On Farmers'Markets and Football

Right around 1PM this past Sunday, a hundred market farmers breathed a huge sigh of relief. The rest of the city was grieving but we’d just had our livelihoods handed back to us

Business is business. Adversity happens. Equipment breaks down, customer tastes change, and competition is relentless. Farmers are especially adept at backup plans and contingencies because their fortunes ride on the weather, which was dealing hard hands even before things started getting really strange the past few years.

But football?

For many of us vendors, markets are our main source of income this time of year. Wind, rain, and even snow take their toll on sales, but football hits us even harder. Other than the Pike Place Market, there are four year-round farmers’ markets in Seattle: University District, Ballard, Broadway, and West Seattle. Three of these four markets run only on Sundays. Unlike baseball, basketball, and soccer, which happen throughout the week, football owns Sunday, and it doesn’t share. Even the church down the street reschedules its Sunday services on game days.

Football hits some markets harder than others. A market that bills itself as an entertainment venue, with a music stage and a roster of food trucks, will be hit harder than a mature shopping market, where serious cooks and shoppers show up early, in all kinds of weather. Football hits the markets harder as the season wears on, as the tension grows and the stakes increase.

Some market managers try to drum up sales by encouraging vendors to wear team colors, show team spirit, and sell game-day snacks. But no showing of blue clothing or blue cookies is going to up your sales if fans aren’t browsing at the market in the first place.

We can’t compete with a phenomenon whose advertising budget handily exceeds our combined annual income. It’s humiliating to feel angry and alienated over something that brings our loved ones so much joy.

But that’s all behind us now, at least until next season. Please come back to the markets. We’ll be waiting, with Brussels sprouts, sheep cheese, smoked salmon, and grilled vegetable quesadillas. We’ll be overjoyed to see you.

 

Humble Feast Dinners at the Neighborhood Kitchen

A year ago I was browsing commercial real estate listings with a long term plan to invest in a building for a long term home for Patty Pan. I stumbled on a property close to my house that was just the right size and just the right price. It was a commercial space in a residential neighborhood and I've always liked those very much. The savvy broker had included an email from a neighbor testifying to the neighborhood's readiness to support a community-minded food business. The neighbor's email went on to wish for a Fair Trade espresso bar or a bistro run by an established chef.

We had no intention of opening a coffee shop or café. (Been there, done that.) But we certainly were looking for a place that we could grow into a neighborhood institution, fostering connections around food.

Back in 2011 I launched a series of monthly local foods dinner events dubbed the "Humble Feast", an antidote to the lavish, expensive local foods galas featuring celebrity chefs and ingredients donated by hardworking farmers and fishermen. Instead of a mind-blowing meal made up of dishes few home cooks could replicate, I wanted to prepare simple, tasty, affordable fare that could also inspire home cooking.

It seemed like an obvious, appealing idea but it turned out to be a tough sell. It was hard to find a comfortable, affordable space where we could host our dinners and we just weren't very good at getting the word out. We had some reasonably successful events and some morale-busting evenings when almost nobody showed.

Early this year I bought the building in Briarcrest, which included a small dining room off the kitchen. We built a beautiful pass-through window with an onyx counter and bamboo plywood trim. And we invited the neighbors for dinner. They came, they ate, and they told their friends. They've come month after month, enjoying our humble endeavor, filling our tiny dining room to capacity and spilling into the kitchen and the parking lot.

The dinners are going so well that, starting the first of the year, we'll begin holding them weekly rather than monthly. We're so grateful to have landed in this neighborhood.

Here's a recipe for the Shepherd's Pie that we served at the last dinner. It's tasty and adaptable, and makes a great winter comfort food.

Shepherd’s Pie (makes 6 servings)

 6 medium-size potatoes (any kind but russets)

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound ground beef, ground lamb, crumbled tofu, finely chopped seitan, or cooked lentils or beans
2 teaspoons salt
2 cups finely chopped vegetables (I recommend carrots, parsnips, turnips, rutabagas, and winter squash)
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons other finely chopped fresh herbs (I recommend rosemary, oregano, and thyme.)

 

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

 Boil water in a large saucepan. Cut the potatoes in quarters, add them to the water, and cook them for about ten minutes, until they’re very soft.

 Meanwhile, heat two tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet. Add the onions and garlic and cook for about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft and translucent. If you’re using beef or lamb, crumble it into the pan once the onion is well cooked, along with one teaspoon salt. If you’re using a vegetarian protein, you’ll add it later.

 Cook the meat on medium-low heat for 5 to 10 minutes, until it’s nicely browned. Add the vegetables and salt and cook for about 10 minutes longer, until they’re very tender. If you’re using a vegetarian protein, add it now. When the protein and vegetable mixture is heated through, add the herbs.

 Drain the potatoes, add the remaining tablespoon two teaspoons olive oil and one teaspoon salt, and mash well. Spread the protein and vegetable mixture in the bottom of a large casserole pan, and spread the mashed potatoes on top. Divide them in four portions and drop them in different portions of the pan to make the potatoes easier to spread.

 Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until it’s piping hot.

Cooperative Economics

Traditional businesses use a relatively straightforward formula for evaluating success. Profit means a job well done while loss spells trouble.

