Eat the Island - Queens Hotel Southsea

Fantastic Local Food Business Networking Event

So what does your happy food face look like? Mine definitely involves a big grin, my eyes close to focus on the taste and then pop open to make sure there’s more…. along with the yummy mumbles of ‘mmm that was delicious!’ 

I saw a lot of this with the people who got to taste our mochi at Eat the Island food networking event in Southsea. This was my first food networking event, so I was a tad nervous beforehand! However, once I was there and I met the lovely organisers from Portsmouth City Council I felt confident and excited. I brought with me about 60 mochi along with some small posters to describe our business and we gathered a lot of attention right from the start as our mochi was such a unique product.

There were so many people who hadn’t heard of or tried mochi before but discovered they liked it. The lovely people of Portsmouth had lots of questions about mochi, so I think this will inspire my next blog! My two favourite questions were ‘How did you get into making this?’ and ‘Erm excuse me, is this cooked properly?’ This question made me smile but also gave me the opportunity to explain how as I’d previously described mochi as a sweet sticky rice CAKE, it is not like what most people in the UK will call cake. The texture is distinctly different. It is incredibly sticky and sweet (and obviously delicious). After another try, she decided she loved it. 

There were so many great and influential local food business including Jayne and David from Yarty, Portsmouth Tea, the (also new) Barnacle Brothers with their coastal rum, and the South Coast Bagel Co to mention a few. It was a real pleasure to talk to all of them and learn about their stories and products. 

It was also good to see so many businesses now have an emphasis on sustainability. I certainly learnt a lot and gave me some ideas on how mochi can be great for events of all sizes.  

Although the late night mochi making and busy day was very tiring, the event was very enjoyable, and all but two mochi I had brought with me were gone before it finished.