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Not to brag, but I make a mean Impossible burger. The trick is frying it on an electric griddle in butter to get a nice crust on it and loading it up with grilled onions (chef’s kiss).
While I am proud of my plant-based burger cooking and assembly skills, I have no aspirations of going into business selling them. But I’m sure there are others out there who do. I started thinking about the nascent home chef business sector, where everyday people can sell the meals they make at home to other people, when Foodnome got approval to operate its first Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO) in the Bay Area this week. Foodnome is similar to other startups in the space like Shef and Woodspoon, creating a marketplace to connect home chefs and customers. As I was thinking about these startups and my Impossible burgers, I wondered whether home chefs could give plant-based foods a market boost.
At first, it seems premature to even ask this question. The home chef space is currently very small as rules and regulations about what food people can sell out of their kitchen are still being developed. So there aren’t a lot of home restaurants out there. Additionally, it’s not like plant-based meats need a boost from this small segment. According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat sales have grown 72 percent over the past two years and the category is currently worth $1.4 billion.
So right now, the idea of a tiny home cook sector moving the needle on plant-based proteins seems academic at best. But if home chef-ing becomes a viable (and legal) money-making option for people, we could see a wave of independent restaurants pop up out of people’s homes. My guess is these businesses will probably start out as side hustles for most as people dip their toes in to test the waters, and won’t involve a ton of capital expenditure (they’ve already got the kitchen and the pots and pans!). As such, these home restaurants can take more risks. Risks like serving up a delivery-only menu exclusively full of plant-based offerings.
In the case of plant-based burgers, sure, sales are growing, but the sector is still dwarfed by traditional animal-based meat. Business Insider reported in May that beef sales in America grew to $30.3 billion in 2020. So if you were to open your own burger joint, you’d have a much bigger audience selling conventional burgers than you would selling plant-based ones.
But as with movies, books and blogs, the home chef business is about the longer tail. Building out a restaurant, buying equipment, hiring staff — all of that takes a lot of money and you want a safer bet with the food you sell. If you run your own food operation out of your home, you are free to take more risks (especially if it is a side hustle and not your main source of income). So you could experiment with plant-based meat (and dairy and eggs) menus because you don’t have to please as many people.
Take my Impossible burgers for example. I believe they are delicious enough that someone paying $7 or so for one would find that was money well spent. I do not believe, however, that I could justify the cost of launching a traditional restaurant to serve them. I’m not sure there are enough plant-based burger fans in my geographic area to support that type of standalone business, and there are already a number of animal-based burger places where I live so launching my own restaurant for them seems like a fool’s errand.
But if I could make and sell them from my kitchen… well, that’s a different story. I wouldn’t need as much money to start, and I could determine the hours I want work (e.g., dinners and weekends only), making the idea of running a food business more enticing. And since I’m not spending as much time or money, I could cater to the smaller number of people in my town who want plant-based burgers.
Chances are good that I’m not alone in this type of thinking. There are probably a lot of people who make unique plant-based burgers, burritos and pizza out there. Being able to launch such a business from the comfort of their own kitchens means we could see a lot of new plant-based virtual restaurants spring up across the country.
Again, this is all more of a thought experiment right now. As noted, there is still a lot left to be determined around the regulation of home cooking, and it presents a new paradigm in meal ordering that customers would still need to figure out. But I think it’s worth considering because a large number of smaller, independent home restaurants could bring about big changes to where people eat.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Foodnome launched this week. We regret the error.
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