The equation is fuzzier for a cooperative which, by definition, exists to benefit its members. Profit is anything left over after subtracting operating expenses from incoming revenue, but wages and salaries weigh in as operating expenses. The more a coop pays its members, the less it has left over in profit.

Earlier this year I bought the building where Patty Pan Cooperative now operates. The business pays rent to me and this rent goes to pay down my mortgage and increase my equity in the property. The rent benefits me personally, yet it comes out of Patty Pan's bottom line.

We've been grappling with these equations all summer as we've earned our livelihoods and set aside funds to pay for the expensive build-out we completed last spring. We need profit to pay back our loans, and we need profit to create a cushion because it's good to save for emergencies and a seasonal business tends to be short of cash half the year.

We recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to buy equipment to make our own tortillas out of local, organic, whole grains. Naturally we evaluated whether the tortilla project would make our business more profitable, and concluded that these tortillas will probably cost the same as the ones we currently use. However, some of the costs will switch from the material expense of buying a finished product to the labor expense of making it ourselves.

In other words, the tortillas will cost the same according to traditional calculations, but the process will give back more to our members. There are other benefits as well. By buying grain from local growers, we'll cycle funds back into the closely knit farmers' market economy. Our quesadillas will be tastier and healthier. And we'll stay interesting. When you've been around a lot longer than any of your competitors, staying interesting can be an uphill battle.

Speaking of interesting, the research and development process for our tortilla project has been fascinating. It's challenging to create a light, flexible tortilla using 100 percent whole grain flour. We're open to harmless add-ins like lecithin or baking powder, but we'd really rather study the behavior of the dough and learn how to achieve the results we want using just flour, olive oil, salt, and water.

We've made appealing prototypes using a small electric tortilla press designed for home use, but the real work will start once we buy and install the professional equipment that can press tortillas to a consistent thickness, and cook them at a consistent heat.

We're curious, we're engaged, and our morale is high. We're looking forward to getting started.

Reflections on Kickstarter, After One Week

As soon as we launched our Kickstarter campaign, we started getting emails from helpful consultants and companies offering to boost our showings with the Kickstarter algorithms that determine whether a project will be prominently featured on the company's site. Naturally we reported these messages as spam and deleted them, but they did provide food for thought.

Fundraising isn't for the faint-hearted. You throw yourself at the mercy of close and distant friends and associates with the humbling and often distasteful mission of asking for money. Then you ask again. And again.

The internet makes it possible to reach more ears, at least in theory. More people receive your message, but they receive it in the context of a sea of messages that they have to filter for information worthy of giving a damn.

Before launching our project, we read quite a few blog posts and articles about how to get the word out. They mostly cautioned that Kickstarter support comes primarily from networks that are already in place by the time you launch: friends, family, and friends of friends of friends who have been quietly admiring your work. They advised anyone interested in starting a Kickstarter campaign to start creating a network months ahead of time by building a strong social medua platform and commenting prolifically on sites and feeds that attract like-minded would-be patrons.

We approached the process differently. Patty Pan is a business that meets customers face to face. We don't advertise and we couldn't care less about Yelp reviews: people don't buy our tamales and quesadillas because they've seen an advertisement or read a review. They buy our food because they're at the farmers' market and the vegetables smell good.

So we're bringing our Kickstarter campaign to our customers face to face. Instead of profiling the type of customer most likely to support our project and courting the websites and bloggers most likely to cater to that theoretical customer, we're asking support directly from those most likely to benefit from quesadillas made with tortillas pressed from local, organic, whole grain flour: people who already enjoy our quesadillas week after week, at market after market.

Whenever someone orders a quesadilla, we tell them about our plans to make those awesome quesadillas even better. We're bringing tortilla prototypes to the markets and sampling them. We're getting an enthusiastic response and we're on track to meet our goal.

Thanks so much to everyone who has pledged so far. Many of the names aren't familiar, but we suspect many of those names go with familiar faces and we look forward to putting the two together, after years of feeding you.

And if you haven't yet checked out our project, please do. Thanks again for listening.

COGS

Like most reasonably sane people, I'll do almost anything to avoid bookkeeping and data entry. But the strangest thing happens once I actually sit down and start inputting numbers: they tell a story, explaining why we've felt short on cash or where we're been spending too much.

This past winter I applied for an SBA loan, a bear of a process. I managed to pull together the accounting information necessary to convince the bank that I was loan worthy, although it took most of my waking hours for a stretch.

I worked with a loan consultant, who also happened to be my real estate broker. I showed him a draft of a cash flow projection, which I had prepared to show that the business could pay the rent even if it didn't grow much. If I were a loan officer, that would be what I would want to see.

The loan consultant commented that if my projections didn't project real growth then the bank would assume I had no confidence, and he asked me to revise the projection to show that we'd grow by 20 percent annually.

This was a reasonable request: we have, in fact, grown about 20 percent per year for the past 10 years. But when I plugged in the numbers, the profit barely changed. Scratching my head, I revisited some of the other figures. In particular, I looked at the payroll cost, which had been 46 percent of the gross last year.

I knew that payroll percentage was too high and I had some ideas about why that was case and how we could correct it. I changed the projected payroll cost to 40 percent, which was still higher than what we'd typically spent, at least up until last year.

