Kayla Sonneby & Kelley Callaway are #MadeForKnoxville.
As a team, Kayla and Kelley are creating the secret ingredient you didn’t know you needed.
If you think all butter tastes the same, think again. The co-founders of Butter from the Block are expanding Knoxville’s culinary palette with their creatively crafted compound butters. For Kayla and Kelley, building a strong business requires teamwork; so it’s only natural that these two are experts in bringing ingredients together to make perfect blends.
The co-founders found the resources and community needed to launch their idea at the Real Good Kitchen. Since starting in January 2023, they have continued to grow and now sell their butters in Three Rivers Market, as well as online. Throughout the year, Kayla and Kelley experiment with different flavor combinations and offer newly developed compound butters every season. Because of their fresh product offerings, they get to see the excitement that their butter stirs up in new and returning customers. Their willingness to try new things is a constant inspiration to local cooks seeking to infuse fresh flavor into classic recipes.
“When we start explaining to our customers about the different ways you can use our butters, it’s like we’re offering a new perspective or approach to cooking”
In Their Own Words…
We create small batch compound butter by mixing quality butter with bold flavors to elevate your dishes and spread a little happiness, whether you’re cooking at home or in a professional kitchen.
We feel like we’re making change through the product we make because butter is such a staple ingredient in everyday cooking and yet so many people we’ve come across have never heard of compound butter. When we start explaining to our customers about the different ways you can use our butters, it’s like we’re offering a new perspective or approach to cooking and you can see how excited they get.
We also really love our product because we have a variety of flavors, both sweet and savory, and every month we offer a new savory and sweet to accommodate with the time of year so it’s fun to announce that to our customers and see the response, and it keeps them engaged and coming back for more.
What led to entrepreneurship:
We’ve always been into participating and supporting the community and we started paying attention to the different kinds of makers around Knoxville and noticed there weren’t any compound butter businesses. Around the time we were brainstorming, we came across the Real Good Kitchen and they hosted an open house. We went to it with only a business name and an idea, and with our combined efforts and the kitchen’s resources, the rest just progressed naturally.
Lessons learned:
Some of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is to be flexible, adaptable, and how to work together. We’ve had instances where some of our ingredients were delayed which held up production, but we just rolled with it and produced more of the other flavors. Another thing we’re still learning is packaging, labeling, and the logistics for markets. It’s all changing and we’re learning constantly along the way and one way that we maintain these changes is to stay positive, talk it through and hear each other out, and offer a number of suggestions or options until we both agree on it. We both have our strengths and certain skill sets that have carried us through and communication has been the biggest constant throughout our journey.
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