culturally responsive support services through the Parkdale Centre for Innovation’s Early Stage Entrepreneurship Program.
With the grant funds in hand and support from Parkdale Centre advisors, Chef Maki was able to come up with a solution for her biggest challenge: inventory management. Raven Rising’s e-commerce website is hosted on Wix, whereas the brick-and-mortar retail location operates on a Square point-of-sale (POS) system. Both systems were serving the business well separately, but having two discrete systems in place to track product meant staff had to manually update inventory in one system to reflect changes that had occurred in the other. Chef Maki said she didn’t want to change either system since she had invested time and money to get them both set up. With the help of Parkdale Centre advisors, Chef Maki discovered SKU IQ, an app that integrates e-commerce and POS inventory so businesses can sell online and offline at the same time. “It was just a glorious day when everything got synced. I was working probably three times as hard as I needed to be,” she says.
With the remainder of her RAISE funds, Chef Maki worked on redesigning packaging for her retail partners. Raven Rising provides products to the Ontario Legislature and the Fairmont Chateau Laurier. With well-known retailer partners, Chef Maki says it’s important her brand is well-represented. This new eco-friendly packaging has just been completed and Chef Maki is preparing to send out her first big shipment to Nk’Mip Cellars in Osoyoos BC, the first Indigenous-owned winery in North America. “I’m really excited to have [this new packaging] represent my business,” she remarked.
“To find the program and the [grant funds] have improved my business, in time, labour, and ease-of-life by 400%,” she estimates. While Chef Maki is an experienced entrepreneur and has been in business for several years, she knows there is always more to learn and new ways to optimize your business; and the RAISE program provided an opportunity to do just that.”
