From pig farming to pickling, these Georgia women are cooking up success

Credit: Jenni Girtman

Credit: Jenni Girtman

Salwa Kisswani

One of Salwa Kisswani’s happiest memories was when her mother and grandmother would call her into the kitchen in their home in New York to help make pickles.

Those warm memories — and a dissatisfaction with commercially made pickles full of preservatives and dyes — drove her to start making pickles five years ago once again using her grandmother’s brine recipe.

The operation started small with Kisswani and her husband, Randy Michael, selling at a few farmers markets and stocking an antique shop they owned in North Georgia with pickles.

Kisswani’s mother warned her against becoming an entrepreneur and encouraged her to pursue a career with stability. Others told her she would be wasting her life on pickles, but for Kisswani, “it just feels like I’m actually building something.” She quit her corporate job in software development and dedicated herself to a pickle business.

Evergreen & Market offered her a way to share “the old ways of food again,” she said. Kisswani and her husband would work late into the night slicing, brining and preparing jars of pickled produce by hand. As the business scaled up — now they’re in more than 300 retail stores across the U.S. and 11 metro area farmers markets — they added around 20 employees, but the process remains the same.

Credit: Jenni Girtman

Credit: Jenni Girtman

Evergreen & Market offers more than 40 flavors and types of pickles, including grape pickles, pickled watermelon rinds and lemons, banana pickles and pickled beets. But what keeps customers returning is the experience, Kisswani said.

If a customer makes a special request, Kisswani and her team oblige, even if it means preparing a few jars of pickled golden beets for just one farmers market patron.

“Knowing that we’re feeding people — we’re feeding kids, we’re feeding moms, dads, grandmothers — that’s a big responsibility, but it also makes your heart bigger,” she said.

atlantapickles.com.

Niki Pattharakositkul

“Every day is a new day; it’s a new start,” Niki Pattharakositkul said. “What you’ve already done is great, but what can you do better?”

With that mindset, opening 12 restaurants in almost 10 years doesn’t seem like such an unlikely task for the 36-year-old.

Pattharakositkul always knew she wanted to be a restaurateur. Cooking makes her feel calm and focused, and it reminds her of making food with her mother and grandmother in Thailand. “Every time I cook, I feel like I miss them,” she said.

She’s lived in Georgia since her early teens and attended Georgia State University for marketing. At that time, she noticed there weren’t many Thai restaurants that bridged the gap between casual mom-and-pop and fine dining.

She decided to introduce that happy medium. She started working in restaurants after graduating college with the goal of learning from the best, like Nan Thai Fine Dining. She studied what made other restaurants successful and how she might adapt it for her own space one day.

As a first-time restaurant operator in her 20s, Pattharakositkul was met with plenty of noes and she found it challenging to use her voice, but when an empty space became available near the Lindbergh MARTA station in 2016, she jumped on it and opened 26 Thai Kitchen & Bar.

Over the last decade, Pattharakositkul has opened eight more 26 Thai locations across the metro area. And she launched two other concepts this year — cocktail bar Blackjack Bar Tapas and a traditional Thai eatery called Pink Lotus that offers “less familiar” Thai dishes from the country’s central, northern, southern and Isan regions. She is also building out a corporate kitchen that will allow her to maintain consistency at each 26 Thai location.

Sometimes people advise her to slow down, but Pattharakositkul believes “opportunity doesn’t come and knock at your door,” she said. “I take it first, and I will figure out what to do next.”

26thai.com. instagram.com/pinklotusthai, blackjackbartapas.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Monica Sunny

Monica Sunny’s father always tells her, “You got to get on that train. You may not know where it’s headed, just get on there and figure it out.”

Sunny found her train in the form of chai. When she was growing up in Atlanta, there were few Indian restaurants and grocery stores, so her family almost exclusively drank chai at home.

When she had her own family, she built the chai ritual into the lives of her three sons as well. On Friday mornings, Sunny would pull out her masala dabba — which is a tin filled with spices — and brew chai for everyone.

Her boys called it the “chai box.”

Sunny began to notice other parents taking an interest in the ritual when their kids came for playdates. The chai she made was a far cry from the Americanized version people were used to, she said.

Soon, she was setting up tables with her chai blends at Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn in the hopes that busy moms would take an interest in its health benefits and flavor. In 2020, Sunny and her husband decided to focus on the business full time.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

She’s created 15 blends, all using spices sourced from small farms in Kerala, India. And for about a year, she and her eldest son worked late into the night to create their own chai concentrate, which won a Flavor of Georgia People’s Choice Award in 2024.

