Kate Crow shares her cooking journey and opening up her local soup business in downtown Muncie.
Editor’s Note: The writer of this story, Arianna Sergio, is friends with Kate Crow’s son.
Kate Crow’s first memory in the kitchen is from when she was around 9-years-old. Her mother had gone for a walk with her brother, and there was a Shake n’ Bake chicken left cooking in the oven. The oven timer went off, and Kate’s mother was still gone. Kate thought she had to be the hero and take the chicken out before it burned. As she was pulling the chicken out, she didn’t have a tight enough grip on the tray and it tipped over, with two of the chicken breasts falling onto the electric coil, starting a small fire. Kate immediately shut off the oven and sprinted down the street to find her mother.
The chicken fiasco didn’t keep Kate out of the kitchen. She remembers helping her mom prepare for dinners with her siblings. She recalls eventually cooking one of her first foods — salmon patties. Kate was in middle school when she took on this daunting task. There was only one issue — she didn’t realize she had to pick each and every bone from this fish in order to make them. Though she did it, and still makes salmon patties to this day, she remembers it being an “awful” experience at the time.
As she grew older, her relationship with cooking grew stronger. Kate says she is a big people-person, so when she was in college, she would always have friends over and occasionally cook for them. She says she wasn’t great, but she had a couple of recipes that worked for her. She would cook some of her favorite recipes from her childhood, or she would borrow them from friends.
“The beginning of all of this was just recognizing that I enjoy feeding people,” Kate says.
When Kate would learn a new technique, either by reading it in a cookbook or by watching someone else do it, she realized that her cooking could only improve from there. After watching one of her close friends cook for her and her husband, she became extremely interested in exploring various flavor combinations. She jokes that meals don’t have to be just “meat and potatoes” all the time.
“[Cooking] became important to me because I enjoyed [the food] tasting better and coming from my fingertips,” Kate says.
Her passion for cooking shined through, and this is when she realized she wanted to start a food business of her own, and Runaround Soup was born.
Runaround Soup is a to-go soup and bread service located in downtown Muncie. Each week Kate sells one soup and bread option, with the varieties changing every week.
“For soup you can have a main course in one pot. And the bread, it just seems like soup needs bread because you have to be able to get that last bit out of the bottom of the bowl. Someone wrote to me that they may have licked at the bottom of their bowl at work in public,” Kate shares. “That’s what it’s about.”
Kate’s favorite soup and bread that she cooks: Greek lemon chicken soup with cucumber dill bread.
“That combination is probably the best I have. It’s a signature sort-of flavor because it’s so different from what you can find at other places here [in Muncie],” she says.
Kate’s inspiration behind the name Runaround Soup is people whose lives are always so go-go-go that they can’t catch a break. Their supper is solved.
“You can take [the soup] home, heat it, and eat it. You can actually take the time to sit down with your family, even if it’s only 15 minutes between things you have to do, but at least you didn’t have to spend an hour fixing up dinner,” Kate says. “I was hoping [Runaround Soup] would help people do that.”
The mother of four explains that she would often see children leading very busy lives.
“They’d have a granola bar, or they’d have a bag from McDonald’s or Taco Bell or something like that. I just thought, ‘Oh, I think we can do better than that.’ That doesn’t mean that the parents are doing anything wrong. That was the option, right?” Kate explains. “It’s simple to take [my soup] somewhere, and you don’t really need any other tools, except a spoon I suppose.”
Overall, it took Kate four years to open Runaround Soup. She says part of this late opening was due to COVID, part of it was being a mother to her children while working her then job as a chemist, and part of it was trying to figure out what exactly her business would look like. When Kate officially opened Runaround Soup’s doors, it wasn’t soup season, it was the exact opposite. It was July. She persevered and sold her soup and bread at various farmer’s markets to get the name out there, see if people were interested, and if they even liked her products.
“I got very good feedback and would sell out quite a bit,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it because it was really hot out, but people will eat soup all year round if their house is air conditioned,” Kate jokes.
She says it was very fun to see the regulars come to her tent at the farmer’s market.
“My favorite was a guy who would come up first thing Saturday morning at Minnetrista with his bag, and he’d come straight to my tent. He said, ‘This is my favorite. My wife and I really look forward to our Saturday night,’” Kate says. “There was another woman who would come every week, and she would just walk up to the tent and ask, ‘What do you have this time?’ And I’d tell her, and she’d say, ‘Okay, I’m going to walk around for a little bit.’ She’d always come back to me. I loved it.”
One of Kate’s regulars at the farmer’s market, and now her storefront, is an accountant at Ball Associates, Carol Seals. She first tried Runaround Soup’s black bean soup at the farmer’s market. She says it was “wonderful” and that was the moment she became a regular.
“I keep saying I have a favorite [soup], then I have another favorite, and another,” Carol says.
“[Kate] has such a variety and that’s what I like about it. I also like it because I’m a single person. I work downtown and where she does it on Tuesdays is right downtown. So, at the end of the day I just pick it up and bring it back to the refrigerator at work and then I have it for my lunches the next two days.”
Carol even got a few coworkers and her neighbor to try Runaround Soup.
“One time a neighbor was out on a trip and she was getting in late. I knew she was coming in late and didn’t have groceries because she’d been gone for like three weeks, so I stuck one of the soups and the rolls on her porch, because she was getting in at like two in the morning,” she explains. “She said the soup was perfect.”
After almost two months of selling her soup and bread at other locations and events, Kate finally opened Runaround Soup’s storefront this past September.
“It [opening] was all very exciting, but scary. Very, very scary. I really was very nervous. In fact, I was working up to be in Mamma Mia! at [Muncie] Civic [Theatre]. I was in the ensemble. Going into that tech week, I was unable to really eat like normal because I was so nervous, and I realized it wasn’t about the show,” Kate says.
She says she was so terrified about opening because she didn’t want to mess up. Luckily for her, Runaround Soup has been a success.
“It’s been fascinating to see how many doors start to open as soon as people know you’ve opened something like this. I don’t know if this happens with all businesses or just with food. There are people asking about delivery, if I’m ever going to do vegan food, about donating soup, if I will ever get gift cards, there’s all kinds of options,” Kate says. “These doors just go ajar and then you have to decide which one to walk through and discover if you can handle it or not. The learning part of that is one, being excited that your community is interested in what you’re doing and finds it valuable. But two, it’s learning that I have to focus first, and make sure I’m succeeding at what I’m doing in my plan before trying to expand too much.”
You can order your serving of soup and bread through their website on or before each Thursday. Once you’ve completed your order, you pick it up the following Tuesday between 4-8 p.m. One order of soup and bread is $15, before tax, and it feeds up to 2 people. Kate also makes vegetarian options for a selection of her soups. She will not be cooking for a couple weeks, but she will be back in the kitchen on Jan. 11.
Sources: Runaround Soup
Images: Shannon McCloskey
Featured Image: Shannon McCloskey
