Meet the First-Time Food Entrepreneurs Starting Businesses During the Pandemic

Odds are, when you're reading about a food business in a magazine, it’s already well-established. It’s probably making enough money to pay for a publicist. Maybe it already has investors.

但是，从一开始就有些令人兴奋的东西 - 首次企业家登陆商业思想，为他们提供资金并保持其漂浮的时刻。

尽管前所未有的业务挑战,其他e have been a flurry ofnew food ventureslaunched during theCOVID-19 era，我们在这里聚焦一些首次创始人。尽管他们的某些业务是必要的，而其他业务则是作为爱好。他们现在都在激励我们。这就是他们使其工作的方式。

Shab Ferdowsi had been wanting a new professional outlet for a while, but the pandemic was the catalyst that finally made it happen. A musician and photographer living in Los Angeles, 28-year-old Ferdowsi found herself at home, unable to tour with her band. So, in July, she started baking pretzels.

“It felt like a fun thing that I wasn’t seeing people do,” she said. “And they were really easy to make.”

几周前，她从一个朋友那里得到了一些酸味的开头。她还开始实验。她说：“这只是为了好玩，尝试酸面团比萨饼，并发布我的酸面团旅程的照片。然后在八月的某个时候，我的朋友要求我让她成为披萨，因为她看过我发布的照片​​。那种让我想，也许我可以为其他人做这件事。”

费多维（Ferdowsi）没有向她的朋友收取第一个比萨饼或一周之后的六个比萨饼的审判，她也免费分发。但是她知道她想开展业务。因此，她不久之后就放了一个菜单，在网上订购了一些披萨盒，并开始在Instagram上进行预订。

起初，她的客户主要是朋友。然后是朋友的朋友。很快，是Instagram的追随者，其中一些她不认识，而陌生人开始发布有关它的信息。现在，她每天要售出约18个比萨饼，每周两次。目前，她在周日下午（有时甚至是星期三晚上）提供皮卡，人们提前两到三天下订单。

Her individual size margarita pizza starts at $11, with Calabrian chile, fresh mozzarella, and basil. Sunday-only offerings include arugula walnut salad, cucumber mint salad, and coffee gelato, for $5 each. All can be picked up at her home in Pasadena.

费多维说：“我仍在那个阶段，我正在投资工具。”“因此，我赚到的所有钱都可以回到建立我的系统。”她最近购买了Ooni Pizza烤箱，这使她可以制成烧焦的那不勒斯风格的馅饼。

“Eventually, I’ll get to a point where I’ll be done investing in those supplies," she said. "At the end of the day, pizza ingredients are not expensive, even if I’m getting higher quality stuff. A pizza is a few tablespoons of tomato sauce, a few pinches of fresh mozzarella, and I’m trying to keep it simple that way. So, to a certain point, the profit margin can be a good one.” She’s currently talking to people about doing pop-ups, and possibly finding a non-home kitchen to work out of.

Ferdowsi开始这项业务的一个巨大动力是，甚至在Covid-19-19大流行之前，其他收入流也在变化。在过去的两年中，她一直在经历视力改变。她说：“我是一个很有能力的人，但这涉及视力和中央视觉。”“因此，这确实阻碍了我做很多事情。”

Freelancing from her laptop, for example, was becoming tedious. She considered getting a job in a commercial kitchen at one point this summer, after discovering her love of baking. But chopping vegetables as a prep cook, and the optical detail that entails, simply didn’t make sense.

“At the very end of the day … there's that visual acuity that is needed for just general working in a kitchen that I don't have,” she said. The situation motivated her to start her own operation.

她说：“前进的替代方法只是坐着不动，我不会那样做。”“我不是那个人。”

在今年夏天的黑人生活事务中，考特尼·刘易斯（Courtney Lewis）和她的联合创始人劳伦·米切尔（Lauren Mitchell）认识到对食物，水和营养的需求。vwin德赢ac米兰在大流行裁员之后，有些人经历了无家可归和粮食不安全感，刘易斯和米切尔知道他们想提供帮助。vwin德赢ac米兰因此，他们建立了一个非营利性餐厅的Err'body Eats。

“While we were in protest, we continued to pass tent camps and see people that were hungry,” Lewis said, recalling marching in D.C. “And we knew that if we were thirsty and hungry, and we were experiencing the weight of the pandemic, that people on the street were experiencing it tenfold. We didn’t feel right promoting the sale of food, but rather people contributing and being able to help their community.”

刘易斯（Lewis）在华盛顿特区和新奥尔良餐厅（New Orleans Restaurants）曾在该行业工作，她认为她不想回去。她说：“我们知道我们可以为食品行业做出贡献，而且我们不必在餐厅里努力工作就可以做到vwin德赢ac米兰这一点。”

As protests against police brutality continued, Lewis cooked and distributed the first set of meals on June 3, using her D.C. home kitchen and her own funds. Since then, she and other volunteers have gone out every week—sometimes every other week—to deliver home-cooked meals, toiletries, hand sanitizer, Gatorade, and water.

