Jess Ignatiev

Welcome To Eloma Episode 27: Supporting Local Small Business with Jess Ignatiev

“From the beginning we knew that we wanted to work with local businesses as much as possible,” explains Jess Ignatiev, Co-Owner of Heirloom Food Truck. Today, Jess joins host Kiley Peters to talk about the importance of supporting local small businesses and how Jess and her husband have managed to do that through their food truck business. 

Jess and her husband were very intentional about working with other local small businesses from the moment they made the decision to buy a food truck. They knew that for a food truck to be successful, they would first need to have strong relationships within the community to be able to partner with locations for parking. They took it several steps beyond parking and incorporated local businesses in any way they could like produce to the logo t-shirts. Jess is passionate about creating a space at the table for other women in the food and beverage industry by putting together policies that promote respect for women. She also tries, whenever possible, to work with other businesses that are not only local, but also Black or Brown owned, women-owned, or LGBTQ+ owned in order to give back to the parts of the community that are generally underserved. 

There are so many ways that local small businesses can positively impact their communities. Learn more about how Jess and her husband took their initial idea for a restaurant and pivoted to a food truck at the start of the pandemic and how they were able to utilize their business to uplift other local business owners. 

Highlights:

• “From the beginning we knew that we wanted to work with local in every part of our business as much as possible.” (12:10-12:18 | Jess)
• “What are these small local businesses that we can help provide a service that they’re not able to provide to their customers and vice versa? So the biggest thing, it was like obviously we need to work with breweries because beer, Wisconsin, food. That was the number one thing.” (12:34-12:52 | Jess)
• “Our biggest thing as women is if we are owners and we are able to take control of policies and responsibilities in these businesses in our industry, we can ensure that everyone has a seat at the table.” (28:32-28:50 | Jess)

Listen
Apple Podcasts – Spotify – Google Podcasts – YouTube

Connect with Alli and Adrian
Instagram | @heirloom.mke
Facebook | Heirloom MKE
Website | www.heirloommke.com/

Connect with Welcome to Eloma
Instagram: @WelcometoEloma
Website: WelcometoEloma.com
Weekly Email Newsletter: bit.ly/RIXEmail 

Connect with Kiley
Social: @kileypeters + Linkedin.com/in/kileypeters
Websites: RAYNEIX.com, BrainchildStudios.com, KileyPeters.com
Weekly Email Newsletter: bit.ly/RIXEmail
Email: info@rayneix.com

Jess’s Bio

I own Heirloom MKE with my husband, Pete. We opened Heirloom MKE in September 2020 after our plans of opening our full-serviced restaurant came to a halt in March of 2020, due to Covid. Prior to Heirloom MKE, I was a full-time portrait photographer for my own company Poppy & Fern Photography, and prior to that I was in the specialty retail industry for 10 years. And prior to that, I graduated from UWM with a marketing degree after deciding that psychology was not the right path as I knew that working for myself was my ultimate goal.