“The fact that chai in the ’80s was not even on the horizon or anywhere that you would see in Georgia, and now we were a Flavor of Georgia people’s award (winner) — I think it’s pretty cool,” she said.

The Chai Box can now be found on the shelves of a big-box store like Costco, yet it is still a small operation, run out of a modest warehouse in Marietta. Grand plans are in the works, though; Sunny just announced she will be opening Atlanta’s first chai cafe in the upper Westside.

“That’s my dream,” she said. “Just a little chai cafe in the corner of the street (like) in India.”

810 Livingston Court, Marietta. 844-242-4269, thechaibox.com

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Jocelyn Dubuke

Jocelyn Dubuke started baking because she liked to stand out, and there was no better way to do that than to be the person bearing treats.

Although all the women in her family enjoy baking, “I’m the only stupid one who made it a career,” she said with her infectious laugh.

Dubuke discovered a love for making chocolate after she graduated from the Culinary Institute of America. In 2015, she turned it into a business: Jardi Chocolates.

A decade later, Dubuke remains the sole chocolatier at Jardi and fulfills orders with the help of a part-time employee. The process is almost entirely done by hand, and her chocolates contain no preservatives or color dyes.

It took a lot of experimenting with color theory and new ingredients to extend the chocolate’s shelf life without using preservatives, she said, but fortunately she comes from a family of science lovers.

Dubuke built a niche by making chocolate for restaurants and wholesale customers. She’s never had a retail space and does not have plans to open one despite the naysayers who say she won’t be successful without one.

Running her own chocolate business for 10 years has brought its share of creative burnout, so when she started to notice the rising cost of chocolate, she decided to launch an ancillary business, Atlanta Candy Kitchen. It gives her a break from exclusively working with chocolate, and she can sell her treats at a lower price point, she said.

But even after a decade of Jardi Chocolates, the craft still excites her, which keeps her from giving up when business slows down during the steamy summer months.

“I can’t walk away from it because chocolate is a part of me now.”

3400 W. Hospital Ave., Chamblee. 470-240-8353, jardichocolates.com

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Sarah Koch

Sarah Koch knows how to adapt.

After graduating from college, she joined the Peace Corps. About halfway through an assignment in Senegal, a fellow volunteer approached her about co-founding a nonprofit agricultural organization.

Despite having no experience in agricultural or nonprofit management, and with the intention of only helping to get Development in Gardening off the ground, after five years Koch found herself as the executive director.

DIG works with uniquely marginalized communities in Senegal, Kenya and Uganda to shore up their food systems. The program trains people to build regenerative gardens that improve a community’s access to food.

Her passion for the work was something she found over time. In those first years, Koch and co-founder Steve Bolinger learned how to operate a nonprofit and best serve the people they worked with while she sought to understand the complexities of food systems in the regions they worked.

Now, DIG is primarily led by local program leaders and facilitators while Koch focuses on fundraising and supporting their efforts from Atlanta. She learned years ago that the best way to lead DIG was by listening to and learning from the communities they work with, she said.

“We let them guide us on what they want and let them determine what success looks like, and then we work together to try and meet that,” Koch said.

The fears of not succeeding in her fundraising efforts keep Koch up some nights, she said, but two decades later, DIG’s farmers have become increasingly important as they fill in the nutritional holes because of cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development in marginalized communities.

“There’s a lot of people that depend on DIG to show up, and the work is really really good and it’s really impactful,” Koch said. “It has a life of its own, and I just hope that I can do enough to help it thrive.”

dig.org

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Laura Jensen

Not many people can say they’ve kept an animal from extinction, but Laura Jensen found a way to do just that with Meishan pigs.

Nestled in Jensen’s idyllic Loganville farm, a select group of hefty, wrinkly Meishan pigs make their home on grassy fields and between a few pits of cooling mud. Jensen Reserve, a farm store and butcher shop, is steps from the pens.

Jensen grew up on her grandparents’ cattle farm in North Carolina. She moved to Georgia in 1995 in the hopes of one day founding her own farm.

She and her husband, Bill, purchased the Loganville property in 2013, and Jensen soon discovered that eating the eggs and chicken they grew on their farm helped ease the symptoms of her autoimmune disease. Jensen decided to add hogs to the farm to see if pork would also help alleviate her symptoms.

Jensen started with large-breed hogs, but she soon found they were too destructive to the farm. Then she stumbled across a breed of hogs she’d never heard of before: Meishan.

A friend, Rico Silvera, was posting on Facebook about the last two research herds in the U.S., so she offered to take some in. The Meishan, a Chinese breed, was her perfect pig because of its docile nature and ability to gain weight quickly. For Jensen, “there was no looking back.”