The bottom line tripled!

So I've developed a new fixation with COGS, or cost of goods sold, the accounting concept that measures the direct costs such as materials and payroll that go into creating what a business sells, as opposed to indirect costs such as rent and vehicle expenses, which are also necessary but peripheral.

I'm observing correlations between ways of organizing tasks and number of hours spent to achieve outcomes. I'm walking that fine line between managing and micromanaging, seeing connections between the accounting information and day to day processes. I'm actually finding it fascinating.

An Excruciating Question

 

I just read an editorial by a restaurateur lamenting that a $15/hour minimum wage would send his business into a tailspin. As expected, comments were scathing, mostly agreeing that anyone who can find the money to start and grow a business should be able to pay workers more.

It's difficult to talk about the issue of fair pay from the perspective of a business owner without sounding like a privileged, entitled jerk. The best pieces I've read have focused on specific parts of the proposal, such as some proponents' unwillingness to make any exceptions, even for tipped servers who earn well over $15/hour overall.

 For most of the twenty seven years that I've run small businesses, I've earned less than my employees, who are legally entitled to at least minimum wage--however low it may be--whether or not the business actually earns enough to cover these wages. When the business didn't earn enough to cover wages, I accrued personal debt. When the business didn't earn enough to pay me, I didn't get paid.

There are laws against exploiting other people but there are no laws against exploiting yourself. I've pulled all-nighters, worked consecutive eighty-hour weeks, and gone years without a vacation.

I'm not complaining. I love my work and feel lucky to have had a strong support system during the years it took to nurture my company into solvency. I've had social and economic advantages sufficient to break multiple falls.

I honestly don't know whether I'm for or against this minimum wage proposal. It's intriguing but drastic. I'm especially worried about the lovely farmers struggling to create successful business models in the context of an industry and infrastructure that sabotages them at every turn.

I'm certainly in favor of a living wage but I'm also all too familiar with the challenges of managing small business cash flow. Workers absolutely should be paid more, especially in the foodservice industry, but the money has to come from somewhere.

On some level every penny that an employee earns is a penny that a business owner does not earn. Whether you're talking about corporations and shareholders or independent business owners working grueling schedules and paying off heavy debt, this zero-sum scenario stands in the way of finding a productive solution to the minimum wage conundrum.

Last year Patty Pan became a worker-owned cooperative. I'm still an owner, but now I'm also an employee and most of the other employees are owners as well. Our cooperative hasn't always radiated sunshine and rainbows, but we have managed to successfully collaborate, building a business that is bigger and smarter than the company I created on my own.

In healthy workplaces the interests of workers and business owners are aligned. Fair wages motivate employees to give back in ways that bring in enough revenue to cover higher payroll costs. But  money is an imperfect motivator. Praise and purpose can yield even better results.

It costs little to show appreciation and build a work culture where contributions are meaningful and valued. These basic decencies can't stand in for a living wage, but they can keep workers engaged, improving a company's odds of success despite higher payroll costs.

The tragedy of the $15/hour minimum wage debate is that it pits workers against small business owners, especially if proponents insist on sudden, drastic changes and don't allow any exceptions. There's justifiable resentment on both sides, and this resentment will likely make employees feel less appreciated and make employers question whether their payroll dollars are well spent. Workers who don't feel appreciated are less likely to do quality work, less likely to help build the kind of thriving businesses that can afford to pay higher wages.

There's no way to know for certain how the proposed minimum wage hike will actually affect small businesses. It's useful to crunch numbers but the situation is really too complicated to predict. I only hope that once it's decided, we'll manage to find productive common ground and move forward without resentment and recrimination.

 

Permit Purgatory

We spent most of last week in permit hell, fending off a plan reviewer who kept springing new, expensive, time consuming requirements. Now we're in permit purgatory, waiting for final plan approvals and field inspections.

Believe it or not, I believe in the permitting process. I'd rather live in a world where plumbing and electrical work is regulated and inspected than one without oversight. But I suspect that nobody--including the plan reviewers and inspectors--would disagree that the process is deeply flawed.

The city creates a code based on national and international standards, and then hires plan reviewers and inspectors to enforce that code. They aim for consistency in situations whose specifics are far from consistent. They struggle with issues of safety and liability, balancing these concerns against the prohibitive costs that businesses like ours incur installing grease traps and fire suppression systems.

And then there's the human element. During my first encounter with the plan reviewer, he shook his head and told me that the building I'd bought was a small business graveyard. I walked away from the second encounter visibly close to tears when he informed me that we would have to install a vent hood over our under-counter dishwasher, delaying our project well over a month and doubling the cost of installing an already expensive machine.

I went home and slept, and awoke with a fresh perspective on power dynamics. Heading back to city hall, I suggested that, since the code required a vent hood but few restaurants have vent hoods over their dishwashers, the powers that be clearly had some leeway and discretion. Perhaps he could exercise that discretion in our favor?

He consulted with his supervisor, backed off about the vent hood, and came back with some additional questions about our project. I answered them respectfully and applied retroactively for an inexpensive permit covering some minor modifications we'd already made.

The other evening he called to say he'd been out of the office for some training work, and was catching up after hours on permit approvals. He had a stack of permit applications on his desk related to our project and only had time to review one at the moment. Which would we like completed first?

