The New Street Food: On-The-Fly
February 17th, 2008There’s a new kid on the block offering fresh, local, gourmet food on the streets of the the American capital.
Food from street vendors has never been considered gourmet in any city, but residents of Washington, D.C., will tell you that there’s been a real dearth of decent food on their streets. Three D.C.-area businessmen were discussing this over a few beers one night, and out of this conversation was born a new innovative company: On-The-Fly, a street vendor selling local gourmet foods to downtown inhabitants. The company operates a small fleet of SmartKarts (fluorescent green electric vehicles) and is just opening its first SmartKafes in areas with a high amount of foot traffic. Their first locations opened late last year.
The company focuses on serving high quality local food to its customers, and environmental responsibility is always a top priority. I spoke by phone with On-The-Fly CEO Gabe Klein. Excerpts:
Posey: You seem to be all the rage these days in D.C. On the website yelp.com, three different users have posted positive reviews about your enterprise (or rather, their lunch). To what do you attribute your popularity?
Klein: I think a few things. One is that people are really enjoying the quality of the food. Our first focus is to have food that tastes good and is nutritious. The “eco” part is important to our mission - we want to be environmentally-friendly, use packaging that’s good. In D.C., we’re very limited in our street food options. Basically, it’s almost exclusively hot dogs and potato chips. We have a lot of people here that are transient folks in D.C. and they are used to a higher-quality set of street food options and it’s extremely limited. I think a lot of people are saying, “hooray, there’s not only something of higher quality, but it’s actually taking it up a notch from what we’re used to in these other cities.”
You claim to be an eco-vender. What does this mean, and what qualities make you an eco-vender?
Well that’s a phrase that we coined, and we also coined SmartKart. We built basically a proprietary vehicle, and this vehicle is built on an electric platform. I used to work for a company called ZipCar, which is a car-sharing company, and I built the operation here in D.C. I always wanted to do something with electric vehicles and we weren’t able to. So, when I started my own company I was really fixated on doing something that involved mobile assets and that involved electric vehicles that just plug in, and then we sort of merged those two concepts with the idea of really high quality street food where you only do a couple of things but do them really well. So, back to the “eco.” The vehicle plugs in and charges overnight, and then we have the capability to run the entire vehicle on electricity during the day as long as we have a 220 volt outlet. We are working on having power at most of our new sites so that we can use 100 percent electricity and have zero emissions not only from the vehicle, but from the production of food as well.
In addition to that we’ve used environmentally-friendly packaging from recycled pulp trays to containers made out of bamboo, and potato forks made from potato fiber. We have a recycling system at our Karts, and we also recycle everything back at our offices and in our Kafes. We’re not perfect; it’s very hard to find the quality of packaging that we want in the sizes we want that’s made out of environmentally-friendly materials, but it can be done. Some stuff we’re even sourcing from the UK, and we’re working on getting local companies to produce it. And that’s a certain component, and probably the most important is buying locally. I think it’s more important than the vehicle itself, and it’s almost as important as the packaging that we try to source everything that we possibly can locally.
We’re working on partnerships this spring for vegetables and even with butcher shops for meat and right now we source a lot of our products like Honest Tea, Route 11 Potato Chips, and Cricket Cola locally, as well as water locally. We’re learning ourselves, so we’re going to continue to grow, but also beyond just not having emissions from having to transport everything cross-country. We believe strongly in supporting the local economy and supporting local businesses, and we’re even helping to incubate a few companies that want to sell their own food or baked goods and we’re helping them get off the ground by providing them a channel for their food.
Does your food come from local farms and ranches?
We’re working towards that. Right now we’re out of season for vegetables so even the local distributors of food are sourcing from California, Florida, and various places that are in season, but come spring when we’re in season we’re forecasting probably 80 percent plus of our fruits and vegetables will be local and we’re working on partnerships right now with everything from local sausage makers to local butcher shops to also buy our meats locally.
