The Winter Fancy Food Show at San Francisco’s Moscone Center includes a graduate of Fresh Starts Culinary Academy who makes her gourmet products at the Next Key Center.
Karen Schuler Hill brought bars, bites and crumbles from her D’Vine Crush label to the show, a giant exhibition for the specialty food trade, with four flavors to wow passing foodies: pinot noir, chardonnay, port and sparkling.
Her products are made with varietal grape skins and seeds, crushed into flour, using ingredients considered byproducts of the wine crush. “It’s compost, basically. All natural and very nutritious,” she says.
The Tiburon resident sells her products at the Oakville Grocery, Healdsburg General Store and Cavallo Point Marketplace, among other outlets.
A native of Brooklyn, Karen says she always loved cooking, even planning as a teenager to attend the Culinary Institute of America in New York. Instead, she developed a career in graphic arts and advertising, but reassessed her interests after moving to the Bay Area four years ago.
Initially she pursued an idea to make clothing dyed by wine grapes, then joined with partners to create a grape-related food product. Looking for a commercial kitchen, she became acquainted with Fresh Starts Culinary Academy and ended up joining the culinary training program.
“I needed food handler certification and decided to take the class,” Karen says. “It gave me the confidence to do this. I knew I could handle the kitchen, I knew I could handle the work. The support that I got from the chefs was amazing for me.”
She's now building the D’Vine Crush business on her own and making the products in our kitchen; one of her employees is a Fresh Starts graduate. Look for D'Vine Crush coming to the gourmet food aisles near you!
