What's in a name?

I suspect that Union of Genius is not the name that immediately springs to mind when you think "soup café." It probably breaks most of the rules for what to name your business. We could have chosen from a million soup based puns. Souper Bowl, Enter the Soup Dragon, What soup doc?, Soups you Sir!, Soupercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Well not that last one as we couldn't have afforded the sign, but you get the idea.

So why Union of Genius? Well the simple answer is we like the name. Elaine likes being called Chief Genius, I like being Mr Genius and we even have a Minor Genius handing out flyers as I type. (I don't know if she noticed the clause in her contract about being called Minor Genius...)

The longer answer is that it represents how we are trying to work. The union is about the way individual components are stronger together. Soup is good. Bread is good. Soup and bread is a union of genius, if you ask us. It's also about trying to find the things we like the most and putting them all in one place. Whether it's brilliant cakes or gourmet marshmallows, the best coffee or tea, it's about putting all the best stuff together. Not everything that's good goes well together, marmite & sticky toffee pudding never work, so the art is finding out what does. That's the genius.

More than that, it's working with suppliers to source local, sustainable ingredients where we can; with packagers to make sure that the packaging we buy is properly degradable; and then encouraging our lovely customers (I do so hope we get customers as it'll get lonely in the shop without them and there's only so much soup I can eat by myself) to either recycle it themselves or bring it back to us to do it. We know that cynics will dismiss this as marketing but keeping stuff out of landfill has been a passion of Elaine's for a long time now. She still volunteers with Edinburgh Freegle to keep goods in use and we're hoping that we'll be able to expand on that in some way through the café next year.

It's also about more than just soup. We're only a small place, we'll only be able to get 7 or 8 people sitting in comfortably but there'll be books to read and a place to cross them. There'll be free wifi so you can tweet while you eat or poke while you dunk and so on. Another of our plans for next year is the "soup group:" just like a book group but for soup.

So the idea is that we're bringing together many different ingredients and, like a good soup, blending them into something that we hope others will find delightful.

And truth about the name? That would be saying; after all truth is a three-edged sword. But we both love a tiny bit of hyperbole from time to time.