Shoreside Support is a full-service superyacht provisioning company that caters to the top chefs in the Caribbean, USA, and Mediterranean. Through a network of warehouses in Florida, Boston, San Diego and Monaco, Shoreside Support has found a way to deliver rare and hard-to-source ingredients with speed and precision. The company was founded in 2017 and continues to find new and innovative ways to make the lives of yacht chefs more efficient. Founder and CEO Tommy Baldwin III joins us in conversation to explain where it all began.
It’s kind of a crazy story, actually! I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset. Both my father and grandfather had several businesses in the automotive industry. My grandfather was a race car driver, and my father owned several NASCAR teams. I started young, sweeping floors and watching the NASCAR races up close. As I got older, I started getting more hands-on with the business side of things. My passion for business development and relationship building flourished. When I went off to college, I decided to develop those skills.
I worked for an energy drink company during my freshman year, where I made some new friends who were just as hungry as I was. By senior year, we were raising capital to start our own brewery. Once we successfully raised the capital, I dropped out of college so I could focus on the business full time. Within just a couple of years, we had 150 distributors in 27 states; our product was sold by 7-Eleven, Walmart, and other big retailers. I left in 2017 to pursue other projects. I moved out to Miami, and before I knew it, I was delivering meat to superyacht chefs out the back of my car!
I had a friend in Miami who was selling meat to his friends, who happened to be superyacht chefs. It was a small operation, and right away, I recognised an opportunity for growth. I pitched a partnership, we came to an agreement, and days later, I was down on the docks selling produce to yacht chefs. I didn’t know anything about food, and I didn’t know anything about yachts. Still, I sold an order of Wagyu beef to the very first person I spoke to. I remember going home that night buzzing with excitement and that same evening, I downloaded Photoshop and put together a flyer advertising high quality specialty meats.
The next day I was back at the docks and learnt that there was a real need for high-quality and reliable provisions – and for more than just meat. Caviar, fruits, seafood were all in demand. No matter what people asked for, I told them I could get it. I would walk out of meetings, immediately fire up Google, and look up what certain products were and where to get them. It was pretty wild.
I started to build a reputation among yacht chefs and captains as the guy who could source anything. Behind the scenes, I was frantically establishing a small network of vendors. It wasn’t long before I realised that this need extended way beyond Miami. Chefs were asking about deliveries in Europe, the Caribbean – all over the world. It was going to take some serious investment to meet those needs, and my partner wasn’t ready to commit. So we ended our partnership, and that’s when I founded Shoreside Support.
I’m a laser-focused human being, and I had my sights set on getting the highest quality products in the world to my clients, whenever and wherever they needed them. If that meant driving several hours to an overnight fish market and speaking to vendor after vendor at 3 A.M. to assemble an order that needed to be ready by 10 A.M., I did it. I understand how stressful a chef’s life is and how inefficient and unreliable provisions make things exponentially harder. I decided I was going to solve that problem at any cost. I wanted to build a network that could deliver anywhere, on time, every time. That’s what we do.
We’re going to keep scaling this beast! 2021 has been all about fine-tuning and we’ve brought in some new technology to improve the customer experience. We've developed a platform that automates the entire ordering process. The app for the chefs is easy to use, and once the order is placed, it goes through our entire pipeline – from picking, packing, and delivery – at lightning speed. We want Michelin star chefs to have the ability to order rare, fresh, word-class ingredients anywhere in the world. And we want it to be easier and faster than someone ordering UberEats to their apartment. Our average turnaround time is 3.2 days, and on average, each order has over 300 unique products. Tricky and complex orders allow us to learn and adapt, making our system and our network better and stronger. We’re constantly improving and evolving.
Do you have any tips and tricks for new entrepreneurs entering the industry?
Create boundaries to protect your own personal health. That’s the most important thing. We provide such a high level of service in such a crazy and unorthodox industry. It’s so easy to forget to take care of ourselves. Everything is intense 24/7, but you have to find time for self-care. It’s also important to build all of your relationships around trust and integrity. The yachting community is small and tight-knit. Mistakes are forgivable, but word will get around quickly if you break someone’s trust. So, trust, integrity and self-care are critical – it’s a crazy and demanding industry. It’s not for everybody. But I love it and could never imagine ending up anywhere else.