Happy Birthday, Dear Edible

I first met Tricia Wheeler on a winter’s evening in 2010. She had gathered a small group of writers and photographers at The Cambridge Tea House to talk about the new magazine she was launching. Edible Columbus would celebrate the community’s local and sustainable food and its producers.

We ate delicious food and brainstormed and couldn’t wait to start work.

Now, 10 years later, I meet Tricia for coffee at Flowers & Bread, a business that she co-owns, to find out more about how Edible began and what she’s doing now.

FIRST IN HER CLASS

Entrepreneurial to the bone, the Akron native and Ohio State University grad launched her first business at age 24, doing background checks for corporations. Following her marriage in 2005 to real estate agent and remodeler Scott Wheeler, and the birth of daughter Kensington, now 13, Tricia sold her company to pursue her true passion: cooking.

Her family moved to New York City for a year so Tricia could obtain a culinary degree—and she finished first in her class at the French Culinary Institute. Before returning to Columbus, she picked up the inaugural copy of Edible Manhattan magazine.

“I read it that day on the subway, cover to cover,” Tricia said. “I loved everything about it.”

Tricia researched the magazine “immediately” and discovered that there were 40 or 50 such publications in various cities or regions across the U.S, “all telling the stories of food in their communities.”

“Edible was its own brand, but each magazine was entrepreneurial in its own city” with its own staff and its own story. Because Tricia knew that she wanted to teach cooking eventually, she was looking for “a way to know the community from the food perspective.” Edible Columbus would become that link.

RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE

Publishing was a new challenge for Tricia. “I had never had a deadline business before. Now I was always working a season ahead. And it was expensive to print—special ink, special paper, we wanted high quality—and we printed it for eight years, every quarter.”

Advertising helped Tricia build the magazine. “We were so fortunate to find a group of like-minded advertisers who wanted to support us in telling the stories that nobody else was telling.”

The premiere issue in Spring 2010 sported scallions on the cover. Inside, readers found an interview with local cookbook author Betty Rosbottom, seasonal recipes from Tricia and stories about Bluescreek Farm Meats, Wayward Seed Farm and Gahanna’s Ohio Herb Education Center.

Tricia also introduced the Edible Columbus Cooking series, which she would teach. “MI Homes let me use their kitchen at Easton. We held classes every other week and they got more and more popular. I brought in growers, producers and artisans. I remember Jane Barnes from Honeyrun Farm coming in to talk about honey.”

THE SEASONED FARMHOUSE

Cooking classes flourished there until 2012, when MI Homes moved. Undaunted, Tricia and Scott purchased a sad-looking residence at 3674 N. High St. in Clintonville. Scott’s company did the remodel work that he designed. Christened The Seasoned Farmhouse, it became Tricia’s new cooking school and Edible’s offices.

The house was transformed inside with a professional kitchen and dining area, and outside with impeccably maintained flower gardens in front and food gardens in back.

Today The Seasoned Farmhouse offers a staggering 42 new seasonal classes per quarter. “We’ve been very busy since the beginning,” Tricia says. “In October we had our 1,000th class.” Classes range in difficulty from quick dinners to prepare after work to a 30-week cooking series for hard-core enthusiasts.

The space is also perfect for corporate events, from dinners to team building. “I’ve noticed that conversations around cooking often refer back to childhood, how their parents or grandparents cooked.” Tricia says. “Then you’ve learned something that you might not have learned in everyday conversation.”

FLOWERS & BREAD

When classically trained chef and recipe developer Sarah Lagrotteria became a teacher at The Seasoned Farmhouse in the fall of 2013, Tricia found a colleague after her own entrepreneurial heart.

“We have the same background and went to the same culinary school,” Tricia says. Both loved flowers and floral arranging. They even made their own homemade butter and longed for “better bread” to spread it on.

Their shared passion for the delicious and the beautiful eventually led to a shared mission: “Buy another building and make a business that celebrates the simple pleasures: flowers, bread and a good cup of coffee.”

They found a dilapidated building within a few blocks of The Seasoned Farmhouse and Scott and his company converted it to a charming bakery/floral shop/coffee shop/event space called Flowers & Bread that opened in February 2017.

Tricia takes particular pride in her two renovations. “My father in Akron did renovations, and I married someone with the same skills. We took real eyesores and transformed them. We live in this community, and we wanted to make these buildings beautiful and give them new life and purpose.”

Flowers & Bread has “no wi-fi—we chose conversations instead” and emphasizes “classes where we do things with our own hands.”

The selection of gifts and gift baskets at F & B, as Tricia calls it, reflects her focus on “things to make people’s everyday lives nice.” And as at The Seasoned Farmhouse, individuals and companies appreciate the flexible event space: “We can do dinners upstairs and wreath-making downstairs.”

Flowers & Bread’s latest innovation is the culinary travel division. Sarah and Tricia lead floral- and culinary-focused trips to England, and next year they will add an Italian itinerary.

SO MANY BUSINESSES, SO LITTLE TIME

By 2017, Tricia was head chef at The Seasoned Farmhouse with a team of other chefs and instructors, as well as part-owner and “big picture person” of Flowers & Bread, working with Sarah on growth strategies.

After eight years with Edible Columbus, Tricia says she was stretched too thin and “thought it was time for a new perspective” for the magazine. Because she had successfully worked with the Franklin County Farm Bureau in the past— “they are a wonderful group”— they were the first people she approached when she decided to sell.

“They represent all different sizes of farms,” Tricia says, “and they were always very supportive of our goals.” The Franklin County Farm Bureau became the magazine’s new owner, freeing Tricia to concentrate on other business opportunities, such as opening a second Flowers & Bread planned for Dublin in 2020.

“And I’ve been working on a cookbook,” she says. “A tool to help home cooks with meal planning and organization. It will help us use the food we buy and not waste it.” She promises recipes that are “flavorful, but not too hard.”

A BACKWARD LOOK

Reflecting on the Columbus food scene in the 10 years since she began Edible Columbus, Tricia speaks from the cook’s perspective. “Farmers markets have really grown and grown and grown. The quality of everything is so high. Services like Green Bean Delivery provide greater access for people who can’t shop at farmers markets.”

Tricia cherishes the comments that she has received from readers who have found the magazine useful and beautiful, and from farmers, chefs and producers who say that Edible was the first publication that “got it right” in telling their stories. “Edible has always done a really good job of telling stories—not ‘the latest and greatest, this opened, this is new’— but authentic stories of people doing the hard work, day in and day out.”

Find more information on Tricia Wheeler’s businesses at theseasonedfarmhouse.com and flowersandbread.com.