[Danielle Balocca]: All right, thanks so much for being here with me today. If you don't mind just introducing yourself with your name, pronouns, and just a bit about who you are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Excellent. Thanks for having me. Tara Gearheart and she and her and we are Medford residents. We've been here since 2008 and really love in the community. We, you know, live in by car park in the Fulton Heights area. And I own team media consulting. I live with my husband and three kids and two dogs. We just recently started a pierogi business called Bob's Cheese Pierogies. That's a little bit about us.
[Danielle Balocca]: Great summary. We'll get a lot more into some of those topics in a minute. But before we do that, I just want to ask you the question that is critically important to the podcast that we ask everybody, but what is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow. I mean, this is a loaded question, because there's like, it's a tie between two places, depending on the mood that we like, but our old school, and kind of our always go to is Bocelli's. And I'm a big fan of their pesto fagioli soup and stuffed artichoke would be like the two go to things there. But most recently, Alta Cooper, just because I love that cuisine. And yeah, when I go there, we get tostadas, nachos and all the delicious things that they serve. So and can't forget a margarita.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. You know, people mention Bachelor's all the time, and I've never been there, but I got to try it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's, it's like an old school fan favorite. Nick, Nick was the owner. I think there's been a new ownership over the last couple years, but it was a family run business there. So actually a couple of, I wanna say a couple of the daughters live here and they also go to the Roberts Elementary School. So it's fun to see when back in pre-kids, when we didn't even have kids, my husband and I would post up at the bar and the daughters would wait on us when they were in their 20s. And now it's like, we're all living our mom lives and dropping our kids off at school. And we're like, my, we just look at each other and we're like, my, how things have changed 20 years later.
[Danielle Balocca]: Oh, pre-kids.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly. We can't even remember the time. It's like far away.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, awesome. So yeah, I'm hoping you could share with us a little bit about your business. I think last weekend we had the opportunity to come to the pop-up, your perogie pop-up at Redford Brewing, which is amazing. So if you could tell us a little bit about kind of like how you've arrived at this point in your business.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes. Yeah, so I, I like to say our perogie business kind of came out of private beta into public beta this year. So the concept started, my husband and I, we actually met in I was a waitress and he was a line cook back at Papa T's restaurant. Shout out if you ever visit Yukon Dairy Farm. There's a nice little Italian spot right off the highway. It was both of our second jobs. He's a great cook. I swear in another life he was probably a chef at some point just because he has a natural knack for cooking everything. I have a few things that I'm really good at cooking. One is pierogies. But that was not something that came natural. Joe's grandmother, who the company is actually named after. So Joe's Polish and his family's Polish. And You know, I've known Joe and his family probably like 25 years. And when I first met his grandmother, she was, she was like the sweetest lady. She celebrated 100 years of life. She passed away in 2024. But one of her biggest passions was cooking pierogies, golumpkis, traditional Polish foods. And as someone who just loves a little stuffed empanada or pasta or anything like that, truthfully, I had never had pierogies before I met Joe and his grandma and his family. Over the years, this is her recipe, but it was actually her grandmother's recipe. This recipe has been in the family for over 100 years. When she would come up and visit us, again, before kids and then obviously with kids, we would spend a day with his mom and Babchi. We would clear the kitchen and we would get all the ingredients. It was a process. We would spend six hours peroguing, making the dough, rolling the dough, stuffing, boiling, buttering, packaging, sautéing. It was a thing. And it's a very fond memory, right? And so when we were thinking of side hustles, as we always do, I like to consider myself a little bit of an entrepreneurial mind. thinking of, okay, what are the things that we love to do, but that also make people happy, right, is like figuring out food and good food and, you know, a way to connect community and really getting back to kind of those like family values of sitting and having a meal with somebody, right, like, technology is amazing. We're filming right now on the zoom doing a podcast, right. But there also is a lot of things where we're like, Hey, if we just take 20 or 30 minutes and stop down and have a good meal together and share, you know, some stories and chit chat, like, you know, that's, so that's kind of where it started is, is, is that and so the company's named after her and We now cook out of a kitchen, a commercial kitchen in Stoneham, so Food Revolution. And the owner over there, it's women-owned. And even though Bob's Cheese is family-owned, technically, like on the LLC paperwork, I do most of the cooking at this point. And so we made a good connection with a couple of the other chefs over there that are have their own businesses, a lot of being women led. So it's really kind of evolved. I will say it's snowballed faster, really, than I thought it would, which is sometimes how these things work, right? You're just like, you have this idea and you're just like, I think this is going to be really great. And it ends up working out. And then you're like, oh, my gosh, I now need to like keep the train moving. So that's kind of the position that we're in right now. But we're loving it. Right. So we're trying to scale slow on purpose. You know, we are cooking on the weekends right now for to make orders for pickup for fresh. We're doing pop up events. And then we'll probably be at some farmers markets this summer. And then next year, depending on how things go, we'll look to do our wholesale license and then get into some boutique food shops. But honestly, that's a whole other animal that I'm not ready to wrap my head around yet.
