Alameda Business Spotlight: Pacific Fine Food

Owner: Kelly Kearney

How long have you owned the company? I purchased in 2004. I went to cooking school at California Culinary Academy in the 1980s, but I worked full-time in high tech in sales and marketing through the 1990s. Even while I was working full-time, though, I catered on the side, just because I liked it. When I decided to change careers, catering was a natural.

Who are your typical customers? My clients are mostly corporate. When I bought the company, the business was catering car shows down here at Alameda Point. When the auto industry had a meltdown, the car companies stopped coming. And I had to build a new customer base. I put our website together and targeted the 20 largest companies within five miles. We’ve grown to hundreds of clients since then through word-of-mouth including the Oakland International Airport, Kaiser, the East Bay Regional Park District and St. George Spirits. I don’t like to get too far, though, because the scones won’t be warm when we get there!

What size events do you cater? We’ve done events as big as 1,200 people or as small as 10. Most of our events are for between 20 to 80 people for clients like the Air Museum.

What makes your company unique? We’re very fresh. We’re very seasonal. So we don’t have the same menu every month. Our food is healthy and it tastes good and looks good. A lot of us are retired moms or Girl Scout leaders so we are very, very flexible and creative. We’re also green: we serve on hotelware or compostable plates.

What types of food do you make? We make homemade everything: scones, jams, granola bars, danishes and lemonade.

I hear you have a beehive and garden outside. People kept ordering lavender-mint lemonade and we had trouble getting fresh lavender. So we got bees that pollinate our lavender and produce honey. Now we go through hundreds of gallons a year. We also grow edible flowers and herbs.