Meet the Maker: Jess Messer, Drink Maker
Jess’s business began when she and her family moved to Montreal in 2010. Burned out and winding down her career as a Russia specialist working in international development and human rights, she decided to pivot, to find something where she could spend more time with family. She had a friend who ran a series of farmers' markets, and who was looking for somebody to run a bistro.
She stepped in and loved the experience, which forced her to learn French, and plunged her headlong into food service. By 2011, she had founded Savouré, selling fermented foods and flavored drinks. But, in 2014, when she and her family moved back to the US, she decided to refocus the business just on drinks.
She now offers an effervescent, creative line of sodas and seltzers made from real ingredients, sold in cans and bottles (using a co-packer), and in kegs (for bars, restaurants, and special order clients). The seltzers have no added sugar.
At the same time, she and Lauren Gammon, a caterer, created Tandem – a kitchen and dining storefront space on Main Street in Bristol, which serves as their mutual production space but also hosts community dinners and helps incubate local food businesses. “It's been a really fun part of just kind of living in Vermont and being in the food scene,” she said.
“Tandem has historically been a project more than a business,” Jess added. “We don't have a website, we don't have any signage… We're thinking about trying to make it a little bit more of a community resource slash business, as an event space, because it seems like people need spaces to gather these days.”
But for Jess, above all, Tandem is a place where she can be creative.
As we talk, she starts making a seltzer based on quince, which she called “the ugly duckling oddball fruit – it's really dry. But then when you cook them, they become this insanely beautiful, deep pink.” She adds some pink lemons and her plan is to mix the citrus and quince with honey, roasted barley, and a little bit of turmeric, to make a Vitamin C-rich drink for winter.
“I used to get paid to think,” Jess mused. “And it's nice to get paid to sort of just be creating, you know?... I describe myself as the world's worst capitalist… I don't wake up every morning thinking, ‘How can I make as much money as humanly possible?’ I wake up every morning thinking, ‘I want to do fun things and grow this business in this way.’ And I reached this point where I was like, ‘I get to decide what success looks like for me.’”
And how does that look?
“I personally, as a human being in the world,” she said, “resent the constant conflation of success with economic success. I think that there's lots of different ways to lead a rich life that don't wind up with you being a rich person.” For her, she said, being a mom has been a priority, and “being able to pay myself and to do things in this ethical way where I felt good about it.”
On the flip side, she said she realizes the danger of the founder mindset: “you know, where you think you're the only person who can do the thing… I'm fully aware of my limitations and that there's things that, could I learn how to do it? Absolutely, but should I? No, no, I shouldn't…
“I really like the manual labor aspect of it also. I feel like, as I age, it gets harder, but it's also that I'm grateful that I lift heavy kegs all the time. You know what I mean?... I feel like that with snowboarding too. I'm like, ‘Thank you, snowboarding for reminding me how to fall when I'm 55 years old.’”
“I get to decide what success looks like for me.”
And what advice does she have for aspiring makers?
“The one advice that I would always give is, make sure that you truly, really love what you're doing,” she said. “Because, particularly with small-scale maker businesses, there's this tendency to be really idealized or romanticize what it's like. And it's grueling. I mean, it's really hard work. It's constant work. You have to really want to do it, or it's going to feel like a burden. I mean, any job is a job, right? And there's the job-y aspect of all jobs. But ideally, if you're carving something out for yourself, you want to feel you want it to make you happy, you know?”
And the drinks Jess makes, and the impact she is having on her community, definitely makes her happy. “It feels nice to sort of be engaged in and have an impact on a local super small scale economy,” she said, “you know, especially after doing this sort of weirdly abstract kind of esoteric human rights work, where you don't really actually identify with the people who you're hoping will be impacted by the things that you do. Here, it feels like a form of sort of small-scale micro-activism to be just kind of supporting and nurturing the space where you live. So I don't think I would do it if I wasn't working with actual food, grown by actual people.”
“Make sure that you truly, really love what you are doing.”
The Vermont Maker Project