[Danielle Balocca]: I really like that story. What I appreciate about it is that you talked about how food has sort of helped connect the generations in your family, right? That you sit down to a meal with your daughters and you can tell them this is something your dad's grandmother, who's no longer here, this was important to her and this is like a story of her family, right? and I think like especially at a time like this when we're talking about in like you know in our world where there's just like so much happening with like different cultures and um different ideas about belonging right that like this is such an important message for our kids um and a place like Medford you mentioned Altacuba and you mentioned like and we have a new um pub in the square right these are like cultures that people that their families are bringing to our city right and so um It seems like it's a simple thing to make a pierogi. I'm sure it's not simple. I'm sure it's complicated practice. But there's so much value to what you're doing. And I guess I wonder what your hope is in terms of an impact of the work that you're doing on our city.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I mean, that's like, we have an arm of the business, which is like philanthropic. So something that was instilled from like, my grandfather, and you know, even Joe's family is like, Um, and I own another, uh, business. My, I call it like my day job is, um, I own a marketing agency, uh, team media consulting, and our tagline is grow your business and grow your community. And we celebrated 10 years last year. And one of like the milestones that we hit as an organization, as an as that company was, is we've donated over $75,000 in the past decade to various charities in various communities, not only in the state of Massachusetts, but also where our clients reside. So one of the one of the, you know, Kind of discussions for that business is if you engage us for services for execution Part of your retainer contract goes to a charity of your choice And if you don't have a charity of your choice, we pick a local charity here in Massachusetts and that ranges from pan mass challenge to national braille press for blind literacy that just because you're visually impaired and It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to have independence and learn literacy and reading, because reading is fundamental to life, essentially. So when we were building out the pierogi business, philanthropy is a very strong foundation and cornerstone of the pierogi business as well. And we call it pierogies for a purpose, is the arm of that business. And so as an example, last week at the pop-up when we were at Medford Brewing, It was going into St. Patrick's Day weekend were members of the St. Francis and St. Joseph's Church in Massachusetts are in in Medford, and so they're part of affiliated with like the Mary Karina parish. uh, you know, foundation. And so we did $1 from every order was donated to there. We thankfully, and thanks to everybody that came out and, um, enjoyed our pierogies. We really appreciate you and the church appreciates you. So we were able to donate a hundred dollars, um, to the church from one from the a hundred orders that we send. So, um, it is one of those things where like, we call to the community kind of like, how can we impact, right? Like where we live is where so many things start, but if we're not also, you know, we can scale as large as we want, hopefully, but like to us, that means really nothing unless we're really giving back and supporting to the people that are truly, at the roots, like supporting our business too. And that starts with home and our town. So yeah. And so one of the other things too, is we're in the second year of our scholarship on, um, the team media business where we, um, this, my, my grandfather on my side, um, was an inventor and, um, has a few patents, one being, if you ever go to the auto aftermarket, there's a product called Fuels Duals, and if you dump it into your gas tank, it extends the life of your gas mileage. And so this was something as a child, We have very fond memories of him mixing up these solutions. You would open the refrigerator in summertime, and there would be a gallon bottle that is like, do not drink this, because he was testing solutions for how to extend gas sustainability for mileage. So one of the things that our family, my sister and a few of my cousins, we started under Team Media where we do a $2,500 scholarship to graduating senior, where they are responsible for, and so this is the second year, we're super excited. Last year was kind of like our honorary year that we did that. And this year we changed up the submissions, but it's basically like, submit your story and a thousand words on an invention or a concept of how you're going to impact your community and also like kind of change the world, right? Like, and that could be through either social growth concepts or actual physical products. So, so that's one way we're giving back to the community and Bobshys Perogies is ultimately going to follow that. We are, we are still startups, so we don't have like the funding level yet to procure a program like that. But I'm hopeful in the next couple of years that we'll be able to create a scholarship program for graduating seniors coming out of Medford High School that are getting into the trades, meaning if they want to work with their hands or in the culinary industry, so we can tie it back to, again, food to table, farm to table, community connection and conversation.