After taking in a portion of the herd, Jensen helped Silvera found the American Meishan Breeders Association and led a recovery effort that expanded the Meishan line from critically endangered to threatened. There are now about 1,500 registered Meishans in the U.S., said Jensen, who took over as president of the association in 2020.

“How do you walk away and say no to the opportunity to save an entire breed of any animal?” she said.

At the same time, Jensen built out a farm store where they butcher and sell pork, beef, chicken and charcuterie. She and her husband even spent late nights teaching themselves how to cure their own prosciutto. When Bill turned his focus back to his flower wholesale business, she completely took over.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Jensen Reserve also employs an all-female staff of butchers. It’s something Jensen never intended to do, but as a woman who often took on “nontraditional female roles,” she has a desire to “empower women to find their own passion and their own power.”

The farm store has grown beyond her expectations, Jensen said, but there’s an ambitious part of her that wants to see how far the brand can go, all while saving a pig from extinction.

4091 Bullock Bridge Road, Loganville. 770-363-4487, jensenreserve.com

Credit: NATRICE MILLER

Credit: NATRICE MILLER

Tracy Gates

On a Saturday in 1987, Tracy Gates’ father picked her up from college in Huntsville, Alabama, drove her to Atlanta, took her around to meet his vendors, introduced her to everyone who worked at the Busy Bee Cafe, then went straight back to the golf course.

That was the extent of what Milton Gates taught his daughter about the historic restaurant he had purchased in 1983.

But the young Gates was a daddy’s girl, and she wasn’t about to shy away from a difficult job.

“Anything that’s a challenge for me is interesting to me,” she said. “I am a ‘why’ person.”

Being a “why” person meant Gates rolled up her sleeves and literally got her hands dirty to learn everything she could about the business. She was a dishwasher, a busser and a janitor at Busy Bee. She learned how to cook by watching the old-timers and staff and interviewing the son of Busy Bee’s original owner.

Lucy Jackson opened Busy Bee Cafe in 1947 in Atlanta’s Vine City neighborhood. It became a destination for civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Hosea Williams to gather and eat soul food. Since Gates took over, it remains a tourist attraction and a stop for political figures like former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former President Joe Biden.

The best piece of advice Gates ever received was from Williams, who said to keep the food consistent, he told her. That was easier said than done. Gates had to learn how produce changes with the seasons and how to create a line of cooks who learn from each other to minimize deviations in the recipes.

With consistency no longer a worry, the time has come for Busy Bee to expand. Gates is working to open an outpost at Atlantic Station next year.

“That’s the most exciting part — keeping the brand alive beyond me,” she said.

810 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive SW, Atlanta. 404-525-9212, thebusybeecafe.com

Credit: Courtesy of Sweet Grass Dairy

Credit: Courtesy of Sweet Grass Dairy

Jessica Little

When Jessica Little and her husband, Jeremy, moved back to Thomasville to help with her parents’ cheese business, Little wasn’t particularly excited to leave the hustle and bustle of Atlanta. But, as she immersed herself in the artisan cheese industry, she fell in love with the craft and saw a future where they could share Sweet Grass Dairy cheese with the world outside of southwest Georgia.

A few years later, when her mother offered to sell the creamery to the Littles, she jumped at the chance.

But finding a way to grow Sweet Grass Dairy was its own beast. Little had watched her parents become serial entrepreneurs with their dairy farms, and she wanted that same freedom to shape her and her family’s future while building the business and culture they envisioned.

“We wanted to remain family-owned and true to the values that my mom had at the beginning, which is that everybody deserves good food,” Little said.

There weren’t many cheese professionals in Georgia to glean knowledge from, she said, but her vision for Sweet Grass Diary, coupled with her husband’s operational mindset, drove them to ask questions and seek out the resources they needed.

Little became something of a jack-of-all-trades. She took business courses and joined mentorship programs. She and her husband brought their cheeses to trade shows and food conventions. The biggest catalyst to growing Sweet Grass Dairy was getting approved to sell cheese in Whole Foods, which made it easier to distribute their product outside of the South.

Now, Sweet Grass Dairy employs around 70 people in Thomasville, including at Sweet Grass Dairy’s restaurant and cheese shop in its downtown. And it sources milk from other family farms within a 50-mile radius of the creamery, a sweet solution when Little’s parents retired last year and sold their cows and dairy operation.

What makes her so passionate about artisan cheese, Little said, is how those raw materials will always shine through.

“You could take the exact same recipe in Thomasville and in Vermont and California, and it’s going to taste differently if it’s artisan,” she said. “It’s going to taste like the milk in the place where it comes from.”

123 S. Broad St., Thomasville. 229-228-6704, sweetgrassdairy.com