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Asta Petrus

LRT.lt

Asta Petrus, a marketing expert and co-founder of a successful food blog, felt more than a year ago that the blog had "grown up", gave up her previous jobs and started a dessert subscription business. She says that she created and continues to create it in a different way than was usual for her and the business world in general: without a clear strategy, relying mostly on her intuition.

She has also recently added the idea of the "School of Flavours", a class for children's taste education. We talk to LRT.lt about how taste can become a tool for sensory training.

- How did food and dessert creation become your hobby and now your main activity? Perhaps you brought this hobby from your childhood?

I grew up surrounded by good, quality food. Even though I didn't have a village (my grandparents were city dwellers), one of my grandfathers was an amateur fisherman who used to go fishing in the Kaunas lagoon. I remember that he used to bring back spectacular catches, and my grandmother really knew how to prepare the fish in different ways. Although I did not appreciate fish dishes very much when I was little, and other things were more tasty to me at that time, I was already impressed by the way my grandmother cooked the fish, and by how beautiful and aesthetically pleasing the dishes were.

My other grandparents kept beehives in the garden after they retired. The bees and the fresh honey are still strong in my memories. As do other tastes, and especially the smells. The aromas of a cucumber, a strawberry, a tomato fresh from the greenhouse. These are really very deep, vivid childhood memories.

One of my dad's favourite activities to this day is going to the market to shop. We talk a lot about food, about finding quality ingredients.

I discovered the hobby of cooking quite quickly in my life. Later, while experimenting, I came across the book "Tablecloth Rhythm" by Paulius Jurkevičius. When I read it, it really broadened my perception and, at the same time, made it clear why I was interested in food culture and why I wanted to continue. When I moved from Kaunas to Vilnius, there was a wider choice of food shops and I started experimenting even more. That was the beginning.

Now my children are growing up surrounded by quality food. When they were little, they thought, for example, that all people were mushroom pickers, that they knew mushrooms. Only then did they realise that here, it is more our family that likes to go into the woods to look for, pick and eat mushrooms.

- How did you decide to transform a successful blog into a dessert business that became your core business? Did it take a lot of determination and courage to take this step?

- I remember that after completing the training of business psychologist Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė, there was more clarity about the blog - I realised that this stage was over. A year after starting the business, I think I made a lot of brave decisions, but they didn't seem so brave at the time. I had a lot of faith and an inner knowing that it would work. Whether it would work at all was not even a question for me, I just didn't know how quickly.

Of course, the beginning was not easy and the results do not come so quickly. In general, starting a business is difficult, but today my rule is to think less, fear less, rethink a lot and act more. It's all about action - and now I can be happy with the ideas and results.

- You've said that you've built your business intuitively, even though you've worked in rational, strategic marketing before. How did you decide to try a different way of doing things?

- At one of my workplaces, I had the opportunity to work on a really large-scale brand relaunch: there I felt how interesting, spontaneous and alive the process was. I saw that there really wasn't a lot of rationality, but there was a lot of energy, a lot of desire. Even though I had a very clear example of how business can work in a different way to what I was used to, my own principles didn't change too much.

 It must have been with the food business I created that I started to develop it myself. I call this way of doing things, of building a business, the reverse way. The standard one, which I know very well and have been cultivating for many years, is that you have a project, an organisation or something like that, you make a strategy, you make an action plan and you implement it.

Figuratively speaking, you have a jigsaw puzzle with a picture on it and your job is to put it together, knowing how it has to work and how it will work in the end. And then the intuitive method, which I call the reverse method, is putting the puzzle together without knowing what the picture will be and what the end result will be. You don't have strategies, but you have a direction, a meaning, an essence, which is where the action starts, from which the result is born, and finally you try to make sense of it, to define what came out of it all. I continue to follow this principle, and I like it very much.

- You have recently launched a new project, the "School of Flavours", aimed at children and their taste buds. How do you see the importance of this for children?

- Developing taste in both children and adults leads to a better knowledge of oneself. This is what the dessert subscription is all about, where people receive a set of different desserts every month. Every time you learn what you like, you see more variety and you start to be more selective because you have tried more, experienced more, tasted more. In the end, the key criterion is yourself, not what the outside offers you: advertising or promotions in the shops.

When one's range of tastes and vision is broader, it certainly carries over into other areas of life: you realise the benefits of variety and quality, you are less afraid to try, to experiment, and you become more observant and aware. I have heard one testimonial that the desserts I have created, the subscriptions, have taught people how to taste and talk about flavours, how to share their experiences. That kind of attentive tasting gives a different experience, ultimately creates a connection.

In addition, people who develop their taste buds eventually start to choose better quality food, as they become more aware of the impact it has on their well-being. This becomes a perfectly natural behaviour. Better quality food leads to a better quality of life.

- Can taste also be a tool for developing intuition?

- If you develop your palate by eating quality, natural products that come from nature, you are really developing all your senses (food is also about texture, smell and sight). And if you are constantly choosing processed products with chemical ingredients, you are only dulling your senses, including your intuition.

- I wonder what reactions you get when you talk about your experience of building your business and your intuitive approach?

- I will probably be able to tell you more about my approach later, in about five years' time, when the business has taken off and I can talk more confidently about the success story. For now, I only share it in certain contexts. I get tacit support from my immediate environment. Not advice, not questions, but support and care, which is what I really need.

Today, I see many inspiring examples of living, intuitive organisations around me, and what I find most fascinating is that each case is unique: there is no one-size-fits-all recipe. When you develop a business "from within", it becomes an authentic unique business that only you can create. I am also very inspired by the fact that there is a lot of humanity in these organisations, and that good results and profits are not the main goal, but the consequence. The consequence is creating quality things that can give people something really good.

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