Food

Training Programs Invite Diverse Groups of Cooks Into the Kitchen

| ChrisHardmanWriter

MADISON, WISCONSIN-BASED Chef Jonny Hunter has a passion for hand-crafted, local food. The charcuterie produced by his company Underground Meats has won three Good Food Awards. His meat-centered restaurant, Forequarter, was nominated as one of the best new restaurants of 2013by Bon Appétit, and he was nominated for “Best Chef: Midwest” Semifinals of 2017 by the James Beard Foundation.

With all this success, it’s hard to believe that he can’t find enough cooks to staff his kitchen.

“Casual fine-dining places have been opening with much more frequency,” Hunter said. “After the industry started to grow, [our] labor supply dried up pretty quickly.”

Amid historically low unemployment in Wisconsin and around the country, it’s perhaps no surprise that finding kitchen help is a major challenge for restaurants. But widespread employment isn’t evenly distributed—many minority populations still face chronic unemployment. To address that unemployment crisis, and to build a more diverse workforce, Hunter reached out to people who were systematically under-employed. In 2014, he joined with two other like-minded individuals, Matt Feifarek of Slow Food Madison and Chandra Miller Fienen of Starting Block Madison, to form FoodWorks Madison.

At the top of their agenda was to develop First Course, a job-training program tailored to produce cooks ready for a kitchen job in three weeks. Their first cohort graduated in May of 2017. “We really want to make it so that our student [can] apply for a job on a Tuesday and be useful on a busy Friday night shift,” Feifarek said.

A Nationwide Cook Shortage

In addition to Madison, restaurants in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and other cities around the country are also struggling to fill their kitchens with cooks. The low wages and long hours the restaurant industry is known for make recruiting cooks difficult. Although some restaurants have increased wages and benefits, the need for cooks still outnumbers the supply.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for cooks is expected to steadily increase as new restaurants continue to open and people continue eating out. Although the overall demand for cooks in schools, hospitals and cafeterias is expected to grow by 6 percent from 2016 to 2026, the growth for restaurant cooks is expected to grow by 12 percent. That means the U.S. restaurant industry will need a total of 1,377,200 cooks in 2026 compared to 1,231,900 cooks employed in 2016.

To fill this need, leaders in the food industry are taking a more active approach to staffing their kitchens. Instead of waiting for the cooks to come to them, they are recruiting people to complete low-cost or free training programs with a job opportunity as the end result.

Culinary Training Programs Across the U.S.

Programs in Boston, Cincinnati, Maryland, and most recently Chicago are tapping into a long-ignored labor pool to fill the city’s kitchens. Cincinnati COOKS! is a free culinary training program that has graduated more than 1,400 formerly under- and unemployed people, including recovering addicts, veterans, and chronically unemployed adults.

The curriculum, developed by the Freestone Food Bank, includes life skills training such as job interview techniques to help students succeed both in and out of the kitchen. War veteran and recovering addict Adam McKinney joined the program straight from rehab.

“The leadership that is around here, and the way they go about doing things, keeps all of us motivated,” he said.

Within a year of completing the program, 80 percent of the graduates find jobs in the food industry or start a continuing-education program such as Cincinnati State’s Culinary Management program.

The Maryland Food Bank runs FoodWorks, a 12-week culinary training program for low-income individuals in conjunction with the Community College of Baltimore County. Students learn basic culinary techniques, professionalism, and food safety while they prepare meals for their hungry neighbors.

And in October, celebrity chef and restaurateur Rick Bayless announced that he is launching a culinary training program for low-income students at a food-and-beverage incubator called The Hatchery on Chicago’s West Side.

“I believe this program can help surmount two big challenges in the city—lack of cooks to fill our restaurants’ kitchens and a lack of both solid preparation and career opportunities for the youth of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods,” Bayless said in a statement.

At Bayless’ program, high school- and college-age students will pay a minimal fee to learn basic culinary skills from Chicago chefs and then head to internships at Chicago’s best restaurant groups.

In Madison, An Open-Source Journey

The FoodWorks Madison crew completed their first job-training program in 2017. Feifarek describes First Course as “not a cooking school or a culinary school—this is a get-a-job school.” To develop the curriculum, FoodWorks worked with chefs and kitchen managers, community agencies, and an educator from the University of Wisconsin.

Supported in part by a $10,000 grant from the city of Madison, FoodWorks was able to rent a kitchen, hire teachers, buy ingredients, and give $1,000 to each graduate of the program. “It went awesome. We learned a lot in the process,” Hunter said. “We were very pleasantly surprised to find out that our idea worked.”

Feifarek said FoodWorks places heavy emphasis on job placement, inviting business owners and managers to come and talk to students. So far, the approach has proven successful: three of the four First Course students are working full-time at jobs that pay at least $14 an hour. “It’s a nice move for employers because they can use us as references,” Feifarek said. “We hope that one of the ways it will work is lowering hiring risk for a small business.”

In June, FoodWorks raised $56,500 through Kickstarter to develop the program further. The plan is to increase the training to 10 sessions a year with 20 students in each course.

Once their program model is more finely tuned, FoodWorks will open-source First Course so other communities around the country can replicate and build on their success.

That way, restaurants looking for cooks and workers looking for jobs will have more opportunities to find each other. “I love it when you can use one problem to solve another,” said Feifarek.

Published on Civil Eats by Chris Hardman 

All photos courtesy of Matt Feifarek.

