The story starts in 2006. Jenni and Josefine are two of many Swedes searching for job and happiness in Oslo. Josefine has been vegetarian for most of her life, and convinced Jenni with big portions of homemade amazing vegan food. Josefine, born and raised in Stockholm with many vegetarian restaurants and options was surprised by the poor selection of organic and vegan food in Oslo - the 2 girls had to do something about it!
Ideas for how to solve this challenge started to evolve. Sustainable food should be easy accessible and taste great. With a broad combined knowledge from the restaurant and service business, we thougt we knew enough to get the ball rolling.
The Vega Restaurant. Full of energy to save the world and create world peace, one bite at the time, we quickly hasted into a collabaration with some other dudes for taking over the established restaurant “Vegeta Vertshus”- now “Vega”. This was in late 2008. Soon we realized that we had different views on how to run the place. And already in september 2009 we left the project. Little surprised, less naive and more determined than ever we knew exactly what we wanted to create, and not to create. We learnt that in a vegetarian restaurant you only get vegetarian guests. We wanted to serve our food to the broader public. To preach to the choir was not our thing and we wanted everyone to get their hands on fresh, organic, raw vegan, gluten free, healthy and exciting food!
Raw food at a sportsbar? All our money was invested and lost in Vega. We were broke but more determined than ever to continue on our own. Funky Fresh Foods was founded in october 2009. We had our first sales to health food stores with our raw food cakes and healthy snacks and at a festival the very same month.
Jenni was still part owner in a sportsbar startup. In the beginning we tried to fresh up the bar menu, with vegetarian options and more vegetables. But maybe this was not the right clientele to start with. Hmm. On Sundays we invited the growing raw food community in Oslo to a pop-up restaurant down to the sports bar. And with the dark bar with the super fresh food we had a really special “cross-over” feeling going on.
We had a big job to do. We wanted to provide something to the market that customers didn't realize the value of -yet. At one time we had an event on a festival, pushing organic smoothies and brownies. A customer walked up and said: “Organic brownies? Thats not for me! I tried organic tomato soup once and it was not good. I don't like organic.” This made us understand that information was going to be a big part of our Funky Fresh project and how big our challenge really was.
Very soon we started to give courses in raw food cooking. Not so much from the health perspective doe. What we knew came from self experience and the pure love of eating a lot. Of course we both had felt the change of the overwhelming transisson from a body and mind on junk to funk! But instead of going on and on about vibrations, love, life force and other less understandable wannabe-spiritual mambo jambo, our focus became strictly on the cooking skills aspect as well as spreading knowledge about sustainable and tasty food.
In 2010 we get contacted by a very enthusiastic woman in Trondheim. Sonia. She just started up a NGO called “Unge Kokker” - “Young Chefs” working for spreading healthy and sustainable cooking skills for today's youth. This was the start of a amazing adventure. Josefine and Jenni began travelling. To big and small cities across the country. The first year Josefine had over 100 travelling days. Mostly teaching in the food classes in schools for 9 years old, or 14 years old. But also for their teachers, and for their parents.
Cake business expands. While Josefine did the most of the travelling, Jennis cake business started to expand. We needed more space and moved into a preparation kitchen at the restaurant on Oslo Golf Club. From the central this is a 40 min ride with collective traffic. We didn't have a car back then. So like most of our traveling we moved and delivered our things on our longboards. Really recommending the route Bogstad - Downtown, amazing downhill chill cruise!
Norwegian winters are hard. Also in words of raw food business. Maybe some of our selling methods should not be official, but hey, it was all for the greater good! During festivals we sold vegetarian burgers, not as “vegetarian burger” but just “organic burger” and served over 1000 non voluntary vegetarians- not one complaining customer yet..
At the end of the summer 2011 we could take out our first salary and by a car. Happy times.
The head chef at the Golf Club, Magnus, is like father Baloo to us. He has taught us everything we know about food prepp, kitchen hygiene, logistics, presentation. On big events we got to help him manage servings for many hundred people and normal days how to run a business. “There is always something to do”. “If you can do it before. Do it before”. ”This was an priceless experience and we will forever be grateful to both Maggan and Guri,the manager, who had the patience with us.
