Lean Food Startup

Just a quick update on the Lean Food Startup panel sponsored in part by Columbia Food Lab and Columbia-Union Kitchen last night.

It was a very successful inaugural event, with about 80 attendees. Three panelists discussed the ins and outs of being a food entrepreneur, and trying to keep things lean. Our panelists were:

• Mike Schwartz, Founder of Bad Ass Organics. Mike also operates the Organic Food Incubator in Queens.
• Kyle Buckley from Grady’s Cold Brew, bottling delicious iced-coffees.
• Dhruv Singh, Founder of !SAVORY, a delivery only restaurant based in Hell’s Kitchen.

In addition to panel discussion and Q&A, attendees also got a chance to tour the kitchen at Union Seminary, which hosted the event last night. Columbia Food Lab and Union Seminary are working on converting the Seminary’s underused kitchen into a new kitchen incubator. The kitchen does need a thorough cleaning, and perhaps some equipment upgrades, but it does already have several solid pieces of capital equipment, and a ton of storage space. More news on this as it develops.

As we get the video we took edited, we’ll be posting some segments of the panel here. We’ll also have some more events planned for the Lean Food Startup NYC Meetup group. If you’ve got questions you’d like us to answer about food startups, comment here, and we’ll see if we can’t get you the info you need.

We conceived of Lean Food Startup as an extension of the Lean Startup movement. Traditionally, Lean Startup methodology has been deployed specifically within the tech startup environment. But we’re here to ask the question: can lean startup methods and principles be applied to the food startup world?

We’re here to test out whether the hypothesis that the Build-Measure-Learn loop that’s central to lean startups can be applied to food entrepreneurship. The goal is to see if food entrepreneurs could increase their success rates, prosper, and benefit from the application of these methods. Can daring and bold concepts in food be iterated upon in a way similar to how people build tech apps?

We’ll be exploring these questions in the coming weeks and months in conjunction with the development of the Columbia Food Lab, a physical culinary incubator. Stay tuned!