Good Food Takes on the School Fundraiser

| ChrisHardmanWriter

OCTOBER IS NATIONAL Farm to School month. It’s one of those “take the pledge” times of year that catapults school fundraising season into overdrive. And with the designation comes all the familiar annual pressure to load the tables with goodies and buy whatever is on offer.

We’ve all been there. A co-worker or family member blindsides you with catalogues and order forms for candles you don’t need or cookies you don’t want. In a moment of weakness, you find yourself signed up for a giant tub of cheddar jalapeno popcorn chock-full of artificial ingredients..

But school fundraising is no longer the old-time cottage industry many of us remember, bolstered by the bake sale and door-to-door dollar chocolate bar pitch. It’s big, big business. According to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers (AFRDS), schools and other non-profits net $1.7 billion selling cookie dough, candy, popcorn and a variety of other food and non-food products. Schools depend on these fundraisers to purchase sports equipment, technology, and plan field trips.

At the same time, as cultural interest in—and government support of—healthier school lunch programs has grown, parents and educators have begun questioning why schools sanction the sale of high-fat, high-sugar processed food, especially in a nation with a childhood obesity rate of 17 percent and rising.

When Mark Abbott found himself faced with the annual school fundraising campaign, he dutifully supported his son, who sold $400 worth of candy and cookie dough to friends and family. But after Abbott’s son questioned why he was selling processed food his family never ate at home, Abbott was inspired. He thought, why not create a school fundraising program that offers healthy, locally made products including honey, jam, pasta, granola, and seasonal produce?

In 2013, Abbott did just that, and introduced FarmRaiser—an online and mobile market—to schools in Flint, Michigan. With his fundraising model, not only can schools raise money, they can also support local businesses that produce healthy food. “Parents are responding to it in a big way,” Abbott says. “We are disrupting an industry.” Since 2013, FarmRaiser has managed 150 fundraising campaigns, become active in 22 states, and helped raise $270,000.

With a traditional school fundraising program, a school can expect to net 20-50 percent of sales. FarmRaiser, on the other hand, preserves that net percentage for schools (by charging a flat rate of 10 percent of sales, Farmraiser guarantees at least a 45 percent return to the school, though the typical campaign returns, on average, 51 percent to the cause), but also extends the support to local food artisans and farmers. “Our entire value proposition is leaving 85 percent of the money in the community,” Abbott says.

FarmRaiser tailors the products to the school’s location, so most of the vendors are truly “local,” and live within 30 miles of the school. For people who want to support the school but aren’t interested in receiving products, FarmRaiser offers a community basket donation. Half of every cash donation goes to the school while the other half goes to a local food bank or homeless shelter. According to Abbott, 10 percent of sales are community basket donations.

FarmRaiser works with 150 food vendors who offer more than 500 different products. Abbott explains that although the vendors sell their products at 50 percent less than retail, they gain tangible benefits with very little risk. FarmRaiser shares customer information with their vendors, allowing them to reach out to potential customers they know have already tried their product.

“For our suppliers that sell direct to consumers in their community, the cost of acquiring that potential customer is the margin [they] would have made in retail sales,” Abbott says. He estimates that 15,000 people have tried local products with FarmRaiser so far.

Al Dente Pasta Company in Whitmore Lake, Michigan has participated in 16 FarmRaiser campaigns since 2013. It sells its products in a bundle: two bags of pasta and one sauce. “For us it isn’t a financial gain. It was more wanting to support something really interesting that I thought served an important purpose,” says owner Monique Deschaine. “The model is a real win-win. You’re showcasing local ingredients. You’re allowing schools or organizations to fundraise. And you are giving people what they want.”

Like any online fundraising platform, FarmRaiser’s business model depends largely on how well its technology functions. And for users of other similar platforms like Kickstarter or GoFundme, the interface and “campaign” process will feel relatively familiar: a dashboard design that’s friendly to users who sit anywhere on the tech-savvy spectrum, and a mobile app that replaces order forms and processes payment by check, cash or credit card. Around 45 percent of FarmRaiser transactions are electronic, Abbott says, and he expects that number to grow.

For schools that still want to use paper, brochures and order forms can be printed from the FarmRaiser website, and schools can input their own orders into their custom campaign pages. Abbott says 75 percent of the campaign set-up and maintenance is automated, and his team is working on the final 25 percent.

But getting the technology up to speed is really only part of the equation. “Our biggest challenge is finding schools that want to do healthy fundraising,” Abbott says. Approaching schools to give a sales pitch is very expensive and time consuming. So instead, FarmRaiser has developed partnerships with like-minded organizations such as Slow Food USA, Food Corps, and Whole Kids Foundation. Abbott estimates that the FarmRaiser message can reach as many as 1 million people on social media through posts from its partners.

Meanwhile, the billion-dollar school fundraising market provides an endless–and annually renewable– source of growth opportunities. The company currently staffs three full-time and one part-time employee, along with five engineering contract workers. So far, investors have provided the funding for start-up and operating costs. And as FarmRaiser continues to automate campaign management, the profitability of each campaign increases.

FarmRaiser is harnessing the power of good food rather than irrelevant junk, and in turn making more money for schools. Their technology is not that new, and neither — obviously — is the idea of healthy food. What it is doing is extending at scale the intangible benefits of a fundraiser beyond the institution and into the community.

