Amy and Hannah Pickle spent their last Rawgirls Memphis day, December 1st, in its commercial kitchen.
For 14 years, they’ve operated Rawgirls Memphis, which included food trucks and a brick-and-mortar location Downtown. They sold the business to Laura Wegner in November, but they stayed on as advisors to help her get settled.
Starting Rawgirls about 14 years ago was “a complete accident,” Amy says.
She and Hannah met at Give Yoga Memphis. Hannah, who owned the yoga studio, was conducting a workshop on how to use super foods. Amy, a professional chef, says, “It was love at first sight.”
A native Memphian, Amy is a member of the Pickle Iron family, which her grandfather started in the 1950s. After graduating from The Culinary Institute of America in New York, Amy worked for famed chef, the late Judy Rodgers, at San Francisco’s Zuni Café, where she learned how to cook seasonally with local foods and make everything by hand. Amy went on to work for Jean-Georges Vongerichten at Mercer Kitchen in New York before moving back to Memphis in 2007.
A native of Paducah, Kentucky, Hannah says, “Food and diet were always a hobby and an interest of mine. … I would eat crazy things like algae and seaweed because I loved how I felt, but I didn’t have talent towards making them taste good.”
Amy, whom she married in 2011, “made them taste good. We started working together at home. Playing around with raw foods.”
Amy learned how to dehydrate foods. Using almond flour, she made gluten-free bread, which she baked under 118 degrees. “It kept all the nutrition intact, so you’re not cooking out the nutritional benefits of food.”
One night they made dinner for a couple of friends. The menu included raw cantaloupe soup and a parsnip and sweet pea risotto. One of their guests said, “I feel so good eating this food. … If I paid you, would you guys cook for us?”
“We weren’t looking for a job,” Amy says. “Hannah had her studio and I had an IT business.” They liked the idea of making things together just for fun.
Still, they made a meal in their kitchen and delivered it to the friend. “Within two weeks we had 10 regular home delivery clients,” Hannah says.
“We both closed our businesses,” Amy says. “We had to. We didn’t want to say ‘no’ to people. They were feeling so good. … It was becoming bigger than us and what we wanted for our life.”
They began working out of a duplex in August 2011. “We had Rawgirls on one side and we lived on the other,” Amy says.
“Then we decided to become legitimate and we rented the old Another Roadside Attraction kitchen,” Hannah says.
They opened their first food truck in the parking lot of Hollywood Feed on Poplar Avenue and Yates Road. “It was an absolute success from day one.”
Popular items eventually included a sorbet made from açaí and their “Green Love Bomb” cold-pressed juice made with cucumbers, fresh ginger, lemon, spinach, celery, and romaine. Their menu was “always growing,” Amy says. “As we were creating the menu, we would create for each other at home and feel the benefits.”
She and Hannah planned to close the business when their daughter graduated from high school. “It broke our hearts a little bit, but we made a public announcement we were going to close. That day Laura, the new owner, wrote to us and said this was a dream of hers to have a business like this. And we felt she was a viable person to come in and take it over.”
Wegner is now calling the business “Rawgirls USA.”
As for their future plans, Amy says they’re looking at an organic farm in Spain, where they’d like to set up an artist and yoga retreat. Also, Hannah says, “We have a mushroom extract business as well that we will gear up once settled.”
So, where did the name “Rawgirls” come from? Since they were using raw foods and they both were women, they thought “Rawgirls” was “kind of cute,” Amy says.
“I don’t know if it was the best idea,” Hannah says. “We still get people thinking we’re a strip club.”
“I’m in my mid-50s,” Amy adds. “I’m not getting on a pole.”
