Do you dream of becoming a cheesemonger? Or opening the type of butcher shop or fishmonger you’d find in Europe? Perhaps you’d love to be a greengrocer, or sell delicious foods from the world’s traditional artisans.

These businesses all require a high level of craft and connoisseurship from their proprietors. An artisan shopkeeper needs to know more than simple retail management: he or she must know his or her products and how to handle them.

But where can Americans learn this kind of expertise? If you lived in Europe, where there is a tradition of artisan entrepreneurs, you could become an apprentice at your city’s best cheesemonger or butcher and learn the craft and business from the inside out. In the United States, these fine food traditions are not widespread and opportunities to apprentice are rare. Few can afford an extended stay in Europe to study with the fine shopkeeper-artisans there.

Food by Hand Seminars was founded to fill this gap. Our intensive seminars are a unique mix of retail know-how and foodcraft expertise designed to give artisan shopkeepers a great start in business.