Published on The New Food Economy by Chris Hardman 

Philadelphia Cuts Salt in Chinese Take-Out

| ChrisHardmanWriter

AS FOLKS DIG into Chinese fare to celebrate the Lunar New Year, they might be surprised to hear that they’re getting an extra helping of sodium. Popular main dishes such as General Tso’s Chicken can contain as much as 2,325 mg of sodium in one serving, 25 mg more than the amount FDA recommends eating in an entire day.

In 2012, a group of Philadelphia health advocates noted that their city has more than 400 Chinese take-out-only restaurants—more than all the city’s fast food joints combined. They formed the Philadelphia Healthy Chinese Take-out Initiative, with the goal of reducing the amount of sodium in Chinese take-out by 10 to 15 percent.

Overconsumption of sodium is a nationwide problem. The average American eats nearly 3,500 milligrams of a day, or 15 percent more than the FDA recommends. The recommendation is even lower for people with hypertension, for African Americans, and for middle-aged and older adults.

The Philadelphia initiative targeted low-income neighborhoods where predominantly people of color reside and Chinese take-out is commonly eaten. “In Philly, we have such high rates of hypertension, particularly among African Americans and Hispanics,” says Jennifer Aquilante of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH).

Sodium is known to raise human blood pressure and half of the city’s African Americans and nearly a third of its Hispanics suffer from hypertension (or high blood pressure), which can lead to heart disease, heart failure, stroke, and kidney problems.

Launched in 2010 by the PDPH—with funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—Get Healthy Philly also promotes healthy foods, smoke-free environments, and works to reduce youth smoking rates.

For the initiative, staff from the PDPH Get Healthy Philly program, Temple University’s Center for Asian Health, the Asian Community Health Coalition, and the Greater Philadelphia Chinese Restaurant Association worked with 300 Chinese takeout restaurants. Not only did they target table salt, the most obvious source of sodium in our diets, but they also turned an eye toward processed foods, canned sauces, and prepared mixes.

First, they asked restaurant owners two important questions: Did they realize that too much sodium contributed to health problems? And, second, were they willing to make changes? Most of the restaurant owners answered yes and requested help in preparing and marketing lower-sodium meals. Get Healthy Philly brought in Professor Shirley Cheng of New York’s Culinary Institute of America, to conduct classes and provide recipes for lower-sodium Chinese cooking.

Professor Cheng gave chefs from over 200 restaurants free cooking training in late 2012 and early 2013. She recommended included using ginger, garlic, scallions, and lemon to add flavor instead of table salt, and also using lower sodium ingredients and modifying recipes. In one example, Cheng recommended a modified sauce recipe for shrimp and broccoli that reduced the sodium from 2,400 mg to 1,300 mg. Her chicken lo mein sauce reduced sodium from 2,500 mg per order to 1,600 mg.

Restaurant owners received a certificate of participation, a door decal, a toolkit, posters about sodium, and recipes for the most popular menu items.

“Chinese food in general is high in sodium because of the sauces,” Aquilante says. “We ask them to use about half as much sauce as they normally do.” In addition to using less sauce, the Get Healthy Philly program also asked the restaurants to give out soy sauce packets only when asked.

Tongshe Lu, owner of Great Taste Chinese Food, completed his training in 2012. “It’s a great program for Chinese take out restaurants,” he says.

To measure the program’s progress, Temple University Professor Grace X. Ma conducted compliance checks at six, 16, and 24 months post training. She found that the sodium content in the three most popular dishes dropped consistently: 13 percent in General Tso’s chicken, 30 percent in chicken lo mein, and 34 percent in shrimp and broccoli.

“I’ve reduced half [the] sodium after the training,” says restaurant owner Tianxing Chen.  “It helps to make everybody healthy in the community.”

How did the customers respond to the change? Get Healthy Philly surveyed over 300 customers from nine restaurants after the shift. When asked if they would order the dishes they’d eaten again, 91-97 percent of the customers said yes.

However, initiatives like this one in Philly show that sodium is an acquired taste, so over time people can adapt to less sodium in their food. “We know from research that a 20 percent reduction in sodium isn’t that noticeable,” says Aquilante.

Partnerships between the Chinese and African American communities have been key to making the Philadelphia Healthy Chinese Take-out Initiative possible. In 2015, PDPHbegan a new outreach program with 80 pastors from African American churches. The pastors learned about the Chinese take-out program and other health issues. In turn, the pastors have begun educating their congregations.

Two years after training, 185 Chinese take-out-only restaurants were still participating in the program.

The success in Philadelphia is serving as a model for other cities looking to improve their residents’ health. In 2015 the Advocate Heart Institute and the Chicago Department of Public Health worked with four Chicago restaurants that serve South Asian fare to reduce sodium levels in their food.

“Several other cities have inquired about our program and replicated it in their own way,” says Aquilante. “Since our initiative is so comprehensive, I think cities can pull out pieces that they want to focus on.”

Published on CivilEats by Chris Hardman

 

Bringing Pollinators Back to Washington

| ChrisHardmanWriter

HAVE YOU CONSIDERED putting in a beehive, but worried that you might not have the time to maintain it? If you live in Seattle, you’re in luck. Once a month, Corky Luster’s Ballard Bee Company will install a hive, care for the bees, and harvest the honey for you.

“It’s like having a lawn service, but with bees. You can sit back and enjoy the bees, and we will take care of them,” Luster explains.

