For The Love of Local

“Farm-to-Table” restaurants have gone from niche to mainstream, and using local products is now nearly a rule for any restaurateur or chef opening a new enterprise. However, not every cafe needs to rely entirely on the city’s Greenmarkets in order to make an impact with local items. In this month’s Enterprise Insight, we will review three methodologies for sourcing locally and examples of each.

Generic

Sometimes, the easiest way to keep it local is simply by sticking with what you can get in each season. For Maman, a new bakery-café in SoHo, their strategy is just that; vegetable-focused fare that’s seasonally and locally sourced. The café doesn’t call out specifically from which farms their products are coming; they let the produce speak for itself. This method goes hand in hand with the café’s preference for vegetable—but not necessarily vegetarian—dishes, which we discussed earlier this month in our Retail Spotlight.

 Item-Specific

Eataly’s items might be mostly imorted from Italy, but its flour is New York State grown and milled. Obviously, the majority of Eataly’s products are coming from Italy—jams, sauces, coffee, etc—but the bakery runs on flour milled in nearby Clinton Corners by Wild Hive Farm. Wild Hive Farm owner Don Lewis sources whole grains of heirloom wheat from local farms and mills over 300 acres worth just for Eataly—roughly 3,000 pounds of local flour per week!

Programs similar to these are most common—using local ingredients for high-impact items balance the benefits of using and highlighting local ingredients with the problems of availability and seasonality. For example, a patisserie could exclusively use local eggs, and make a note of it on the menu. Bars have a huge inventory of local wine, beers, and spirits to choose from, and intrinsically must note where the beverage comes from.

Farm-Forward

The most obvious and most common form of using local ingredients is now almost a necessity. Citing the provenance of specific ingredients started back in the days of Savoy, Blue Hill, and Union Square Café getting their food from the greenmarkets. Restaurants like these put a strong emphasis on farms and the relationship between the chef and the farmers. This movement has evolved to the use of rooftop gardens, like Rosemary’s, and functioning farm-restaurants, such as Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

For many hospitality enterprises, accessibility is the biggest issue with local sourcing. Fortunately, New York State is making big progress in this area—going as far as to set up a marketing campaign around local products. “Taste NY”, as the program is called, even has a retail store in Grand Central Terminal, which exclusively sells products made in state. And GrowNYC, the agency that runs the Greenmarkets around the City, has started a local distribution company, Greenmarket Co, which delivers from farmers to wholesale customers. Whether you’re operating a fine dining enterprise that is showcasing the best in season from the best producers or seeking to bolster local agriculture on a larger scale, using regional product can drive revenue and good will.