From a Whim to Wisconsin's Favorite Charcuterie Brand: The Story of Tricky Foods
- 23 hours ago
- 3 min read
Therese Merkel didn't plan to become an entrepreneur. She went to school for IT, worked as a project manager, and had a perfectly reasonable career lined up, until she quit, and then the pandemic hit a few weeks later.
"There weren't a lot of opportunities to work elsewhere, everyone was at a hiring freeze. And I had a lot of time to think; do I really want to just get another job for a paycheck?"
The answer was no. In May 2020, she decided to pursue her passion for food instead. A cousin suggested she try making charcuterie boards. She made one at home, liked it, found a commercial kitchen, and Tricky Foods was born. "It was completely out of whim," she says. "But it hit my passion."
What started as a 1 person operation out of a rented kitchen grew quickly. Word spread on Instagram. Orders piled up. By September 2023, Therese had opened a brick-and-mortar storefront in Madison's Bay Creek neighborhood; a wine and beer bar, charcuterie shop, and event space all in one, with a team of 12.
Finding Her Footing at StartingBlock
When Therese joined StartingBlock's Madworks accelerator program, she was already running a real business. What she needed was clarity on how to scale it, and the right connections to get there.
"The pitch competitions, all the programming, it helped me get a lot more clear about how I wanted to grow," she says. But the single most important thing to come out of Madworks was a connection from StartingBlock's CEO, Scott Mosley.
Scott connected Therese to a packaging engineering professor at UW-Stout. That connection became the backbone of one of her biggest business breakthroughs: a research-backed, eco-friendly packaging solution that could keep charcuterie boards cold and intact during long-distance shipping.
"I literally went across the country to a packaging expo to try to meet people who would help me with packaging, and no one would," she says. "Scott's connection to that professor is what made it happen."
Going Nationwide
Customers had been asking Therese to ship since 2020. She kept putting it off, figuring she'd get to it when things slowed down. They never did. Madworks changed that.
"What probably would have taken most people years to figure out, I was able to figure out in under a year," she says. Tricky Foods now ships nationally, bringing Wisconsin cheeses, cured meats, and beautifully styled charcuterie boards directly to customers' doors coast to coast.
For Therese, shipping isn't just a revenue channel, it's a mission. "Getting more Wisconsin cheese around the country, spreading what we do here to the whole country, that's what success looks like to me."
A Woman’s Touch at the Center
Beyond the boards and the brand, Therese is building the kind of workplace she wanted but rarely saw. "I want to be a place where women can work and also live life at the same time," she says. Her team grows with the business, everyone starts as a charcuterie artist and can move up from there.
The vision is big. A few hundred employees. Snacks that go massive. Wisconsin agriculture with a national footprint. And at the center of it: a founder who turned a whim into something real, with a little help from the Madison startup community that had her back.