Ballard Bee customers sign up for a year of “urban pollination” services at a time. During the 6-month honey season, they receive two 12-ounce jars of honey a month, and in winter, Luster makes sure the hive survives.

In the process, he is turning suburban backyards and city rooftops into honey producing habitats, in hopes that it will help his customers connect the dots between what they eat and the natural world around them. “By [giving people] bees, you bring them into the fold, and they become part of the food system,” Luster says.

To make his business sustainable, Luster does more than manage hives. He teaches classes, consults with chefs, and sells honey and beekeeping supplies. “We’ve had a huge interest in beekeeping in Seattle,” he explains. His classes sell out and many of his graduates move on to their own beekeeping adventures.

Luster also consults for some of Seattle’s finest chefs. He helped both Jason Stoneburner of Bastille Café & Bar in Ballard and Gavin Stephenson of Seattle’s Fairmont Olympic Hotel set up rooftop apiaries. “My goal was to educate the chefs and get them involved,” says Luster. “Both are really bright and very interested in trying to be part of the solution.”

The restaurant apiaries have succeeded. Chef Stephenson now manages five rooftop hives that house half a million honeybees. He harvested more than 400 pounds of honey last summer. Last year, after relying on the service of Ballard Bees for three years, Chef Stoneburner has taken over caring for his hives. He uses his honey in desserts, vinaigrettes, and in a popular cocktail called the Bee’s Knees.

In 2014, Luster started a new service for restaurants called the apiary partnership program. He invited restaurants and chefs to buy bee hives that he manages for a small fee. The restaurant gets 100 percent of the honey. According to Luster, the partnership is a great success and he plans to expand this program in the future. His clients include the Walrus and the Carpenter, an oyster bar in Seattle, Vif, a wine and coffee café in Seattle, and the Tom Douglas Restaurants.

Nearly half of Ballard Bee’s income comes from honey sales. The company owns an additional 130 hives that are housed 45 minutes outside of Seattle at Local Roots Farm and at Camp Korey. The honey produced by those hives has varied flavors that depend on where the bees are foraging. The first nectar flow begins early in the spring when the bees are feeding on pollen from the flowers of bigleaf maple trees, the largest species of maple found in the Puget sound area. Next the bees feed on pollen from blackberry bush flowers. The last flow is from the Japanese knotweed plant and has a fig and caramel taste to it. Called Dark Cream Honey, it’s Ballard’s favorite flavor and recently received national recognition as a 2015 Good Food Awards winner.

Education is important to the Ballard Bee Company’s mission. Luster’s goals when starting the business in 2009 were to teach people about bees, replenish the local bee population, and encourage new beekeepers. He is dedicated to spreading the word about the value of bees and says people are afraid of bees because they don’t know enough about them. When he works with a hive, onlookers express surprise that he is dressed in short sleeves without gloves. “People are amazed that honey bees are extremely gentle. They’re teddy bears,” he says. Some of his clients put lawn chairs near the hive so they can relax and watch the bees at work.

As pollinators of fruit trees, nut trees and crops, the value of bees is vast. According to the Washington State Department of Agriculture, honey bees pollinate $2.2 billion worth of tree fruits, nuts, and berries, and produce 2.5 million pounds of honey in their state alone. Those calculations do not include the value of all the seed crops bees pollinate, such as onions, watermelon, and squash.

Seattle, with its vibrant local food scene, is an ideal place to launch an urban bee company. Since Luster started his business, other bee companies have debuted, offering hosting, consulting, and education services. One business, called the Urban Bee Company, gives city dwellers a chance to sponsor a hive or an apprentice beekeeper along with hosting and education programs. “I could not be here without the support Seattle has given me,” Luster says. “I am really thankful for that.”

 

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An Urban Farmer Breaks New Ground in Flint

| ChrisHardmanWriter

THIRTY-YEAR-OLD Roxanne Adair is a trailblazer. In 2010, she and a friend started Flint River Farm in Flint, Michigan, a city where urban farming isn’t the norm. Adair’s background was in fisheries, wildlife, and biology, and she used the knowledge gained working at the Genesee County Land bank to buy and rent city lots, totaling nearly three acres, in the heart of Flint.

This process wasn’t easy. Flint’s history mirrors that of other rust belt cities. The city had a robust economy based in the auto industry until it began to decline in the 1970s. When General Motors closed multiple plants and cut thousands of jobs in Flint in 1989, work suddenly became scarce. As unemployment and crime increased, the media dubbed Flint “the Murder Capital” of the U.S.

Despite the city’s challenges, Adair and her partner jump-started their business with a grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation. Their goal was to create a sustainable business model for urban farming in Flint.

The farmers built hoop houses, produced enough vegetables to supply a multi-family community supported agriculture program (CSA), harvested honey from two beehives, and even tapped neighborhood maple trees to make syrup. They sold their organically grown produce at the Flint Farmers’ Market.

Since her partner left in 2012, Adair has continued to expand the farm on her own, and the space now occupies 17 city lots. Flint River Farm produces a wide array of heirloom crops, including apples, blackberries, strawberries, cherries, corn, melons, tomatoes, squash, dried beans, carrots, beets and Brussels sprouts—the list goes on and on.

frf joannas dadWhile Flint River Farm is filled with fresh produce, the neighborhood still faces its challenges. Across the street is a burned-out convenience store. The main drag, Saginaw Street, is a block away and is home to strip clubs, a pawn shop, and a liquor store.