Vision

We fill our work days washing pots, peeling onions, sticking labels,  organizing receipts, filling propane tanks, stocking coolers, tinkering with equipment.

Our kitchen remodel project has upended our routines and given us a chance to revisit the bigger picture. We're giving some thought to who we are as a business, and who we want to be over the long term.

We enjoy vending at farmers' markets. Our fellow vendors are free-thinking, creative and consistently unusual. Together we commiserate and collaborate. We also eat very well, especially during the summer. But Patty Pan already vends at most of the markets in the area so it's just a matter of time before we can no longer grow as a mainly farmers' market business.

We care about good food, fresh ingredients, and cooking from scratch. But we're not fanatical purists. We're fascinated by the challenge of making wholesome food widely available, but we run a for-profit business so we're geared towards building these concerns into our business model.

Our new kitchen will be a cooking and dining space where we'll host community dinners and group cooking events. We're planning a kitchen utensil lending library and a free herb garden so neighbors can pick what they need for their dinners.

We already earn enough from the farmers' markets to pay our rent, so we should have some leeway figuring out how to make our new gigs pay because we are, after all, a for-profit business. The neighbors seem stoked, and we're excited that they're excited.

The Elusive Farmers' Market Parking Space

I've heard that parking rivals price as the top deterrent keeping consumers from shopping at farmers' markets. Once you've gotten used to the convenience of grocery store parking lots, a four-block trek to buy vegetables from your favorite local farmers can be a deal breaker, especially in lousy weather.

But parking issues don't affect all markets equally, even markets of comparable size with comparable parking constraints. Take the Ballard and University District markets.

I've often heard people talk about how difficult it is to park at the University District market, but I usually have to park just as far away when I go to the Ballard market in the middle of the day. Yet I rarely hear people complain about Ballard market parking. I think that's because Ballard is more of a party while University District is a serious shopping venue. You can do plenty of serious shopping at Ballard as well, but folks are more likely to head there than to the University District for a leisurely weekend outing. Leisurely weekend outings often involve parking and walking a few blocks while trips to the grocery store usually do not.

On Fridays during the summer we vend at the Madrona and Phinney markets. On sunny and cloudy days Phinney almost always outsells Madrona. But Madrona has on site customer parking, and on days with dumping rain it consistently outsells Phinney. Customers aren't as deterred by the weather because they can easily get back to their cars.

This past fall the University District market moved from its long-time home in the community center parking lot to the main street outside the center. We were excited about the move. Markets held on streets are almost always busier than markets held in parking lots. Our optimism was well-founded: we've had a wonderful winter there despite some beastly weather lately.

But the move has had another, unanticipated consequence. Like the Madrona market, sales at the University District market have been reasonably consistent in all types of weather, even though our numbers used to tank in the rain and the chill back when the market was held in the parking lot.

The market administration and the community center now offer parking in the lot where the market used to operate, fifty feet from the new site. They charge for the convenience, but the lot always seems to be reasonably full.

Speaking of parking, I used to find that I could improve my parking karma by dropping coins in other people's meters when they were about to expire. But you can't do that anymore with the printed stickers that have to go on the inside car window.

Building a Kitchen

We've been hard at work outfitting a new space for Patty Pan. Some of the work involves hands-on building, sanding, texturizing, painting, and installing. Other phases involve standing around and scratching our heads, ruminating, brainstorming and problem solving.

I've built kitchens before, and it's always been a lonely and stressful endeavor. I'm not especially handy and I don't know much about building materials so the process has always required making decisions involving large sums of money that I didn't really have, basing those decisions on scant information and insufficient experience.

It's so different building this kitchen as a coop. Between us we have construction experience, artistic sensibilities, networks to scavenge building materials, and plenty of camaraderie. We're sharing the burden and excitement of making decisions, the frustration of snags and the glory of breakthroughs.

When I built my first tiny kitchen in Fremont, I hired a friend of a friend to build a custom walk-in cooler in an odd-size space off the main kitchen. We submitted a drawing to the building department and they took six weeks to look it over before sending it back with the concerns about the format of the drawing, but no real issue with our actual proposal for the walk-in. We redrew the plans and resubmitted them, paying additional fees and delaying the project several weeks.

When I built the Lucky Palate kitchen on Queen Anne, I paid a professional $1000 to draft a layout drawing and help with contracting logistics. He presented the price tag as a good deal and he may have been telling the truth: compared to the revenue from drafting a floor plan for a full service restaurant, my project must have been barely worth his while. Still, $1000 was a lot of money to me.

This time around we bought cad software and drew up the plan ourselves. There was a steep learning curve but we learned new skills and the health department accepted the drawing the first time around. We've had similar experiences with everything from relocating light switches to moving heavy equipment.

It feels strange to say, but this time around we may actually be having fun.

Hiatus

Haven't been posting for a bit, but I just wanted to let you guys know that we're enjoying our cooperative business model, and we have some exciting things brewing.

Back soon.

Economy of Scale

 I've been working with folks at the University of Washington to create a Humble Feast event on campus. We've got a group of about 25 students planning to prepare a tasty, affordable meal and serve it to a community of students interested in sensible food choices and local food economies. We'll be using the kitchen and dining room at the Husky Den, the eating establishment in the student union building.

