Sarah Hedger, the woman behind local breakfast food company Yum Granola certainly has her plate (or bowl) full with managing a growing business and a busy toddler. Sarah shares a weekday in her life with us.
7.00am - I realised pretty early in life that alarms are not for me. My three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Rai feels the same way and when that sun turns orange, we’re up!
7.30am - My skills as a chef are utilized at Yum and also around mealtimes in our house. Making breakfast for Rai and then putting together her lunchbox takes almost as much thought as the five course degustation meals I used to create at Whare Kea Lodge! No joke.
8.00am - Hopefully Rai is dressed by now! We’re ahead of schedule which means a quick game of role-playing Paw Patrol. Oh, did I really just mention that?! Yes, I’m Ryder and she’s one of the pups… that’s enough of those details!
8.20am - Rai and I set out on our e-bike to Busy Bees kindy. She always asks to go on the e-bike and I think we both are in better moods with more sunshine and fresh air in our lives.
9.00am - If I haven’t gotten in some form of mediation or breathwork before 7am, this is where I sneak it in. I go for a short walk on the railway reserve near Yum. Whilst only 15 minutes, it adds tremendous value in the form of joy to my days.
9.30am - Get to work! I wear a lot of hats with Yum. From CEO to my chef role of creating new recipes, fostering relationships with our suppliers and stockists, liaising with our employees and Mike, my husband, who handles the production side of things (and the other 31 hats) at Yum. Today we are working on our next Chef’s Edition Seasonal Granola, which is exciting as I love the creation of something new and delicious that is fresh, whilst learning about new ingredients available and grown here in New Zealand. I also get to meet a lot of neat people in our community in this space as well. Connecting Yum to the world is one of my favourite parts.
1.00pm - I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve got to 1pm before realizing I haven’t eaten, eeks! And we own a breakfast company! Anyhow, I really like savoury things first off in the day, before snacking on Yum in the afternoon.
3.00pm - I pick Rai up from kindy and I always look forward to this. The afternoon time I get with her is special, we visit Ruby’s in the port for a special treat ice cream and a cuppa. I feel really, really lucky that I have this time with her. Everything else stops. No phone answering, no social media checking, no email checks… nothing. Just quality time being present with my favourite little human.
5.00pm - We’re all home and I’ve had time to think about what to make for dinner by this point. I’m really good at making something good from what we have on hand… It’s like a cooking challenge every day!
7.00pm - Nighttime for Rai which leaves a couple of hours to get sorted for Yum tomorrow and then relax with some yoga.
9.00pm - This is the goal time to go to bed! 10pm has not been recharging the batteries lately so it’s been moved up to 9pm for me. I really love sleeping… Such an underrated part of our lives.