Theft is a frequent problem on the farm, but Adair doesn’t begrudge her hungry visitors. “If you need [food] bad enough to steal it, you need it more than I do,” she says. But, she encourages people to reach out to her first: “Tell me and I will harvest it for you. I’ll wash it for you and have it ready.”

Vandals also come through the farm regularly, slashing the thick polyethylene walls of the hoop houses or spray painting gang paraphernalia on the sides. Repairs and replacements can cost thousands of dollars.

By and large, however, the long-time residents of the neighborhood have become Adair’s friends. They share tools, talk over the tomatoes, and collaborate on composting. Adair recalls that when she started the farm, she rarely saw the neighbors outside. “They would mow their lawn and then run back inside,” she says. Now people have planted flowers and are taking pride in their landscape. “I can’t take credit for that,” says Adair, “but I think [the farm] has caused people to come outside more and not hate their surroundings.”

Throughout the year, Adair shares her knowledge through community workshops, on topics as diverse as urban foraging, composting, maple syrup making, organic gardening, and season extension. Although she charges a small fee for the classes, Adair admits that she doesn’t turn anyone away. “There is a spirit in the city of Flint that I haven’t found anywhere else,” she says. “The people who have stayed have been through some really hard times. I have a respect for the struggle.”

Flint River Farm aims to address the city’s high unemployment rate by providing jobs to Flint residents. Using grant money, Adair hired local teenagers to farm and work at the farmers’ market. At the height of the growing season, she employed nine full-time staff members and two interns. As the farm moves toward self-sustainability, Adair hopes these jobs will become more permanent. When the farm first started, it was entirely grant-funded. This year grants accounted for only 40 percent of the operating costs.

To sustain the farm, Adair has diversified her product line. She has sold lip balm made from her bees’ wax, salad mixes from the hoop house, teas from dried herbs, eggs from her small flock of chickens, and nut butters she grinds herself. This month, she began selling bulk dried goods like organic oats and flour at her stand in the market. “I am confident that with bulk food bins we will be sustainable next year,” she says.

Last summer, the city threatened to confiscate the chickens Adair keeps at her house. Flint’s Blight Authority gave her 30 days to dispose of the birds. Adair used that opportunity to try to change a 1968 city ordinance that prohibits residential homeowners from keeping “fowl” on their property. She mobilized her support network, worked with the city council, and created a ”Friends of Flint Chickens” Facebook campaign.

On the last day, Adair sat on her front porch and waited for the police to come. She highly doubted that in a city with only three police officers on duty at a time, one of them would take time away from chasing drug dealers and thieves, to chase her chickens. She waited all day. No one came.

Like her chickens, Roxanne Adair is in Flint to stay.

Published on Civil Eats.com by

 

Detroit Company Creates Fresh Food Pit Stops

| ChrisHardmanWriter

IF YOU’RE ON THE HUNT for a fresh, ready-to-eat meal in Detroit, the best place to find it just might surprise you. Take the Sunoco station on Fort Street or the Victory Liquor and Food store on Warren Avenue. Amidst the Hot Cheetos and snack-sized Chips Ahoy cookies, you’ll find a cooler stocked with everything from fresh fruit and yogurt parfaits and spicy feta and hummus wraps to Thai chicken salads made with fresh, green lettuce—not the wilted iceberg you might expect.

The company behind the food might not be what you’d expect either. Fresh Corner Cafe (FCC) is a mission driven food and delivery service with the goal of making healthy food accessible to all Detroiters. To do this, they’ve turned to a most unlikely distribution center—neighborhood convenience stores.

For years, Detroit has been labeled a “food desert,” but that term is misleading. “It’s not that we don’t have grocery stores,” explains Detroit native and FCC co-founder Val Waller. “It’s that people have issues getting to them.”

According to a 2011 report from Data Driven Detroit, there are more than 115 grocery stores within Detroit’s city limits. In the years since that report was published, several high-profile grocery stores have opened stores in the city—including Whole Foods in June 2013 and Meijer in July 2013. But Detroit encompasses 138 square miles, the public transportation is undependable and some neighborhoods are simply not safe for walking. As a result, many Detroiters choose food from the closest of the more than 1,000 corner stores in the city.

“We’re trying to change the idea of what can be available in these spaces,” Waller explains. Initially FCC co-owner Noam Kimelman had to convince the shop owners that his products would sell. But Kimelman and Waller worked hard to build relationships with store owners and won over customers by providing free samples.

The idea for Fresh Corner Cafe came to Kimelman while he was studying at the University of Michigan. While working on his Masters of Health Management and Public Policy, he and his classmates came up with an idea for getting healthier food into urban areas. His first business, Get Fresh Detroit, launched in 2010 and offered for sale packets of food with fresh ingredients to make soup or stir fry. His goal was to make a gas station or convenience store a one-stop shop for fresh food ingredients. Kimelman soon learned that his customers were more interested in ready-to -eat meals, so he changed his business plan to offer pre-made meals.IMG_7849_edited-1

Kimelman recruited Waller, another U of M graduate, to join the company in 2011. Her degree in sociology and work experience in her family’s Detroit pizzeria have fueled her passion for creating an equitable local foodshed. She says access to good food should not be contingent on where someone lives.

Unlike most government interventions, says the Fresh Corner Café website, which “rely on big box retail to address healthy food access and obesity” the company’s goal is to “reduce barriers and uplift existing assets to provide a highly replicable and scalable solution with low capital requirements.”

