The Soup Peddler is David Ansel. That’s me. I’m going to switch over to straight first person right away with this little narrative in order to keep it personal. I won’t pretend that I was born to cook. I was a good little boy but a very, very poor eater. I was brought up in the “iceberg lettuce and fruit cocktail” era.
The story continues fairly predictably, the boy (darn, I keep slipping into third person and changing my tenses) grows up, goes to college, attends some Grateful Dead shows, graduates with a degree in electrical engineering, and lands in the middle of The Land Of Cubicles.
This is a bit of a paraphrase, but I then followed a girl to Austin and fell in love. With Austin, with the way that people here live differently, take a creative approach to writing the scripts of their lives.
I was very inspired by the way people connected to each other, to the strength of the myriad little sub-communities of Austin. I have always been a dabbler, but I put it into great practice back then, employing my inspirations as a yoga teacher, freelance writer, and eventually as an amateur cook, hosting dinner parties at my house for the Jewish Sabbath.
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to travel quite a bit in those days, and my interest in cuisine was stoked by markets and street food around the world… that’s putting it a little grandly, maybe around a little section of the world. In particular, this photo is very important to me… it was taken about a month before I started The Soup Peddler. I can’t help but think that this woman (Kiki), the gordita lady of Real de Catorce, Mexico, was the final impetus for my journey into the food business.
It’s as simple as this: I sent an email to my friends asking if I could bring them some soup. Seventeen of my more generous friends took me up on the offer, so I was encouraged enough to invest ninety of my very last dollars to start The Soup Peddler. I bought the ridiculous pot in this picture and began cooking out of the clocktower house on Mary St. I couldn’t begin to realize how much I didn’t know about what I was getting into. I’ll tell you the story of those first soups one day. If we had ever met, the me of now would have laughed the me of then right out of the room, thus causing the me of then to reconsider the folly of the endeavor, thus causing the me of now to cease to exist. That would have been bad… naivete saved the day.
Part of the promise to my first customers was that I would bring the soup to them on my bike. The Soup Peddler was born. I loaded up my first soups into a milk crate attached to my bicycle, then soon expanded by adding a modified baby trailer carrying coolers full of soup. I didn’t realize quite then what I was doing with my time… I had accidentally created a food super-hero. It was a much quieter time in the food world, in the world in general. Back then, people were actually excited to receive emails just like you’d be excited when your pen pal wrote you a letter in the real old mail. The Soup Peddler was a big story in such a quiet time.
The press started rolling in… I had become such a quirky earnest feel-good story that it was automatic… The Austin American-Statesman, the Austin Chronicle, then Christian Science Monitor, all the TV stations in town, then a documentary film which aired all over PBS, at several film festivals, and even at Italy’s Slow Food Film Festival. The Food Network came knocking and we did a shoot for one of their short-lived shows. My star was definitely on the rise.
I used to take summers off because of the obvious seasonal ebb in soup demand in this volcanically hot region. That would afford me the opportunity to travel and have more food experiences, and it also gave me the chance to write my little opus, The Soup Peddler’s Slow And Difficult Soups. It’s a pretty good read, part of the under-appreciated literary genre “fictionalized memoirs.” There’s a germ of truth on each of the pages, I promise you that, but that’s about as far as I can go. Writing the book was one of the great joys in my life. For some reason, I haven’t accumulated the gumption to write another one yet.
I would say the apex of my fame came shortly after the publishing of the book. I was featured in an eight page spread in Food & Wine Magazine. Soon thereafter, I was on NPR’s wonderful The Splendid Table. My company was growing, we were selling loads of soup, we now had a little fleet of delivery trucks going all over town, we expanded our menu to include all sorts of things besides soup. I now had a general manager and chefs to do the cooking for me, and I was relegated primarily to be the IT department (cruel irony!) and pretty face of the company.
My place in the Pantheon of Austin characters was secure, The Soup Peddler was by then a household name. I got married, settled down, and began to enjoy the fruits of the crazy first phase of entrepreneurship. I had used every ounce of every part of my being: creative, physical, intellectual, interpersonal, and I was pretty spent. I took time to breathe again and create space in my life, frankly to heal from some of the tribulations involved in running the business. My wife and I had a child. It was a very good time.
But there was definitely something eating at me. A lack of direction, a lack of paths forward. I often described The Soup Peddler as an inversion of the Ben & Jerry story, who had the early challenge of starting an ice cream company in a very cold climate. They struggled with that but obviously sorted that little problem out. For whatever reason, I was unable for many years to break out of my rut. Perhaps a bit too independent, investor- and debt-averse, old-fashioned, I had sort of painted myself into a corner. I was incredibly proud of what my staff and I had created and very much in love with our delivery service that so many people valued so deeply. But it had a life of its own, it would ebb and flow at its own will, no force could I exert to change its course, it seemed. I needed a burst of creativity.
That opportunity came serendipitously as so many great things do. I ran into Matt Shook, the founder of Daily Juice (now Juiceland), one cold rainy day. I was taking the afternoon off because sales were great and my work was done. He was taking the afternoon off because sales were horrible and his work was done. We had our “chocolate in the peanut butter” moment and decided to go into business together, to mash up our know-how in a seasonally complementary way. We rehabilitated a curious little box of a building at a very prominent intersection and put together a nice little business, a new, first-ever retail face for The Soup Peddler.
As of the writing of this history, “The Box” is a little over a year old and is definitely a success. For the sake of this narrative, let’s call it a happy ending for the time being. It’s not exactly a soup empire, but it is a good small business and supports quite a few employees and their families.