ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
Marination madness
Voted "America’s Best Food Truck" by ABC's Good Morning America Weekend show, Roz Edison’s
Marination Mobile, which serves up delicious Hawaiian-Korean cuisine, has now expanded to
include two brick and mortar locations in Seattle. Discover the secret behind Marination’s spicy road
to success.
NPower I was looking for my next career move;
however the economy was struggling and it
looked more and more like it would take some
creativity to stay strong financially.
By 2009 my partner and I were looking for ways
to diversify our investments, and Marination
was born, in part, as a hedge against the
performance of Wall Street.
Q: ell us how Marination evolved from one
T
truck to two permanent locations.
Marination Station and Marination Ma Kai were
the result of extraordinary luck. Once the truck
operation was up and running we knew that
it would be desirable to have a place with a
few seats, that could operate longer than three
hours per day, and that might even out some
of the seasonality of the truck business. We
happened to learn about a retail space in a
neighborhood we wanted to be in, via a friend.
We would not have stood a chance with the
building owner if we hadn’t been lucky enough
to have a colleague in common.
Q: Roz, tell us more about your journey from Hult via the public
education sector to Marination.
When I graduated from Hult, which was the Arthur D. Little School of
Management back then, I was very interested in public education. One
day I discovered the concept of Charter Schools during an informational interview set up by my ADL adviser and it seemed like the perfect
fit for me—business and public education. I started working for Massachusetts Charter School Resource Center as a program assistant.
After attending the Technology in Education program at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education I gained another teaching job followed
by a program manager position at the MATCH School. A couple of
years later, after launching the MATCH Corps program I relocated
to Seattle, where after a short stint working as a project manager for
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Our Ma Kai location also came about by
chance. We were not actively looking for
waterfront property, h owever I was on the Seattle Parks website doing
some research for one of our truck locations, and there happened to
be an RFP for a concessionaire at the Seacrest Boathouse. I had never
heard of the Seacrest Boathouse but I jumped in my car, drove over
and just gawked at the incredible view of Seattle from this place. It was
too unique a property and opportunity to pass up, so we submitted a
bid and the rest is history.
Q: hat have been the highs and lows of your entrepreneurial
W
journey? How did you deal with the lows?
The highs and lows of this journey have come from customers. The
highs are all the customers who write us nice notes, send us pictures of
their kids eating tacos, and tell us how they miss us when they move or
travel. All of those interactions have been so fun and flattering.