Targeting convenience stores is an effective way to reach low-income shoppers. Fresh Corner Cafe sells to stores that are all certified to accept food assistance cards, also called Bridge cards. According to Data Driven Detroit, residents of Detroit spend twice as much of their Bridge card money at convenience stores as compared to the rest of Michigan‘s residents.

Fresh Corner Cafe works at a community level. They source fruit from Peaches and Greens, a locally owned produce market, and the wraps and salads come from Lunchtime Detroit, a sandwich shop. The staff lives locally and the drivers come from the communities to which they deliver. FCC delivers meals to 27 locations—including cafes, gas stations, and pharmacies—three times a week.

Currently the sales from the convenience stores do not generate enough revenue to turn a profit, so in order to keep the company sustainable, FCC expanded by placing their own self-serve to-go cafes in several Detroit workplaces. The company provides a fully-stocked refrigerator with a self-pay station and they stock and clean the shelves and handle all financial transactions. These workplace cafes makes it convenient for busy professionals to eat healthy and for businesses to provide fresh food to their employees.

So far, these strategies appear to be working. In August, Kimelman was recognized with a young entrepreneur SCORE award for pioneering the model and the company now employs six people.

Last year FCC sold some 30,000 meals bringing in $200,000 worth of revenue. Those numbers will continue to grow as FCC expands to more stores and offices. According to Waller, FCC plans to open their own certified kitchen, which will give them more control over ingredients and eventually allow them to introduce an organic line. “It is a social injustice for people to not have access to fresh food,” she says. “Detroiters are so used to not having things that they don’t even know how to ask for them.”

Published on Civil Eats by

 

FarmRaiser Takes Fundraising Local

| ChrisHardmanWriter

WHEN MARK ABBOTT’S SON  was in fourth grade, his local elementary school recruited students and their families to participate in a fundraiser for the school. After successfully selling cookie dough and candy to friends and family, Abbott’s son remarked that he had just sold $400 worth of things the family would never eat at home. “It’s too bad we couldn’t try something healthy like apples,” said his son.

That suggestion resonated with Abbott, so he had an idea. Instead of candy and chips from national suppliers, why not make it possible for students to sell healthy food from local farmers, beekeepers, and food artisans? He started a pilot program in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. And the following year, in 2013, FarmRaiser ran 30 fundraising campaigns for schools in Michigan and Washington State.

Fundraising is a necessary evil for our nation’s schools. Budget cuts from federal and state sources have left most schools financially needy. In a 2007 survey conducted by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, 94 percent of principals–representing a wide range of school districts across the country–reported that they had held fundraisers.

Often run by parent volunteers, these fundraisers generate money to pay for everything from field trips, to playground equipment, school supplies, and new technology. Schools in both low-income and high-income areas report the need to fundraise. At least 35 states provided less funding per student for the 2013-14 school year than they did before the recession hit. Fourteen of these states have cut the amount they give for each student by more than 10 percent.

Fundraising is big business. Student salesmen generate $1.4 billion a year peddling packaged food, magazines, and gifts, according to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers. But as schools are challenged to create a healthier environment for their students, parents and teachers alike question sending kids out into the community to hawk high-fat, high-salt cookie dough and candy bars. “I want to support the schools, but I don’t want to buy the stuff full of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils,” says Therese Povolo of Champion Hill Farm in Beulah, Michigan. She and her husband are beekeepers who have sold honey through FarmRaiser since last fall. The first school that used their products was only half a mile away from their home.

Fundraising is also one more way to fill students’ lives with candy and processed food. Children are especially vulnerable to big food marketing and having schools train them to be salespeople for high-calorie, low-nutrient foods seems counterintuitive. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, diet related illnesses such type 2 diabetes are on the rise. Their research shows that childhood obesity has doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past three decades.

Similar to traditional catalogue-based fundraising programs, FarmRaiser customers order products from a set list of vendors. But FarmRaiser campaigns avoid cookies and desserts, opting instead for local fruits and vegetables and locally sourced honey, pasta, granola, spice mixes, artisan breads, jam, etc. Schools can also collect money from cash donations made online.

Most of FarmRaiser’s vendors are within 30 miles of the school and if the school has a personal connection to a farm or food artisan, FarmRaiser will add them to their product list. “We love to sell products that directly connect back to the students at the school,” says says FarmRaiser’s campaign manager Christina Carson. For example Leelanau Montessori in Suttons Bay, Michigan, includes dried cherries in their fundraiser from Cherry Bay Orchards, one student’s family farm.

FarmRaiser vendors also use the campaigns as marketing tools. It provides a chance to reach new customers at a time of the year when farmers’ market crowds in Michigan are dwindling. “We have a big tourist market in the summer and when that falls off, it’s nice to get other people aware of our product,” says Povolo.

Carson says that FarmRaiser’s financial model is competitive with other types of food-based fundraising, which offer schools anywhere from 20-50 percent of the profit. In this case, the school ends up with a flat 45 percent of the amount sold, FarmRaiser takes a 10 percent fee, and the rest goes to local businesses.

FarmRaiser also helps schools raise money through a program they call The Community Basket. Here’s how it works: The school accepts cash donations in the name of a local food bank. The school keeps 50 percent and the rest of the money is used to buy local food for the food bank. Typically the students choose the charity and then have a chance to deliver the donation. “[It’s] a great way for people to share the bounty of the fundraiser with people who are in need,” says Carson.