刘易斯说：“您会在国会山区看到很多[无家可归的人]，您不会期望这是所有这些政府建筑物，”“如果我们看到有很多人，那么我们就会记下它，并确保回到那个地方。”

Having worked in fine-dining open kitchens, Lewis recognized the privilege of being able to talk to someone who’s cooked your food—and wanted to relay the same experience to the people she serves. “We’ve built relationships with these people and they’re counting on us to be there every week,” she said. “If we missed a week, they would make it a point to let us know.”

Err’body在8月份正式赢得了非营利状态，迄今已筹集了约12,000美元。其中4,000美元已经开始their GoFundMe page, with the rest being via CashApp and other in-kind food donations.

“We know that in taking care of others, we’ll be taken care of. There’s nothing that we’ve ever had to want for,” Lewis said. “The things that we do on a weekly basis are currently covered, but if they ever weren’t, Lauren and I are willing to put up the money for it like we did in the beginning.”

Lewis is exploring the possibility of ghost kitchens to prepare a larger volume of meals. Post-pandemic, she’s also interested in moving towards a soup kitchen model, hopefully one with an education component. “We’d like to start culinary classes and urban agriculture classes and get people really into what their bodies are ingesting,” she said.

“我们有很多对我们doi的工作的信心ng,” she continued. “It’s definitely been a learning curve to figure out how to fundraise and sustain for the community that we serve, and I won’t say that we’ve figured it out yet. But we’re so committed to this. These are our full-time jobs. We’re not going back to the kitchen.”

35岁的金·科恩（Kim Cohn）一直想创办自己的生意。她在着陆之前跑了几个想法农场喝茶, which she launched during the pandemic while working full-time. It’s an online-only store that sells U.S.-grown green tea, and Cohn buys directly from a couple in Hawaii who farm and harvest the tea themselves. They use only regenerative methods, without pesticides or herbicides, and grow the tea in the rainforest to ensure that the land doesn’t need to be deforested for agricultural use.

When most air travel came to a halt this spring, the tea-growing couple lost the agritourism that made up a sizable portion of their income. Cohn realized she could provide them a new distribution channel with bulk orders, as they weren’t interested in growing a direct-to-consumer business themselves.

After investing nearly $2,500 over the past few months, she officially launched her store in September. Like many new businesses, it’s still in the process of becoming profitable, but Cohn is confident that it can be—while not compromising on farmer compensation or product quality.

Although she’d been interested in entrepreneurship for a while, she was moved to action by reading stories about struggling family farms.

“For a lot of small producers and growers making a high-quality product, the supply chain basically collapsed overnight,” Cohn said. “I honestly found it a bit heartbreaking when I was hearing all of these stories. Milk farmers, for example, didn't have a market anymore because schools closed, and pork farmers had to actually kill their animals, which is horrible.”

Cohn, who grew up in Northern Virginia, made a map of small farmers in the area to encourage people to buy from them. She posted it to several local Facebook groups and got significant traction. “I think it got like 20,000 views,” she said. “I felt like this wasn’t enough though; I just wanted to do more.”

She talked to tea farmers across the country, and figured Farm to Tea could help support little known regional foodways. Most Americans don’t realize that tea is grown in America, or that it’s such a special product. Cohn spent months researching sustainable packaging. She registered an LLC, opened a business bank account, and bought a color printer for labels.

现在，她正在弄清楚如何以导致长期利润的方式扩展自己的业务，同时又不妥协她的任务。她说：“目前，它只是试图提高人们的意识，即在美国有一个茶业，而且质量确实很高。它正在支持小型农民，这使得再生农业能够在夏威夷蓬勃发展。”

拉斯·罗迪（Ras Rody），60, has been a chef for 25 years. But, like so many others during the pandemic, he's shifted gears entirely: by moving across the country and opening his first-ever food truck.

一直都是这个计划的。但是,当锅demic hit, the timeline accelerated. Rody decided to leave Tampa, Florida, where he had been cooking at pop-ups and farmers' markets. Facing a dead tourist season there, he drove to Santa Fe, where his partner, Michelle Wurth, was waiting for him.

Rody specializes in Ital cuisine, a Rastafarian philosophy with which he grew up in Jamaica. It's characterized by vegan, plant-based cooking that avoids processed ingredients, additives, and preservatives. To that end, it was important to Rody that his food truck had not previously been used to cook animal products. Last year, he and Wurth started the process of building their own food truck trailer from scratch, and they launched it this April in Santa Fe.

Despite opening in a new city at the onset of the pandemic, the food truck has gotten significant local traction with word-of-mouth advertising. And Santa Fe-area press has quickly followed. “People really appreciate what we do and they support us,” said Rody.

Rody and Wurth grow an organic garden as well, located right by the food truck—corn, spinach, chard, and kale make it into the Jamaican curries Rody cooks.