Bring the Food, Stories, and Joy From Our Southeast Asian Kitchens to Yours!
Tuk Tuk Box is a mission-driven, first-generation Southeast Asian women-owned and founded specialty food retailer whose mission is to create economic opportunities, advocate for, and uplift the Southeast Asian community by using food and storytelling as a catalyst for change.
We are so excited to announce that we are part of the 2022 IFundWomen Caress Dreams Fund this year.
THE CAMPAIGN GOALS
Goal #1: $30,000 - Publish a high-quality cookbook prototype that will be available for pre-order purchase: This entails: Full-time staff to manage development, pay community members for their time and recipes, videographers and photographers, travel to community members, graphic design, copywriting and editing. Costs of hardcover print, publishing fees, and additional print costs
Goal #2: $50,000 - Publish and print cookbooks, cover platform software, trademark, and insurance fees including a social media campaign and a Marketplace launch for pantry staples featured in the cookbook
STRETCH- Goal #3: $100,000 - Additional funds raised will be used to employ more community members to further support expanding operations such as fulfillment, packaging upgrades, and salary payment for our team.
Tuk Tuk Box is coming out with our first ever Tuk Tuk Cookbook!
We are raising $30,000 this summer to help us create our first cookbook titled, "Tuk Tuk Cookbook: Funky Fresh Flavors and Southeast Asian Stories (TBD)" featuring our Southeast Asian journey, community stories, and recipes from our extensive network of talented and passionate chefs, home cooks, and family.
Saving Our Family Recipes, Sharing Them With the World
As daughters of Southeast Asian Americans, we know there’s a longstanding tradition of oral history in our communities. This is usually how customs are passed down and recipes are shared. However, for first, second, and third-generation children, these stories are being lost with our elders as there’s often a language and literacy barrier. Over the past decade, we have personally been collecting stories and recipes from Southeast Asians all over the globe and have curated a collection on our website with over 100 digital narratives at no cost to the public. Our dream is to compile these culinary histories into a beautifully photographed hardcopy publication that introduces our people’s food and provides accurate cultural and historical accounts in the storyteller's voice. A true anthology by and for the people.
A Comprehensive Southeast Asian Cookbook with a Mission-Driven Purpose
There are plenty of other cookbooks focusing on one specific cuisine, but we are offering all of Southeast Asia! We at Tuk Tuk Box advocate for visibility because of our historically marginalized status so we wanted to create an inclusive cookbook with recipes and insight from esteemed chefs, creatives, entrepreneurs, and food bloggers from Indonesia to Myanmar. We're going to introduce new dishes you've never seen before and also teach you how to make our childhood comforts. Our chef friends will urge you to decolonize your cuisine and lean into ancestral cooking and also help you find shortcuts or substitutes in order to achieve the same taste as grandma's. Whether you're in the diaspora desperate to taste home or you just want to learn something new in the kitchen, there is something delicious waiting for everyone!
Our food doesn’t just feed us; it transports us back in time and place. For most Southeast Asian families, food is one of our main sources of comfort. It's a love language, a way to connect, heal, and reacquaint yourself with 'home' -whatever that means to you. At Tuk Tuk Box, we use food not only as a catalyst for social change, but to highlight the amazing achievements of our community. This has helped lead us in the direction of creating a community cookbook and why we’re calling on our ifundwomen family for your support.
$30,000 will help us cover the cost of travel, participant stipends, copywriting, editing, photography, creating a prototype, and so much more!
HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT
We are so grateful for your support! Below are three options to get involved with this campaign:
- Subscribe to our newsletter! (Use CARESSIFW for 10% off your first purchase)
- Donate to this campaign (see rewards on the right-hand side) .
- Share this campaign & help us spread the word!
If you are a company or small business and would like to be featured on the Tuk Tuk Box Community Page, please visit the FAQs section on our website
HOW YOUR SUPPORT HELPS
Your support helps us pay equitable wages to all of our community partners. Through this community-funded cookbook, we can continue supporting our charity partner, Courageous Kitchen, a 501c3 in Bangkok, Thailand that aids asylum-seeking families through food, education, housing, and medical aid.
We are dedicated to donating 10% from each cookbook to Courageous Kitchen or our other Asian Pacific Islander community partners who we'll also hire to assist in the development of this book. With the aforementioned cost associated with production, such as photography, editing, and content creation we are committed to exclusively hiring Southeast Asian or BIPOC contractors in order to drive economic development in historically disenfranchised communities.
This is for the aunties making sambal from scratch, the uncles tossing the woks in the hot summer heat, and the little kid in all of us who has dreamt of seeing themselves reflected on the pages of their books. It's for our elders to breathe that sigh of relief knowing that their food, their stories, and their love won't be forgotten.
Thank you for helping us realize this dream and share our joy with the world.
Tuk Tuk Box is for everyone and anyone with an appetite for trying/learning something new; for those of us in the diaspora desperate to taste memories and reconnect with their communities to make new ones; for companies and organizations ready and willing to facilitate spaces that celebrate uniqueness and diversity; for anyone who wants to feel good and fully conscious of what they’re eating and who they’re supporting in that process.
To learn more about our value propositions visit our website: tuktukbox.com