As the need for fundraising grows, so does the need for fundraising companies working for more than just their own bottom line. FarmRaiser plans to increase their campaigns throughout Michigan and the Seattle area and to move into other states in the coming years.

“Eighty percent of households purchase something from a fundraiser every year,” says Carson. If they were selling, say, local apples instead of candy, she adds, “you’d have 80 percent of people purchasing local food.” The impact on the local farm economy could be huge.

Published on Civil Eats by

 

Detroiters Connect in Shared Kitchens

| ChrisHardmanWriter

IN MEXICANTOWN, on the Southwest side of Detroit, Chloe Sabatier makes French lava cakes. Sabatier sources as many of her ingredients as locally as possible, including raspberries, strawberries, and spices. She sells at farmers’ markets, cafes, restaurants, and specialty stores across the Detroit Metro area and her commercial kitchen is located in a banquet hall owned by Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Cathedral. How is it that French delicacies are being made in a church started by Polish immigrants in a Mexican neighborhood? The answer is an innovative program called Detroit Kitchen Connect(DKC).

By making abandoned or underutilized commercial kitchens available to local food entrepreneurs, DKC helps residents start food businesses with a minimal investment. “It’s an asset-based approach to solving problems and finding the solutions in neighborhoods,” says Devita Davison, Community Kitchen Coordinator at Eastern Market Corporation. In July of 2013, Eastern Market—one of the oldest farmers’ market organizations in the country—joined with FoodLab Detroit—a network of food entrepreneurs dedicated to growing Detroit’s local food movement—to create DKC.

Detroit’s population shrank dramatically over the last few decades, dropping from 1.5 million in 1970 to 700,000 in 2012. While people may have left, however, many office buildings, churches, and community centers remain. Many of them have commercial kitchens that are used sparingly or not at all. Instead of seeing these buildings as liabilities and signs of decay, Davison sees them as assets in a city where many people are struggling to make ends meet.

Like kitchen incubators such as San Francisco’s La Cocina and Hot Bread Kitchen in Harlem, DKC charges a low hourly rate, which gives local entrepreneurs access to facilities that would normally be out of reach both geographically and financially. But its Detroit location sets DKC apart from other incubators around the nation, because the project also has the potential to bring forgotten neighborhoods back to life.

Take the Sts. Peter and Paul Orthodox Church. With its congregation shrinking and participation dwindling, the leaders were at a loss at how to connect with the community.

Before DKC got involved, the church had started a community garden and opened their banquet hall to rent for neighborhood celebrations, but the kitchen was only used on Sundays for a homeless outreach program. Now, the kitchen is a hub of activity that’s in use almost every day. Crème Detropolis makes gourmet sweet potato pies; Five Star Cakes makes traditional layered cakes.

With grant money from the United Way, DKC was able to give the church $5,000 for a new security system, a new door, security cameras, and outdoor lighting. “When we first started the program, this church was suffering,” Davison recalls. “Because the church didn’t have a good door, it was broken into several times.” Since the DKC upgrades, however, the break-ins have stopped.

And DKC provides services beyond the shared kitchen. DKC food artisans become part of the Eastern Market and FoodLab Detroit community of businesses. With these connections DKC tenants learn where to find local ingredients, where to sell their products, and how to navigate the city bureaucracy. Within this community, established business owners share their successes and failures with DKC’s fledgling food entrepreneurs.

As part of DKC, Detroit entrepreneurs also get help with the licensing process—another barrier to starting a food business. There are two types of licenses in the state of Michigan. The first license is for packaged food and is pretty affordable at $70 to $175. But the second type of license is for an entrepreneur who serves food such as caterers, restaurateurs, and food trucks. That license comes from the city of Detroit and costs $1,500, which is around three to four times more than any other city or county in the state.

“In a city that needs to promote entrepreneurism, in a city that is talking about using food as a conduit to grow the local economy, these barriers of entry are stifling growth,” Davison says. Her next task is to work with the city of Detroit to make the catering license accessible to more entrepreneurs.

Currently, 10 licensed entrepreneurs work in DKC’s two kitchens. April M. Anderson used to bake out of her home (under the Michigan cottage food law) but she had to turn down larger orders because her home kitchen was too small. Through DKC, she was able to rent space in a commercial kitchen and within a few months opened Good Cakes and Bakes in a retail space in Detroit. Anderson bakes at the DKC kitchen from 3 to 6:30 am and then heads to her shop at 7:00 am.
“I don’t know if April would have been able to open her bakery if she’d had to purchase hundreds and thousands of dollars of equipment,” says Davison. “She understands full well that this is what she has to do to buy her own kitchen. Until then we are her bakehouse.”

Unlike kitchen incubators in cities that receive generous public funding, Davison says, “What we’ve done here is scrappy. We haven’t gotten a dime from the city.” Private funders, including the United Way of Southeast Michigan and the McGregor Foundation, have footed the bill since the program began.

With nearly a year under their belt and some visible success stories, DKC hopes to expand and open more kitchens. The goals, says Davison, go far beyond food. “We are building a more inclusive food economy in Detroit,” she says. “We are challenging the social, political, and economic structures that reinforce inequities.”

Published on Civil Eats by

 

Clarkston’s Woodshop: A Hand-Crafted Joint

| ChrisHardmanWriter

I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYONE so excited about a pig.