The meal is supposed to be an educational event, showing some strategies for keeping costs low while using good ingredients. This poses an interesting challenge for me: I use creative purchasing arrangements to buy food in bulk for Patty Pan and I'll use many of these same ideas to buy ingredients for the dinner, but it's not always simple to translate these strategies so they're useful for students.

Patty Pan's purchasing model is based on buying leftovers directly from farmers at the end of each market day. This works for us as a business: we're insiders and we do everything we can to give back to the farmers whose surplus we're buying, from feeding them quickly when they're hungry to bringing back their waxed boxes. But many farmers I know become downright surly when customers try to buy produce cheaply at the end of a market day. (One farmer even answers affirmatively when customers ask for end-of-day deals, and then inflates the price as he calculates: a cluelessness surcharge, if you will.)

Why are farmers offended when customers ask for discounts late in the day? It's no secret that the food is perishable and may end up as compost or food bank donations. They're surly partly because they feel that the practice is unfair to the loyal customers who pay full price throughout the day. In addition, the act of asking for any discount--at least in this culture--implies that you don't feel the product is worth its original price, and folks who spend all of their summer daylight hours trying to keep their farms healthy and solvent resent the insinuation that their produce isn't worth the amount they typically charge.

Most farmers I know say they can grow a lot more than they can sell, but unless they stretched themselves too thin vending at too many markets or increased sales by lowering their prices, they wouldn't be able to sell the additional produce. Lowering prices would be counterproductive because it would involve investing even more time and labor to earn the same amount of money.

Some of this surplus is a necessary, built in part of the food and agricultural systems as we know them, both on small and a large scales. Most customers want food that's cosmetically appealing, rather than wilted or full of bug holes. Farmers never knows exactly what's going to sell--or even exactly what's going to grow abundantly--so they hedge their bets and grow a range of options, leaving the less successful beds unpicked.

There must be a way to bridge the gap and use some of this wasted food to help folks who want to eat well but can't afford it, while also offering farmers a financially viable business proposition. I think the answer lies in finding the sweet spot where it's worth it for a farmer to part with these leftovers for a lower price, bringing in some extra income without cutting into regular farm revenue. It also helps to approach the issue with sensitivity and respect.

For the UW Humble Feast dinner, we're organizing a gleaning outing to the university farm. We'll be paying the farm to let us come pick. There's a bed of chard slated to be plowed under: the don't have the labor to pick it or a customer who would buy it but it's lovely chard, and we're going to use it all.

I love the idea of paying to glean, and I wonder what other kinds of applications it could have.

By the way, if you want a good deal at the end of a market day, show that you're a loyal customer by buying regularly, don't ask outright, and don't expect it. You may not get that price break every time, but I bet it'll happen sometimes.

Nettle Soup Allergy Relief

I'm not usually prone to allergies, but I hear they can hit you at any time, and apparently yesterday was the day.

I've been buying stinging nettles from Foraged and Found Edibles at the Ballard and U District markets: they're an early glimpse of spring and while I wouldn't quite say I like the way the taste, my body feels like it needs them. Typically I make nettle pesto by steaming the greens until they're soft and the heat neutralizes their sting, and then I whiz them in the food processor with some goat cheese. That's it. I spread the pesto on crackers or toss it with pasta. Then I add honey to the steaming liquid and enjoy some nettle tea.

When the allergies struck yesterday I wanted something more heavy duty, something that would allow me to eat the entire half-pound bag in a single sitting and set my system back on track. I decided to make a soup, but the larder was mostly bare and the only ingredient that seemed suitable for a nettle soup was a half cup of miso.

I steamed the greens in a big pot, in about a quart of water, and then I removed the nettles, pureed them until they were silky, and whisked the miso into the steaming liquid remaining in the pot. Then I mixed the pureed nettles back into the miso broth. That's it. Two ingredients.

The soup was tasty and rich, and I ate it all. I found myself trying to think of other ingredients that would have enhanced this flavor, but it just didn't need anything else.

I'm also happy to report that this morning I woke up feeling considerably better.

Becoming an Owner

Last Spring when Dev hired me, I became the newest member of the Patty Pan team. I felt lucky to find a group of people who shared my values about food and work and who were so much fun to be around. In late Fall, when Dev proposed turning the business into an employee-owned cooperative, I felt honored that I was asked to be a part of it. I would be able to dedicate a percentage of my working hours each week toward owning shares in the business. No monetary investment up front. All sweat equity. It seemed too good to be true.

On January 1, 2013, when Patty Pan Grill officially became Patty Pan Grill Cooperative, it didn't seem right that there was no fanfare. No unveiling ceremony. No document in the mail. No ribbon cutting. It is a strange feeling to change from being the employee of a business to becoming a partial owner. Gradually, along with the excitement and starry-eyed dreams, I started to feel the weight of responsibility. Having spent most of my working life as an employee, I realized how different it was going to feel to be a part of owning and directing my place of employment - exciting, empowering, but scary.

