Our Story

Hi!  We’re David and Sheila and our passion is cruising. The Fall of 2018 finds us in Freeport Bahamas, at Ocean Reef marina. I decide to make tuna casserole for dinner. I find the cheese, milk and butter in the top-loading fridge. The flour’s in cupboard No. 1 (more on that later). Tuna’s in cupboard No. 2. And there’s no mushroom soup to be found. There’s supposed to be two cans of mushroom soup in cupboard No. 2. I can’t make tuna casserole without mushroom soup!

I swear I saw a can just yesterday, but I can’t find it now. David starts looking for the mushroom soup. 

Twenty minutes go by until we find the mushroom soup. Disaster avoided! Dinner gets popped in the oven.

Well, on a sailboat, as in life, you can either live with challenges or try to fix them.  David got tired of spending time looking for ship’s stores. He needed to find a fix for our shopping and provisioning for the boat and Pantry in Paradise™ is born.

We talk about how we would want to use it, what kind of interface it should have, and what are the most important features. Like setting reminders to use products before they go bad. Like creating a shopping list of all the items that are below our normal provisioning quantity. Like provisioning for more than a week. Like telling you where that mushroom soup is! Two cans in cupboard No. 2 and four under floorboard No. 5. Woo hoo!  I’m going to love this. I can’t wait to use it!

So, we soft launch at the 2019 Annapolis Boat Show. 

David and I work well together.  We meet with everyone we can think of who has anything to do with food and sailing.  I have the story, David demos the app. It always begins with, “I wanted to make tuna casserole for dinner, and I’m sure I saw a can of mushroom soup just the other day, but I just can’t find it now”.  And everyone laughs. They’re boaters – sailors, cruisers, power boaters – and we have one thing in common. We’ve all lost that ubiquitous can of mushroom soup on board.  

We meet with exhibitor Carolyn Shearlock of The Boat Galley and make plans to meet up before the show starts the next morning so we can show her the app.  And she likes it! She’s looking forward to getting a beta version of the app.

Later David bumped into Sheryl Shard of Distant Shores fame. David gives her a quick demo of the app. She liked it too! Another beta tester.  Wow. We had 100% interest in the app! We’re ecstatic! It couldn’t have gone better.

And so we work on giving feedback to the developer, working with the Collaborative Haus team on the marketing campaign, and wondering just how this is all going to play out!

We’ll keep you posted!