We stand in the freezer at the Union Woodshop in downtown Clarkston and gaze down at a 209-pound female. My host is Executive Chef Aaron Cozadd, who is dressed in black pinstriped pants, chef whites and a bandana with a small white pin that has one word on it: meat.

Cozadd and two other men carry the pig into the prep room, hoist the pig onto a stainless steel table and prepare to cut off its head.

That pig will end up on the Woodshop’s Southern Pride smoker, located right outside the back entrance to the restaurant. The pig will be dry rubbed and surrounded in smoke for 12 to 14 hours, producing a smell that leads people to the restaurant like a piper’s pipe. Judging by the crowd milling outside the restaurant—the wait can be two hours on a weekend night—the restaurant is thriving in its second year. And since the Woodshop was named 2011 Restaurant of the Year by the Detroit Free Press, the restaurant’s reputation has spread far beyond Oakland County.

Of course a busy chef doesn’t have time to break down every pig, but once in a while Cozadd takes saw and knife in hand to do the work himself. “The better you know your ingredient in its raw stage, the better you can be in cooking it,” he explains. “Most people see meat as cut steaks in the grocery store. They don’t appreciate that an animal died for it.”

Cozadd owes a lot to the pig. He has built a reputation on his ability to craft hand-pulled pork, Tasso ham, spicy sausage, robust hot dogs and maple-cured bacon. Any meat—pork or otherwise—that is smoked or cured is done by hand in house.

This animal has all the qualities Cozadd looks for in a good pig. Before arriving at the Woodshop, the pig lived at Cook’s Farm Dairy, a family-owned farm just six miles away from the restaurant. There the pig had plenty of mud to wallow in, children to adore him and—best of all—a diet that included the leftover ice cream the dairy is known for. “If you love the ice cream and the pig eats the ice cream, you will love the pig,” Cozadd says with a smile.

Cozadd prefers local pigs over mass-produced pork because he believes local pigs tend to have better living conditions and eat good food themselves. He says that because mass-produced meat has been modified to be leaner with no fat and no marbling, the meat ends up dry with little flavor. He uses local pigs when he can, but is realistic about the economies of a restaurant. Even if local farmers could meet the restaurant’s demand for meat, only a portion of restaurant customers are willing to pay extra for that local meat.

Cozadd relies on local farmers for as many raw ingredients as he can. His weekend specials highlight the seasonal ingredients he buys from local farms. Squash blossoms from Law Family farm in North Branch top a market pie with pickled garlic, fresh oregano, ricotta and olive oil. Kale from White Pine Farm in North Branch is creamed and served alongside pancetta-wrapped hake and roasted red-skin potatoes. Maple syrup from Doodles Sugar Bush farms in Blanchard is the main attraction in the Woodshop maple-cured bacon and the sweet potato mash. When available, the restaurant uses local cherries, vegetables and herbs. Cozadd says that local products simply taste better.

“Ultimately, if you have really good ingredients to start with everybody is going think you are a better chef,” he explains. “The food does 80% of the work. Your job is to just stay out of the way.”

Although Cozadd has built a reputation on meat, he is equally passionate about his vegetable side dishes. He mixes his classical French training with modern ingredients and techniques to create side dishes and appetizers that are good enough to take center stage themselves. His wood-fired pizzas can be customized before preparation with toppings ranging from roasted garlic to smoked shrimp to pickled chilies. He smokes salmon before turning it into a paté and cold smokes cheddar cheese and sour cream for the kitchen and pickles and olives for the bar.

Cozadd has worked in professional kitchens since he was 16. He graduated cum laude from New York’s prestigious Culinary Institute of America in 2004 and then rambled around a bit—backpacking in Europe, cooking in the Florida Keys and snowboarding in Aspen. Eventually he returned to his roots in Clarkston, where he worked as a cook in the Clarkston Union. When the owners of the Union decided to open another restaurant down the street, they offered Cozadd the position of executive chef.

Cozadd’s first executive chef position at the Clarkston Café—which combined a fine-dining supper club with a pizza joint—was short-lived. With an upscale décor and a highly ambitious menu, the Café lasted only two years before Michigan’s economy tanked. In spite of attempts to lower the price tag and scale down the menu, the reputation of “fine dining” stuck, and struggling families turned to cheaper fare.

Undaunted, owners Curt Catallo and Erich Lines set about to reinvent the Café. Cozadd kept busy, and on the payroll, working on specials for the Union down the street. During that time Cozadd honed his skills in charcuterie—the art of preserving and flavoring meat. The team decided to create more than a typical barbecue restaurant and capitalize on the wood-fired oven they had, combined with Cozadd’s hands-on approach. They called it “a hand-crafted, wood-fired joint” and re-opened as the Union Woodshop in August 2009.

Two years later the restaurant is packed, even on a Sunday night, and Cozadd is nearly done cutting up his pig. Members of his staff wander in and out; some ask questions about the process, others make jokes and some shield their eyes and say “gross.” But behind the laughter and smiles is a deep interest in where our food comes from and a genuine respect for the man preparing it. As he finishes, Cozadd proudly shows us that he will use all but a handful of the 209-pound pig.

As humble as he is talented, Cozadd attributes any accolades to the ingredients he so carefully chooses. “It’s really easy to make something delicious out of something delicious,” he says.

Published in edibleWOW Magazine  by Chris Hardman