The transition from sole proprietorship to a cooperative is bound to be interesting and challenging at times. We have all depended on Dev as our fearless leader and she has been incredibly fair, open and accessible. However, now we will have the opportunity and responsibility of weighing in on decisions. Voicing our opinions must not only reflect our own self-interest, but the health of the Cooperative as a whole. Thinking of the all the aspects of our business, from relationships with vendors to annual reports to rolling tamales is overwhelming. Fears creep in about my own inadequacies and what my new role will demand.

It is a big experiment. The only way I'm going to have enough courage to take the necessary steps is to make the transition real by celebrating it. If fanfare feels needed, I’m going to have to make it happen! Accordingly, later this month we will have a party for ourselves. Probably won’t be spending a lot of company funds on booze, though. When you start to be personally responsible for the bottom line, your perspective shifts a bit.

"i must become the action of my fate"  must become the action of my fate" --June Jordan

Becoming a Cooperative

Six years ago I came up with a five-year plan for my future,  right around the time my lovely landlords in Ballard sold the building I was leasing to some not-so-lovely landlords. I was going to take five years to learn some marketable skills and then sell the Patty Pan and do something less physically demanding.

A few years went by and I realized that I didn't want to sell my business. I love what I do: working outdoors, hanging out with farmers,  bartering for amazing ingredients, and getting folks excited about eating vegetables. I love market culture and I love being self employed. I've also seen businesses under new ownership go downhill and I didn't want to see that happen to Patty Pan. I care about it too much.

But the summer season can be grueling and I'm not getting any younger.

Patty Pan has fabulous employees, folks who come back year after year even though the work is seasonal and tiring. I don't know if you've ever been served by them, but folks are always telling me how pleasant and committed they are.

A few years ago I started talking to a couple of key employees about sharing ownership of the business but the time just wasn't right. This year, the time felt right. The business is making a profit and it's become grown above and beyond anything I could have created myself, in part because we've built a shared knowledge base and we have enough collective experience to keep getting better at what we do.

So we've become an employee-owned cooperative, as of the first of the year. It's been quite a journey. Every cooperative is different: most cooperatives start out as cooperatives, with a group coming together and deciding they want to build something together. Patty Pan started out as a sole proprietorship, and we've had to figure out how to share responsibility and revenue in ways that were fair to everyone. The arrangement had to offer enough to members to make them want to join, and it had to offer me enough to make me want to share.

We crafted a set of bylaws that cover everything from how we'll share equity, to how we'll distribute profits, to how we'll make different types of decisions, to how we'll kick out someone who is stealing. It's been quite a journey. I'm feeling happy, but a bit disoriented. I know I'm disoriented when I can't figure out what I want to eat.

How Patty Pan Upgraded Our Ingredients, Retained Our Low Prices, and Maintained Our Impressive Food Cost Percentages

Patty Pan tried an experiment this past summer. We began using better cheese, better corn masa, better corn, better beans, and better tomatoes. (Our quesadilla vegetables and our meat were already high quality and didn't need to be upgraded.)

But we didn't want to raise our prices. We pride ourselves on low prices and it felt important to continue offering a good value. Times are still hard.

We approached the question as a creative problem-solving exercise, analyzing the cost of each of our menu items and looking for ways to tinker. Here's an example: I've noticed for years that most of my staff used too much cheese when they made quesadillas.

Of course we didn't want to skimp on cheese, but when you use too much cheese it oozes out the sides, gets all over your spatula, and generally creates a sticky, unpleasant quesadilla-making experience. Over the course of making hundreds of thousands of quesadillas, I've found that it's easier to keep the cheese an inch from the edge of the tortilla. It spreads so the result is sufficiently cheesey, and you end up using a lot less cheese.

I'd tried to communicate this to my staff on various occasions, but somehow it didn't click and in the end it felt sensible to just pick my battles. But when we started using more expensive cheese, it became more urgent to get this point across.

We use twelve-inch tortillas. I asked a math whiz friend to calculate the area of an eleven-inch circle relative to the area of a twelve-inch circle. It turns out that an eleven-inch circle is thirty seven percent smaller that a twelve-inch circle. Thirty seven percent. So, armed with this information, I set out to make my point again. This time it clicked, my employees began keeping the cheese away from the tortilla edges, and we were able use higher quality, more expensive cheese without spending extra money on cheese.

We also revised our menus, putting the items with the best food cost percentages closest to the top. Folks tend to order more of items that are listed higher up on the menu. It cost a chunk of money to reprint five sets of menus, but it was a good investment and had the desired result: folks ordered more of those higher margin items.

Actually, we did raise one price: the kid's quesadilla. We raised it because we introduced a couple of varieties of kid's tamales and we wanted to get the parents on board with encouraging the kids to eat tamales rather than quesadillas. We figured we could achieve this by offering the kid's tamales for a lower price than the kid's quesadillas.

We think our kid's tamales are better products than our kid's quesadillas. They use better ingredients and they're much easier for us to heat and serve. They're also a better gateway product, one that is more likely to encourage kids to eventually try our adult tamales. There's a much smaller step between eating a small tamale with beans and a big tamale with beans than between eating a small white quesadilla with just cheese and eating a big red quesadilla stuffed with cheese and vegetables.

Now the numbers are all in, and we were excited to discover that our food cost percentage didn't change at all compared with last year, even though we upgraded our ingredients and, for all practical purposes, didn't raise our prices.

