Several days a week, Jullet Achan moves through the kitchen of her Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment, stirring dishes from her Surinamese background: fragrant batches of goat curry, root vegetable soup and her own take on chicken chow mein.
She packs the meals and picks them up for delivery to customers who order through an app called WoodSpoon.
“Joining WoodSpoon has made a huge difference during the pandemic, giving me the flexibility to work safely from home and supplement my income,” Ms Achan said in a company press release in February.
However, in New York State, there are no permits or licenses that allow individuals to sell hot meals cooked in their own kitchen. And WoodSpoon, a three-year-old start-up that says it has about 300 chefs preparing food on its platform and has raised millions of dollars from investors including its parent company Burger King, knows it.
“It’s illegal,” said Oren Saar, founder and director of WoodSpoon, which facilitated the interviews with Ms. Achan and other chefs. “If someone is on our platform and sells food that they have cooked in their own kitchen, it is against our platform policy. But to be honest, we think those rules are outdated.”
Ms. Achan said she came from her own research that cooks were not allowed to sell food cooked in their home, but said she would continue to do so. “The food has to be prepared in a clean kitchen and it has to be done correctly,” she said. “I’ve been cooking for my family for years and that’s how I prepare meals for my customers.”
WoodSpoon is part of a shift taking place in the food industry. Driven by the pandemic, companies and investors are throwing tens of billions of dollars into bets on what, where and how consumers will eat in the coming years.
In a bet that people will eat less meat, huge investments are being made in plant-based food start-ups. Fast food giants are spending tens of millions of dollars adding drive-through lanes to serve an increasingly grab-and-go nation. More than 1,500 haunted kitchens have sprung up across the country, and Wendy’s has jumped on the bandwagon with plans to open 700 delivery-only restaurants. Millions of dollars are being pumped into snack bars, chip shops and beverage companies with the belief that consumers want extra nutrients or health benefits from their midday grasses. And start-ups like WoodSpoon and Shef have sprung up, which have propelled an underground industry of selling food to friends and family through apps into the mainstream. They aim to reach those who have developed mealtime fatigue during the pandemic, tired of looking for a new, inventive way to cook a chicken or re-chosing their favorite takeaway. Most of these apps say they expect the chefs to follow all state and local laws or risk being removed from the platform.
“What we’re seeing is cooking burnout,” said Melanie Bartelme, a global food analyst at Mintel, a market research firm that found last spring that a third of consumers said they were “tired of cooking” for themselves or their families. As routines and activities ramp up again, Ms. Bartelme said, families will look for meals that are easy and effortless.
The companies portray themselves as part of the new gig economy, a way for the people who make the food to earn little or a lot of money, by working the days and hours that best fit their schedule.
Selling meals online presents an opportunity for women who struggle to work outside the home due to limited childcare options or for refugees and recent immigrants, said Alvin Salehi, senior technology adviser during the Obama administration and one of the founders of Shef. Mr. Salehi is the son of immigrants who came to the United States from Iran in the 1970s and struggled to run their own restaurant, which ultimately failed.
From her kitchen on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, María Bído uses WoodSpoon to sell classic Puerto Rican dishes like mofongo, bacalaitos, and sancocho, following recipes she learned from her grandmother.
“All my life people said to me, ‘You have to do something with your food,’ but I always shut myself off without even trying,” said Ms. Bído. “How are you going to do that? How is it going to happen? How is it going to work out?
“Now I have a weekly income. I can see my earnings. And I get reviews.”
She believes this will help her in her next goal of moving into a commercial kitchen and offering her specialties across the country. When asked what she knew about restrictions on the sale of meals she cooked in her kitchen, Ms Bido said she was not aware of them. But she said she believed WoodSpoon made it clear to consumers that meals were prepared in the home kitchen. She added that the company has inspected her home kitchen as part of the vetting process to allow her to participate in the platform.
WoodSpoon and Shef are expanding rapidly, even as industry rules and regulations catch up.
In recent months, states have eased restrictions to make it easier for home cooks to sell products online, but the result has been a patchwork of state and local rules, regulations and licensing requirements. In some states, home cooks are only allowed to sell baked goods such as bread, cookies, or jelly. Others put a limit on the amount of money home cooks can make. And other states require the use of licensed facilities, such as commercial kitchens.
In New York, individuals can apply for a home-processing permit from the State Department of Agriculture and Markets, which allows them to cook and sell bread, cakes, cookies, and certain fruit jams. But home-based “restaurants” are banned, whether the food is served at home or delivered through an online service, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said in an email.
Legislation was introduced last year that would allow private individuals to sell hot meals from their own kitchen, but it is still pending.
Mr Saar said WoodSpoon, which started in 2019, couldn’t wait for the laws to catch up when the pandemic hit. “With Covid and all the people approaching us to work on the platform, all the people we thought we could work with, it wasn’t right for us to wait to launch,” he said.
He estimates that 20 to 30 percent of chefs on the platform use licensed commercial kitchens, meaning the majority don’t. He said WoodSpoon helped home cooks obtain the proper permits and licenses, provided safety training and inspected the kitchens, but ultimately it is the responsibility of the individuals selling on the platform to follow the proper rules. A spokesperson later added in an email that the company was in the process of making commercial kitchens available to its chefs.
“We are ahead of the regulators, but as long as I keep my customers safe and everything is healthy, there will be no problems,” said Mr Saar. “We believe our home kitchens are safer than any restaurant.”
When asked if WoodSpoon would remove cooks he knew were cooking from their kitchens, Mr. Saar protested, “It was a good question.” He noted that many WoodSpoon chefs prepared and sold food on social media and competing food platforms, such as Shef.
For example, when Chunyen Huang is not working as a line chef at the upscale restaurant Eleven Madison Park, he prepares and sells Taiwanese dumplings, pan-grilled pork buns, and glutinous rice from a kitchen in his home through both WoodSpoon and Shef. He said he did it mainly to introduce customers to traditional Taiwanese food in the hopes that they would like to learn more about the country’s history and culture.
When asked about selling Mr. Huang on Shef, a spokeswoman said anyone who did not comply with local laws and regulations would be suspended. The next day, Mr. Huang’s offerings on Shef disappeared.
Mr Huang said it was not clear to him why he had been removed from Shef’s platform.
He still sells dishes on WoodSpoon. He added that he hoped to cook in a commercial kitchen in the coming weeks.