What about organic food?
We don’t advertise “organic, organic” because you can’t always get organic, or it’s not always the best product, but as much as possible we buy organic food whether it’s spinach for salads or meats when possible (or at least free-range). We sell a lot of organic packaged products from Stonyfield yogurt to sweet tea. I would say more than half of our products are organic in our stores and in our Karts.
Your motto is “Fresh. Local. Fun.” We’ve already talked about the local part. Tell me now about the fresh and fun parts.
We built a 2500 square foot kitchen and commissary on Capitol Hill here in Washington, D.C., and we have two chefs and we’ve made quite an investment in infrastructure and quality in terms of our staff to produce food daily. For instance, I’m sitting in the bank across the street from our Kafe, right after dropping off all our food for lunch today which was made this morning, and then we’ll drop off breakfast food for tomorrow later tonight, and then in the morning we’ll get a delivery of fresh baked goods that were made at about 3 AM. So the idea is for everything to be made fresh daily from fresh products sourced locally whenever possible.
Do you have any plans to expand to other cities?
Well, we have a number of plans. What we’re trying to do first is get a handle on our business here. I’m actually glad we that launched in the winter months with these few prototypes because we’re really learning a lot. It would have been a big undertaking if we were in season; the first few weeks that we were open it was warm and we were just slammed. So, we are going to expand to breakfast and dinner first. Right now we’re open 11 to 3 (at the Karts) and those are winter hours. So we’ve been building partnerships for high quality breakfast foods. Chesapeake Roasting Company is a local eco-friendly roaster. We’re going to start rolling out breakfast on March 15, approximately, so it’ll be quite a change for our operation, because running for 12 hours straight will be quite different.
We would like to expand to other cities. No one’s ever done this exact business before, and they definitely haven’t scaled it. So we want to make sure that we learn that there’re a ton of pitfalls that you can fall into from seasonality and weather to the types of food that you choose to prepackage to hot foods that you choose to serve on the cart. We really want to master the business locally and we’re definitely interested in expanding. When we expand it would still be “fresh, local, fun,” so we would partner with local players in other markets in Philadelphia, New York, or Chicago.
What kinds of foods of foods are you looking at for breakfast?
We have a great partner, Buzz Bakery, which is one of the hot bakeries in the D.C. area. You can go and get a bagel just about anywhere or egg and cheese on toast. So we’re going to do some unique items with them, like ham and scallion scones baked fresh every morning, maple sausage biscuits were the maple sausage is actually baked into the biscuit, and fresh brioche where they actually make their own bacon; so, we’ll offer really high quality unique items that we can be assured are made fresh that morning and that we don’t have to invest a lot of time in making ourselves. And we’re looking at coffee from Chesapeake Bay Roasters which we’ve already introduced in the Kafes and then high quality local chai, and we’re still working out the menu. We’re talking about locally produced fresh fruits that we’ll cut up for people. There’re a lot of options.
You’ve been around the block in the business world a few times. How is it that you ended up running a group of street vending carts and cafes?
Well, I have two partners. Michel Heitstuman, who’s the finance, design, and technology guy, worked for AOL in it’s early days and is now our CFO. Christopher Lynch is my partner; he owned a restaurant here in Washington, he’s our COO and our operations guy. My job is general strategy and marketing which overlaps with operations somewhat and public relations and government relations. So there are some interesting challenges here in this business. So I looked at this as a unique challenge.
I am a D.C. resident and I see it as a severe need for high quality food on the street having been to a lot of other places. So, that’s the number one reason that I’m in this business. The number two reason is that I love food, and so do my partners, and we wanted to do something unique for D.C.; D.C.’s seen a real renaissance over the last 10 to 12 years, and it is the capital of the free world and we think that it should have more than hot dogs for the people to eat on the streets. So we try to provide three to four star food on the streets that’s simple food, really high quality, and only a few options.
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