So here's the lesson: Don't believe any business that tells you it has no choice other than to raise its prices to cover increasing costs. Of course, there really are some situations when a business has no choice other than to raise its prices to cover increasing costs. But there are also so many ways to tinker with numbers and marketing strategies and find alternative approaches to make it all work.

In the end, we're limited only by our imaginations.

Buzz Words

Until this year, I've resisted using buzz words to market Patty Pan's products. I'm talking about those convenient short hand terms that consumers use to make quick decisions about whether they want to buy. When customers asked whether all of the ingredients were organic I used to answer, "Anyone who tells you that all of their ingredients are organic is lying." (Really? Organic salt?) Or sometimes I'd respond that I think organic certification is a racket.

I really do think that organic certification is a bit of a racket. Small-scale farmers spend far too much money and time on fees, paperwork, and explaining the nuances of farming to inspectors who don't know how to farm. And agribusiness had too large of a hand in crafting the regulations, so they don't include important considerations such as whether a particular farmer's practices actually nurture the soil and build a healthy integrated ecosystem rather than simply avoiding chemical fertlizers and pesticides.

But a customer who asks whether a business uses all organic ingredients doesn't want to hear a cynical critique of the organic regulatory process. It sounds evasive and dishonest even though it may be the most honest response. But I can be a slow learner and it sometimes take a while to figure out this kind of thing, especially when it comes to marketing.

So this year Patty Pan shifted gears. We began communicating more proudly about the quality ingredients that we use and we began upgrading the handful of mainstream ingredients that seemed like sensible choices when we first started out. And we made a sign proclaiming it to the world. (We call it "the buzz word sign.")

We had an outrageous market season. Sales were off the charts, morale was high, and we felt more love than ever from our clientele. I think the buzz words played a big role. The weather helped, too. We're excited about the future.

Humble Feast at Skelly and the Bean

photo by Bean Fairbanks

Until last week, the Humble Feast was a vision in search of an audience and a home. For years I've wanted to hold a series of monthly dinners serving affordable food focused on local ingredients, an alternative to the events that showcase local chefs and producers creating fancy, pricey menus.

Folks told me that they thought it was a great idea but I found it to be a tough sell. We held a dozen dinners last year but, aside from a handful of regulars, turnout was disappointing. I lost money. It was also hard on my morale to put my heart and soul into this endeavor and to have so few people show up.

So after last October's dinners, I put the Humble Feast on hold. I'd originally planned to just stop for November and December, when folks were busy with the holidays, but January and February came and went and I still dragged my feet about scheduling another dinner.


At last October's event, three women who had devotedly attended the dinners accidentally paid us twice. I offered to refund their money, but they said they'd rather apply to sum to an upcoming dinner. They got in touch with me last month and asked when I'd be starting up again, so I decided to act on an idea that had been germinating for a while.

Skelly and the Bean is a relatively new Capitol Hill restaurant whose offerings, like my own, are based on market ingredients. Zephyr, the owner and mastermind, launched the business with funding from the neighborhood and community. She sold shares that involved prepaying for upcoming meals, and she enlisted supporters to come sand floors and paint walls.

On Monday and Tuesday nights, the restaurant hosts incubator dinners, opportunities for local chefs to host pop-up restaurants. I thought this might be a good fit for my Humble Feast dinners, and a venue that could help me solve some of the biggest obstacles I'd encountered when I held the dinners last year. I wouldn't have to rent a space and wouldn't have to haul the dishes back to my kitchen and wash them the next day. There was a marketing infrastructure already in place, and the restaurant would be serving drinks, which can certainly make any meal into a more enjoyable experience.

This time around, I enlisted help with the marketing. In addition to tapping into Zephyr's systems for getting the word out to the media, other folks helped to spread the word through list serves and word of mouth. Something clicked. Synergy happened.We drew a crowd, almost filling the first seating and pushing the limits on seating capacity for the second round, filling every spot in the restaurant as well as every seat out on the deck. We set the restaurant's record for turnout.

We also ran out of food before the last few people were fed. Zephyr whipped up some supplementary fare using whatever she had on hand. Most people were quite happy, but several weren't pleased. I think it came down to customer expectations: folks who turned out to enjoy a community dinner were willing to overlook rough spots, while people who were expecting a dining experience were less forgiving.

One tricky element was the fact that the restaurant made their money from the event by selling drinks while we made it by selling food. The restaurant crew didn't want to let people up to the buffet until everyone had placed a drink order, and the process took a long time because the place was packed. And then everyone came up at once, so the line was long and progress was slow.

We'll work out those kinks. Needless to say, we'll hold another dinner. I'm thinking we should schedule them seasonally rather than monthly, so they're somewhat regular yet there's plenty of down time in between. We're also talking about having two seatings two nights in a row, and I think that's a great idea which will ease some of the pressure if we continue to draw crowds.

The idea of affordable local foods buffets also seemed to resonate with folks who work with nonprofits. I've had several people contact me since the dinner wanting to host similar types of events for occasions or organizations.

