Our Truth.

We developed this new restaurant for a simple reason. We set out to find a way to offer good food at a lower price. While the demand for nutritious food has exploded in the past few years, the truth is that the cost for truly nutritious food is still relatively high when we compare it to restaurant quality food. Our goal is to make sustainable restaurant quality food more accessible to everyone, especially for people located in food deserts.

How we’re different…

A standard restaurant model has limitations that do not allow it to reduce prices below a certain threshold, keeping competitive pricing between 16-25$ for an entree. Fast food and fast casual restaurants have models of their own that allow for lower prices, but part of the reason for that is because of the lower quality ingredients that are usually produced at an industrial scale. We decided to do something about that…

Farm+Crave’s business model drastically reduces the costs involved in a standard restaurant’s model. We do this by only offering a pick-up or delivery option, shared kitchen spaces, and by focusing on fewer entrees at a time. This allows us to break the norm of good food being expensive and compete with fast casual establishments, without ever sacrificing the quality of the food.

 

Social benefits:

1. Shared kitchen space-By opting out of constructing our own kitchen space we have been able to use a partnership model in which we use the same fridges and cooking space as other restaurants. This choice along with offering compostable packaging reduces our carbon footprint dramatically.

2. Sustainable Harvest-There is an abundance of healthy/sustainable fast casual restaurants popping up, however, we are starting to overuse “sustainable” products. It is our jobs as the chefs to offer food that may be a little different from what is usually consumed so we can make healthy changes in our diets. We follow the local harvest dates for particular ingredients and limit the amount of meat on our menu, allowing for a more sustainable food cycle and allowing sustainable ingredients to remain sustainable in the long-term.

3. Affordable-Our business model allows us to price healthy and delicious food at 30-40% less than traditional restaurants. This is thanks to our restaurant partnership model and our our wide reach that allows us to buy in bulk directly from farmers and cut out the middleman.

 

Farm+Crave's Costs Breakdown

In a standard restaurant model labor is almost 2x what we spend, food cost varies restaurant to restaurant, however, on average our food cost is among the highest in the industry and we attribute that to purchasing better ingredients. Finally, since we do not have any fixed assets we do not have to worry about all the usual headaches involved of having a brick and mortar location. Savings represents the added costs that a standard restaurant would have to take into account when pricing the meals. Since we do not have those added costs we pass on those savings to the customers and this results in a ~40% price reduction in our meals compared to restaurants with the same quality meals.