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VIDEOWhole Foods Betting on Street Eats
By
Justin Rohrlich
Jun 11, 2010 3:30 pm
The innovative grocer sees food cart vendors as its "next big thing."
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Street Eats will be rolled out gradually, starting with a handful of Whole Foods locations in Northern California. El Porteño, an empanada maker found at various San Francisco farmer’s markets, is already doing business with the company, and according to San Francisco Weekly, Singh “recently met with Crème Brûlée Cart's Curtis Kimball and his brother, Magic Curry Kart's Brian Kimball. Singh has also sat down with Jon Kosorek of East Bay cart Jon's Street Eats about developing a salad dressing.”
"The street-food movement is very hot right now, and they've got some great products," Singh told the paper.
But, what does it take to go from selling food on a street corner to producing the same product on a national -- or even regional -- level?
In an interview with Minyanville, Leslie Skarra, founder of Merlin Development, a Plymouth, Minnesota company that provides product development and research services to the food industry, explained the process.
"The first thing necessary to go from [a street cart] to the Whole Foods level is to convert the recipe to a formula,” she said. “If you've been measuring ingredients by the cup, the large-scale producer will need the weights. Then, you need to define the process. Usually, there are things specific to a street vendor's equipment, their environment, that make their products what they are. After that, there needs to be a process of investigation to make sure the original product can be reproduced accurately."
Finally, Skarra said, “scientists will convert the ingredients in the formula into one that would be acceptable to Whole Foods from a sourcing standpoint, a quality standpoint, and work out the necessary scale of operations.”
“What are the risks?” Skarra asked rhetorically. “Sometimes going from handmade to large scale changes things. This is where many people involved in this sort of translation can underestimate the problems in going from small and slow to bigger and faster. This is known in the industry as 'scale up', which is very important to get right, to maintain the integrity of the street food and the things that make it excellent to eat, a pleasurable experience, every time it’s consumed, to drive repeat consumption.”
Jared Eggers, owner of Endless Summer Tacos, a popular Williamsburg, Brooklyn food truck located on Bedford Avenue, tells Minyanville that he would “love for everything I sell to be cage free and organic [to meet Whole Foods’ sourcing standards], but there’s no way I could do that and charge under $3 for my product.”
He says he would need corporate backing to do so -- which Singh apparently has covered.
"If one of the street-food vendors needed financing, we could help them," he said.
While street vendors aren’t going to put industry behemoths like McDonald’s (MCD), Burger King (BKC), Wendy’s (WEN), or Taco Bell (YUM) out of business anytime soon, certain municipalities are doing their best to put street vendors, who create jobs and enhance communities, out of business.
The New York City Council has proposed a rule that would revoke the vending licenses of food trucks if they're ticketed three times in one year, for setting up shop legally at parking meters.
It seems that feeding a meter to buy more time is illegal in New York.
"I don't have a problem with vendors selling from their trucks. They're not supposed to take up residence on our streets and just feed the meter hour after hour, and that's what a lot of them are doing," Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, who co-sponsored the bill, told the New York Post.
Gene Voss, owner of the popular Schnitzel & Things truck, offered a rebuttal.
"This would make it impossible for gourmet food trucks to exist in New York, and our customers will miss out," he said.
Once this ball gets rolling, it wouldn't be too much of a surprise to see other cities follow New York City’s misguided lead.
If it gets too hot for street-food vendors and they want to get out of their mobile kitchens, Harvindar Singh would like to hear from them.
"Tell them they can e-mail me," he told San Francisco Weekly.
So, here it is: Harvindar.Singh@wholefoods.com
Just one question of a more philosophical bent remains: Is street food still street food when it’s sold in an aisle?
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