[Danielle Balocca]: Do you remember what the invention was for the winner last year?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so she actually, these twin sisters, they were phenomenal submissions. We got really good submissions, but they actually had a garden, like a growth, a food sustainability to end work to end hunger in the town of Medford. And so they have a whole ecosystem at their house where they basically farm and produce food and then drop it at the kitchen in the center of town, that food pantry in the center of town. And some In the midst of being top of their class and getting amazing grades and working full-time jobs and going to school full-time, they spent their free time really curating this program of food sustainability for not just canned goods, but actually fresh foods. So it was really, really amazing. So I actually, I emailed her. the other day, because her first year is coming to an end. She ended up getting a scholarship to Harvard. And so luckily, she stayed local. And I was like, hey, if you're home for the summer, we'd like an update on how the first year went. But our babysitter, who is a graduating senior this year, who was a junior classmate with her last year, said that she's heard that, obviously, they're doing very well at Harvard. But yeah. It was it was really, like I said, it's those types of stories where you're just like, okay, to be 18 and that focused and that able to, to do all of those things is unbelievable. So
[Danielle Balocca]: Wow, you must. That's kind of how I feel about these podcasts, just getting to hear all the really cool stuff people are doing and that you must get to hear some cool stories with those submissions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's really awesome. And then all of that just revives the... the excitement and the, honestly, the hope, right? At the end of the day, you're just like, we hope that we can move forward and do hard things and think outside the box and become really cool and clever. And it's really nice to see that come to fruition in so many ways in various youth settings.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, thank you. How can people find out more? Where can they order your perogies?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thank you. So we have a website. It's called Bopcheese Perogies. So B-A-B-C-I-S-P-I-E-R. o g i.com. I was never good at spelling. Probably just check the link in the podcast that y'all puts in there. That's probably gonna be fast in case I misspelled it. But it's Bob cheese pierogi. We are on Instagram. We do have a LinkedIn as well. And yeah, I mean, you can reach out to us on our website. You can place an order on our website. We do ask that if you're going to order them again, since we are a small family run business and we really are trying to like cook them to order we do have frozen pierogies but if you are looking and saying hey for the following week I want to plan my meal and like soccer season is coming up and it's like hey between the drop-offs and pickups between all of the sporting activities of baseball and everything we ask that people place their order by five o'clock on Saturday and then we'll fulfill it and then you could pick it up Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday at the Stoneham kitchen and that's how that works. We also do shipping right now we're just shipping to New England We're trying to figure out a scalable model. Shipping, as you can probably imagine, food for preservation, it's pretty expensive. We're trying to figure out a way to not pass costs 100% of shipping through to the consumer. So I'm working on scalability and boxing and all of that stuff with FedEx and UPS. to be continued on growth and expansion, all the fun things behind the scenes of how to grow a business, but also how to not feel like the consumers paying for everything just to try to enjoy your product.
[Danielle Balocca]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, I take I take the learning from marketing, from how we work with our clients and eliminating friction. Right. So trying to alleviate those points of, OK, if somebody wants something, which was really interesting when I was doing keyword research for pierogies, 90000 people a month search for pierogies. So. Yeah, it's wild. And there really are not many brands, you know, out there. So first, we were like, okay, area of opportunity, right? Like, not only is grandma, and her grandma and Bob, she's recipe amazing. We enjoy it, our friends enjoy it, our colleagues enjoy it. But apparently 90,000 other people do as well. So I'm like good market to try to get into. So we'll see if one day we can have all of those people at least try our perogies one time.
[Danielle Balocca]: Very cool. Well, thank you. Is there anything else you want to make sure we know about before we wrap up?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I mean, I think that's pretty much it. I really appreciate you having me on the podcast. Like I said, we're live and local in Medford. So if you'll see us out and about, if you have questions, we also appreciate feedback, right? Good, bad, and the ugly. It's all how we grow. So, you know, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to let us know. But we really hope that you'll get to try our pierogies. We're working on the cabbage recipe too. So we have potatoes and cheese, cheese, and then we have cabbage, which will be coming this summer.
[Danielle Balocca]: So I love it all vegetarian.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I know. Yes, yes, yes. Getting into the meat and the USDA certifications and all of that jazz is like, probably a project for next year, we'll tell you. So.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: Keeping with the traditional flavors for now. So.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. All right. Well, thanks so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.