How one tsoHost client turned her passion for food into a tasty little business

Lara Omoloja has always been passionate about food and in the late 2000s, after 10 years working in the corporate world, she did what thousands of people around the UK only dream of doing and decided to take the leap to turn her passion into a business.

More than a decade later, she’s still doing what she loves, as the owner of Greenwich Pantry, a company that delivers cookery and culinary skills workshops across London.

“My mum was very much into food,” Lara told tsoHost. “She had her own food business when I was growing up. She was my inspiration.”

Lara and her team of cookery experts offer a long list of workshops, including breadmaking, sushi making, pastry and pie classes, fermenting and preserving, knife skills and healthy eating.

“I love the bread making classes,” Lara said. “They’re quite magical.

“I also love the knife skills classes. I love to watch the chefs close their eyes and chop to show off their skills. For any dish you make in the kitchen you need to have knife skills.”

Greenwich Pantry’s workshops are open to everyone, from corporate groups to singles, from couples to families and from adults to children.

“Food is about much more than the eating and cooking,” Lara revealed. “It brings people together. Over food people start to talk intimately about who they are and what they like.

“Couples who come to classes support each other and become closer.

“The other Saturday we had a family of six adults. Father, mother, their two children and their other halves. It was amazing to see the bonding process. At the start of the session, they were quite individual in the way they presented themselves. By the end, they were all relaxed and talking about themselves more openly.

“The classes can really make a difference. It makes me feel glad I’m doing this.”

Lara has plans to expand her range of workshops in the coming months and years, in order to grow the business further.

Lara has always been good at picking up on trends in order to develop content for new workshops. She’s currently considering adding vegan cookery workshops to her offering.

“The whole concept of sustainability isn’t going away either,” she reveals. “More people are interested in cooking with more sustainable ingredients.” Lara’s Greenwich Pantry website is an essential part of her business. It runs on tsoHost’s Ultimate cPanel Webhosting package.

This plan features unlimited SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, 1GB memory and a free SSL certificate for security.

“Most of our sales come through online,” Lara explained. “So it’s really important that the website runs smoothly.

“If we want to grow, we have to create confidence in our clients. This wouldn’t happen if our website didn’t work.”

So, what does a foodie like Lara say is her favourite food?

“I’m quite simple when it comes to eating,” she says. “I like basic rice dishes like risotto. I also love plantain. When I was growing up, I used to eat it friend and boiled, but you can do so much with it. You can make it into parcels that look like spring rolls, and you can make it into a nice dessert.”

To find out more about the range of workshops available at Greenwich Pantry, visit the website.

To read about the Ultimate cPanel Webhosting plan that Lara counts on, see our Ultimate cPanel Webhosting page.