You may have noticed some of the interesting new foodish ventures happening in various parts of the country. L.A., Portland and the San Francisco Bay Area all have thriving street food cultures.
New York always has – especially in Queens where informal vendors gather under the overpasses at odd times of day and night.
There’s a cool factor in this (anything underground is automatically cool), but the compelling thing is how the economy is driving interesting new models and innovations. People are attempting to color outside the lines. New ideas are flourishing and they don’t always match up with the regulations meant to keep everything tidy, legal and predictable.
Why Food Crazes Are Taking Off
On the consumer side, people are searching for authenticity and connection, and they want to meet face-to-face with the people who make their food. My theory is that the economic collapse has shaken our trust in “the system” (food safety scares haven’t helped either), and as evidenced in Katherine Butler’s piece on guerilla gardening, people have become so passionate about “going green” they are willing to break the law by planting their own produce.
Producers, who want to meet this need, and perhaps monetize a passion for artisan food production, are finding that the barriers to starting a new food business – whether leasing a building, licensing a cart or setting up a table at a farmers’ market – are sky high. From permitting to health department inspections, there are many hoops to jump through and daunting up-front expenses.
Many chefs who lost their jobs when their restaurants closed (not to mention great cooks from other employment sectors) would like to start their own food businesses. Whether that’s a salami and sausage business, a hot soup delivery service or a cart selling prepared foods, such start-ups are challenged in trying to get their wares to potential customers. Confusing regulations and conflicting rules between cities in the same metropolitan areas are just a few of the issues. There’s also the high start up costs due to the requirements that all such foods be produced in commercial kitchens.
But the customers want it, as evidenced by the lines around the block at the “underground farmers’ market” or the hours-long waits at the San Francisco Street Food Festival last August.
Here’s a rundown of just a few of the creative (and barely legal) ventures enabling would-be food sellers to creatively work with existing regulations until they can be rewritten.
This venture is in Oakland (mere steps from my home, I’m happy to say). It’s a collection of local chefs and legit food producers who use commercial kitchens but don’t have brick and mortar stores.
Samin Nosrat and Chris Lee, two chefs who were thrown out of work when their restaurant closed, founded the Pop Up General Store. The store “pops up” every two weeks in the large, open lobby of a historic streetcar station turned catering kitchen. Customers can order ahead using a digital form, or pop in and buy what’s available. Until the website is built, organizers communicate with their customers through Facebook and an email newsletter. The foods are fantastic, and seasonal. Recent offerings included Posole Verde, Fresh Rigatoni, Corned Beef and Cabbage, Spring Lamb Roasts and for Passover, Matzoh Ball Soup.
I caught up with Nosrat and asked her where the idea for the general store originated. She told me she and Chris would often run into former regular customers of Eccolo, the Berkeley restaurant where the two chefs worked, and customers would tell them how much they missed certain foods.
“Why can’t we make it and sell it?” says Nosrat, explaining the thought process. “We wanted to find a way to keep making the foods we loved and share them with the people who want to eat them, while making a name for ourselves for the future,” she added.
Starting with the restaurant’s email list, the two got a much larger response than they expected. Soon, other chef friends and food artisans joined in. Many were chefs having a hard time economically due to layoffs or reduced hours. Others simply wanted to start their own food businesses, but not before testing the waters. Many, like Lee and Nosrat, are alumni of the illustrious Chez Panisse in Berkeley, so we’re talking about some stellar vittles. If you visit the Pop Up General Store, more likely than not, the very people who produced the food items you see there will be proudly hand-selling them too.
Just a few weeks in, the popularity of the Pop Up General Store is growing fast. Nosrat ventured a guess as to why customers so immediately latch on. “People like seeing the cooks who make their food,” says Nosrat. “In restaurants, cooks are never the ones sharing the food with the customers. They are always in the kitchen.”
This San Francisco start-up is an incubator. Somewhere between an indoor collection of food carts and a store, it’s a cooperative retail space that, once open, will house six vendors selling delectables like Japanese deli foods, vegan baked goods, fresh produce, pickles, sandwiches and more. There’s also a knife sharpening business that for years has been housed in the operator’s nearby home.
The original intent of the space was to be a flexible, indoor food market. The spaces were to be customized to the tenants so vendors could cycle in and out as they find success, gain clientele and move onto their own retail spaces.
The building’s owner, Debra Resnik, wanted to provide a place for vendors who were producing their foods in commercial kitchens and had begun to make a name for themselves through personal deliveries, catering or other avenues, but who weren’t ready to take the leap into a retail space all their own.
I spoke with Resnik on the phone, where she outlined her mixed success with the planning/permitting functionaries in the city of San Francisco. I knew the opening of the space had been much delayed due to permitting issues, mostly because the space doesn’t fit into any well-defined category.
She explains, they were cleared to open and the vendors had started their build-outs, but her original idea for the space had to be adjusted to make it happen. “Because of the regulations,” said Resnik, “Some of the aspects of the flexible floor plan are impossible. We basically won half of what we wanted.”
In this case, the neighborhood and city wanted 331 Cortland to open, but it was difficult to get off the ground due to regulations. The various agencies haven’t been able to figure out where 331 Cortland belongs.
Resnik added that because they “went out there and tried this new concept, maybe other people will have an easier time. Hopefully their experiences will be streamlined.”
Though the process has taken much patience and work, Resnik remains excited. “Working with all of these creative food people has been incredibly rewarding,” she says.
331 Cortland is planning a mid-April 2010 opening.
Vendors are Della Terra Organic Produce, Bernal Cutlery, Paulie’s Pickling, El Porteño Empanadas, Wholesome Bakery, and Ichi Lucky Cat Deli.
Community Commercial Kitchens:
For farmers, being able to sell value-added products like jams, preserves, canned vegetables and pickles can mean the difference between survival and getting an office job. Legal food production, however, has to be done in a licensed, inspected commercial kitchen. Most farmers don’t have the resources to build one from scratch.
All over the country community kitchens are popping up. Many are in rural areas near farms. This is very exciting because, with all the talk of local food, it’s still a minuscule percentage of total food dollars spent. The distribution and transportation issues are just too great with perishables. But once a food is shelf stable, this becomes much easier. A quick Google search turns up dozens of these ventures across the country, in areas as diverse as New Mexico, Florida and North Carolina. (Some of the funding for these operations is coming from the USDA’s new Know your Farmer know your Food program.)
SF Underground Farmers Market:
The SF Underground Farmers Market is a project of Forage SF, a business that offers a CSA box and dinners to help diners become acquainted with the wild foods that exist all around.
Attending The SF Underground Farmers Market is a way to taste and purchase the food that is being produced in backyards and home kitchens in the Bay Area by artisans who lack the resources to “go legit”. The SF Underground Market is a place where budding businesses can get a leg up on their road to legitimacy.
According to the website, the first market was held in a private home in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, with eight vendors and about 200 attendees. By the time the third market was held, there were 47 vendors and over 1,200 people attending. How does The Underground Farmers’ Market stay on the right side of the law? To get notification for the events attendees must sign up for a free membership.
All these businesses have two things in common: Creativity and cooperation. Our society could use a little more of both.
Leave a comment and tell us about any favorite innovative new food businesses in your neck of the woods.
This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.