Kale was one of those “rare” ingredients hard to find in Norway when we moved here. It was most served as animal feed and not to find in the shops. Ya, ya, then we fix it ourselves. For two seasons we hired a farmer and some land for growing kale for us, with the help from Innovation Norway in a project to promote Norwegian agriculture. The first year we failed with the timing of the harvest and the sudden weather change. The second year all our land was flooded just a couple of week before harvest. We gave up kale for a little while, and now you actually find Norwegian kale all year around! But its always hard to be the first one...
Tilstede mat og mer. As soon as we meet Liv Brit, we realized that she was the real deal. We had booked a meeting at “Bakefri” and brought some samples. She talked about her moving back to Kristansand from Canada and how she thought that the restaurants was lacking in organic, sustainable and vegan choices. She was in the process of renovating a building back in Kristiansand city, and wanted us to come down just to see. This wasn’t the first time we had been approched for a meeting to start a restaurant somewhere, or collaborate on some project. But the diffrense was that she insisted on paying for the samples before she left. We were convinced. She was serious.
It all went so fast from here. We payed a visit to the relaxed, idyllic summer city far south in Norway, (not quit that tempting as it sounds in rainy November). Jenni who is the worst sort of yes-person was both sick and tired of Oslo and charmed by Kristiansand. Walking distance to both the beach and the woods were tempting. “I could live here for a while”. The building Liv Brit was renovation was even more amazing than we thougt. Many floors, in the middle of the city's walking strip, outside serving and roof terrace with a ocean view. It was a easy yes.
But due to the size of the project we soon realised that this was nothing that we could handle ourselves. We collected the best people we knew in Oslo, and we ended up a group of five to set up the plan for our new adventure. The head chef and part owner in Kristiansand, Benjamin Dogan, is a famous fish and seafood chef, so we decided that fish and seafood from sustainable sources could be a part of the menu, even though Funky Fresh always serves vegan. We named our new baby “Tilstede” which means “presence”. “Tilstede” opened its doors in March 2012. In 2014 we reached breakeven.
Home in Oslo, Josefine is on a mission. We wanted to write the first Norwegian cooking book about raw food. All the recipes were there. After teaching so many years all the rights and wrongs has been tried over and over again. That we had a chance to take the photos with artist Lisa Westgaard is just so cool! But the publishing companies were not as cool as us. They believe is was no market. And thats how we started our own publishing company. We only have one book, but we sold 4000 copies and prints second edition in 2015.
To make all cakes, caterings and teaching alone was not possible. So when Jenni left town, Funky Fresh got our first full time employee. Soon we also moved kitchen downtown again, and believe it or not. We rented space in “our” old restaurant Vega, we are still very close to the staff there. By this time we also became one more in the Funky Fresh Full Time team. And we among others had great success serving at the big urban festival “Øya” and “Solar Weekend”, establishing ourselves as a reliable F&B full service company on bigger and bigger events.
Coco-Crunch. Benjamin our head chef in Kristiansand, has a real sweet tooth (or should we call is suger addictin), even though we don't serve sugar at the restaurant he just can't give up this green little things we Swedes can “Damsugare”, meaning ”Vacuum cleaner” (yes- weird name for a cake!). Of course anything good tasting could be made even greater tasting and healthy at the same time! Or? Jenni, in the middle of a juice detox, spent many long nights in test kitchen, with a crew very willing to be testpanel. The result? Our famous “Coco-Crunch”, better tasting and more healthy then any other sweet, and of course its organic too. Our business now employs 2 people just rolling and rolling and rolling.
DogA. We had a short visit at the kitchen at startup hub “Mesh Cafè”, but also that kitchen became way too small, way too fast. DogA, Norwegian center for art and architecture, has hosted the Oslo vegetarian festival for some years, the employees at the building had also enjoyed our lunch catering for a while. Of many good happenings during our adventure, the opportunity to take over the big kitchen and cafè at this cool location was a real breakthrough to the commersial public . The kitchen is big enough (for now) we have 70 seats in unique architecture environment, with view of the lake in the middle of the city. Open everyday we serve more than 1000 guests every week, and regular kick event for upon 1000 persons at one time.
In 2015 we finally found a publishing company as cool as us. In August same year we released our 2nd cooking book VEGAN.
Our crew is continuing growing. Josefine and Jenni are still on the move. We live in city, hike in the mountain, climb in the trees and surf the seas. Sustainable food should be easy accessible and taste great. This is our story so far. What we learned is that things never turn out the way you expect- and that´s what makes it fun!
