A father and daughter who sell their Caribbean sauces around the world have said they were inspired to act due to a lack of diversity in Cardiff's food scene. Charmaine Smikle said she and her father created Earl's Kitchen Caribbean sauces and make every jar from their kitchen after wanting to change the status quo from the capital city Charmaine experienced during her childhood.
Charmaine, 39, grew up in Cardiff with her family and felt that there was a lack of diversity, with her family one of the few Black families in the area. She told MyLondon that she would regularly visit London on weekend trips and come back with countless food and hair products that she struggled to find at home.
She told MyLondon: "The Black community back then was quite small. In terms of visibility to afro-Caribbean products be that hair or food, it was extremely limited. Those normal things that are perceived for that Black experience and life weren't really there. We'd always come back from London with so much stuff, we could have opened a shop."
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Charmaine went to London to study Biomedical Sciences at Kings College, and was surrounded by a range of food which encouraged her to think more about the situation in Cardiff. She said: "We could never get the food we wanted in Cardiff unless we travelled to London. We would have to phone our cousins about whether there's something they could see in a shop. The internet wasn't as huge then. I would rely on my family in London to tell me about the latest things so I could indulge in it whenever I visited."
The entrepreneur returned to Cardiff after finishing university and decided to start a new venture with her father, Earl, to be the change they wanted to see. A chef since the age of 16, Earl had already created a name for himself in the city and brought his own taste of Barbados through his sauces.
Sadly, in 2017, Earl suffered a stroke and had to take a step back from cooking in a proper kitchen, a huge shift for someone who had been in the industry for most of his life. Charmaine said: "My dad had been in the profession forever and also worked in TV, helping cater for shows such as Eastenders and 24. He came back from a big trip one day and he had a really bad headache. He had a brain aneurysm. For someone that was working a ridiculous amount of hours a week, he was stopped in his tracks. He had to learn to walk again and rebuild his life.
"He has done it, amazingly. His passion for cooking never went away and one day we were walking through a farmers' market and he said to me 'do you think we should create some sauces?' We had spoken about this before I went to university but it got put on the back burner while I was studying. Now, it felt like the right time."
Together, they created Earl's Kitchen in 2019 with just £1,000 to start with that went into making their first jar. Earl makes sauces, condiments and seasoning, in the hope of bringing that 'Caribbean experience to the home'.
Everything changed in 2020 however when the pandemic hit a few months after the business had started. Their ability to sell drastically changed as their face-to-face business slowed down - by then all they had created was a website but people weren't flocking to buy food online just yet.
She continued: "We found ourselves thinking should we pack it up because we didn't know what to expect. We didn't know how long Covid would last. Around that time, I saw an advert for Amazon's Small Business Accelerator program. This really helped as we couldn't do face-to-face sales anymore, we needed to build our online presence. I'm so grateful for it."
Boasting a range of sauces from Rum and Peppercorn, Scotch Bonnet Chilli and Barbados Caribbean Sauce, they have won awards for their flavours. "We've grown our online presence but we want to be getting into more London retailers. Not to sound pompous but whenever anybody tastes our sauce, they will buy it. Our customers are really faithful and they tell other people about it. This is the food we eat all the time and now we're giving it to others.
"Being able to see my dad in the kitchen you wouldn't think he even had a stroke. He's got so much energy. He loves seeing how the business is going and is humbled by the feedback. These are things he has always been doing and he gets to share them now, he's now realising a dream that he may never have thought possible. We bottle every jar from our kitchen and every single sauce he makes."
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