I'm not sure what lesson to draw, other than the fact that it sometimes takes just the right combination of elements to make a venture succeed. I once read an interview with the guy who pioneered the Silk soymilk brand. He said that he knew that he had a solid idea, so if it wasn't working then he must be doing something wrong. I felt the same way about the Humble Feast. And I'm thrilled that we seem to finally be starting to get it right.http://pattypangrill.com/dinners.php

Authenticity

Lately I've been struggling with the idea of "authentic" food. I'm a Jewish girl from Brooklyn who makes a living selling tamales and quesadillas. My tamales use olive oil instead of lard. Recently we even switched to non-GMO masa and parchment paper "husks," in an effort to steer clear of ingredients that most of our customers wouldn't want to feed to their children, if they stopped and really thought about it.

At a handful of markets my business faces competition from a vendor with genuine roots in Mexico. They prepare a menu that is considerably more authentic than mine in the sense that they understand the flavors, recipes, culture, and cooking techniques in ways that I never will. They serve large, inexpensive portions, using primarily industrial ingredients.

Competition is a strange animal. Even when you respect your competitors, you look for ways to set yourself apart from them, and give customers a good reason to buy your product rather than theirs. In my case, I'm looking to set my business apart by choosing my ingredients carefully. But I can't help feeling a bit disingenuous as I struggle for ways to communicate that I'm using "better" corn than the folks who come from the land where corn was first cultivated, whose ancestors built a vibrant and sophisticated mythology based on the sanctity of corn.

On the other hand, the cheap corn that's available in this country--the corn my competitors use--is largely degraded. It's monocropped on industrial farms using seeds that have been selected more for hardiness than for flavor. According to the Center for Food Safety, 85 percent of the corn grown in this country is now genetically modified. It's a safe bet that any corn or corn products that come from mainstream sources,grew from from these suspect seeds.

So whose food is more authentic? I wouldn't venture to claim that mine is, but the question does make me wonder about our collective infatuation with "authentic" food. We crave flavors and ingredients from distant regions prepared using traditional recipes and techniques, but preparing these dishes commercially almost always takes modification, and the foods inevitably lose something in translation.

At the same time, even so-called traditional foods are always changing. Beef and pork aren't indigenous to Mexico (just as tomatoes aren't indigenous to Italy and potatoes aren't indigenous to Russia).

For now I'm looking at the question this way: I wouldn't go so far as to call my tamales ""authentic". But I'm proud of them nonetheless.

Street Food

Patty Pan is getting a tamale cart! I've spent much of the past few weeks brainstorming about logistics, filling out the cumbersome health department application, and driving down to Oregon to order my custom cart. I can't wait.

I've wanted a tamale cart for years; in fact, when I opened my ill-fated cafe a year and a half ago, I really wanted to get a tamale cart instead, but at that point the Seattle health department still wasn't letting you sell any savory food other than hot dogs off a street cart. Because, after all, hot dogs are so much safer than any other kind of food you could cook on a cart (?)

I'm still not quite sure how my tamale cart will fit in with Seattle's evolving street food scene. To be honest, I've been somewhat ambivalent about the recent hype about the rapidly expanding lineup of local food trucks. Growing up in New York, I knew street food as the experience of buying an expedient hot dog, knish, or pretzel from a no frills cart, and inhaling it while rushing down the street, weaving in and out of pedestrian crowds.

I've always thought of street food as a deeply populist eating experience. The gourmet trucks that have been proliferating lately are strange to me. One truck owner I've worked with struts around in a t-shirt that reads, "I'm only wearing this t-shirt because my chef coat is in the laundry."

I spent a night in Portland last week when I drove down to order my cart. I did a lot of walking, and I ate some street food. I learned from the guy who's building my cart that the health department regulations in Oregon are significantly more relaxed than the rules in Washington State. Unlike many of the Seattle trucks I've seen, most of the Portland trucks looked like low-budget ventures.

 Peeking in windows, I saw plenty of basic, home-style kitchen range hoods and domestic stoves. The Seattle health department requires you to have all professional equipment. I saw many complex and elaborate menus, and realized that the Portland model provides a relatively low budget opportunity for entrepreneurs with restaurant dreams to get started. On the other hand, some of the Seattle trucks likely required as much startup capital as a small restaurant.

So I'm trying to figure out how a Patty Pan cart will fit in. Our success at farmers' markets has come in part from the fact that we were in the right place at the right time and were lucky to be the city's first enduring, tenacious farmers' market concession. We also do well because our menu is set up to prepare and serve food very quickly during the limited hours when we operate. Oh yeah, and we also provide a great product.

To use a Moneyball reference, Patty Pan has never aimed to be the New York Yankees. We'd rather be the Oakland A's: smart, scrappy, and profitable.

The man I've been working with at the Seattle health department told me that they've gotten very few applications for new kinds of carts since they started allowing foods other than hot dogs. So I'm excited to be getting in on this early. In some ways a cart seems more versatile than a truck: it can operate in a smaller space--even a sidewalk--and it's less of a production to get it up and running on any given day.

We're going to offer plenty of tamale varieties, plenty of different salsas, and also chili. And we'll have griddles that can fit over the burners we use so that the operation can double as a quesadilla cart, but we won't try to sell both tamales and quesadillas at the same event. We want to keep it simple, and leverage our long-time experience in getting food into customers' hands as quickly as possible.

If everything goes according to plan, we should be up and running by early July. Stay tuned.