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Home chefs go pro
Last October, Tiffany Abuan’s employer, San Francisco public radio station KQED, threw a chili cookoff that she was determined to win. But the twentysomething gift-planning associate and single mom wasn’t confident of her chili-making abilities, so she focused on cornbread, creating a few flavored butters like chile-garlic as accompaniment. The butters were a surprise hit, prompting several co-workers to inquire if they could buy some. Abuan was taken aback. “I was just going to give them some for free,” she says.
What happened next is a food-nerd version of Lana Turner being discovered at a soda fountain. A few weeks after the cookoff, Abuan was invited to sell her butters at a party at a Mission District bar where small-time food vendors peddled their wares alongside custom bicycle lug fabricators.
Since the chili cookoff, Abuan had gotten more serious, making her butter from scratch, naming it Mmm, Butter!, and creating a website. At the bar, the butters caught the attention of a young man about to open his first restaurant. When the restaurant, Fat Angel
The Greenpoint Food Market in Brooklyn
Pickle sellers Brooklyn Brine at the Greenpoint Food Market
, opened in February, Mmm, Butter! was featured as part of a “butter flight” alongside warm country bread.
It used to be that small food producers like Abuan were limited in their distribution schemes to farmers’ markets if they had a license, or their social circle if they didn’t. Or, if they were serious and lucky, the shelves of a boutique market or grocer. But as the number of people making smoked pear Kombucha and maple-bacon mini cupcakes has exploded, so too have their retail opportunities. From quasi-legal food markets in unlikely places to Twittering food carts and beyond, the concept of how and where food is bought and sold is being dramatically redefined.
LOWERING THE BARRIER TO ENTRY
At the Greenpoint Food Market in the basement of a church in Brooklyn, $20 buys you six feet of folding table on a Saturday. The market’s founder, an amateur baker named Joann Kim, started it as an alternative to the Brooklyn Flea down the street, popular among artsy types for its food vendors, vintage clothing, and furniture dealers. “Some of my vendors just sell granola bars wrapped in saran wrap or foil and that’s about as far as they want to go,” says Kim.
Starting a small packaged-foods company isn’t easy. Many grocers and markets prefer to work with distribution companies to keep their invoicing systems simple, and distribution companies require a certain level of output so they can sell to multiple parties. At the bare minimum, you must be legal. Whole Foods, for instance, works with local producers but requires that its vendors operate out of a commercial kitchen (which the company independently verifies) and that they have a business license and liability insurance.
Foodzie, an online store selling independently produced food products, will help vendors get a license and secure commercial kitchen space. And there are some small food business “incubators,” like San Francisco’s La Cocina, that do the same. But commercial kitchens in a major city typically rent for at least $75 an hour, and a business license runs about $100.
By contrast, independent markets like Greenpoint offer hobbyists a launch pad with few—or, in most cases, no—requirements.
“Maybe after they test the waters and expose their product to a new audience they could go the next step,” says Kim. “We’re a market that caters to amateur home cooks.”
Photographs by Galen Krumel
Sven you should read a history book or two on this topic...
Restaurants as we know them have been around for the better part of the last millennium. The Chinese have records of restaurants operating in the Kaifeng province since the 11th century, and even in France the earliest recorded restaurant was La Tour d'Argent, which was frequented by Henri IV.
The oldest continuously operating...+READ
Sven you should read a history book or two on this topic...
Restaurants as we know them have been around for the better part of the last millennium. The Chinese have records of restaurants operating in the Kaifeng province since the 11th century, and even in France the earliest recorded restaurant was La Tour d'Argent, which was frequented by Henri IV.
The oldest continuously operating freestanding restaurant in the world is Sobrino de Botín in Madrid, and it's been continuously operating in the same location since 1725, and quite possibly earlier.
Don't forget that many inns, public houses, and food stands throughout Europe and the Mediterranean basin have served double duty as restaurants ever since the time of the old Roman Republic.
Back those days, most of those inns, public houses and food stands were generally supplied with goods purchased from government subsidized plantations, which were using monoculture farming, that was harvested by slaves/serfs/peons on a scale that was unimaginable at the time.-COLLAPSE
Wonderful article! We regularly sell at the GFM and love the vibe.
Just as the recording industry has been challenged to come up with new models of doing business, perhaps food purveyors are going to have to be challenged in similar ways. Before the French Revolution, there were no restaurants. The world is a better place, though, and I for one support these changes in the food world.
Yes, this is a good read. I recently learned about comercial kitchen requirements and was surpised! This makes me want to visit San Francisco.
Wonderful article. Entry into the market is difficult. A brick in Mortar will cost you 2 - 3 thousand plus another 3k to stay open... add n equipment and all the little surprises people don't tell you about like the "unsecured property tax" the city keeps hidden, and you have a 150k minimum investment. Kithen space at l victoria will run you a flat $1000 to 2000 so you can put the rest of the...+READ
Wonderful article. Entry into the market is difficult. A brick in Mortar will cost you 2 - 3 thousand plus another 3k to stay open... add n equipment and all the little surprises people don't tell you about like the "unsecured property tax" the city keeps hidden, and you have a 150k minimum investment. Kithen space at l victoria will run you a flat $1000 to 2000 so you can put the rest of the money into your kids, community and Just plain living. No one is putting their space ($) where there mouth is like us in SF. If We had to do it all over again, there would be no way to establish ourselves. I feel for our vendors like Venga and Soul Cocina.... but at least now they have a fighting chance.-COLLAPSE