Clover Food Lab

Took some heroics, but credit cards have returned.

Time to make good on all your IOUs : )

UPDATE: Spoke too soon. New terminal arrived, but refuses to work. UHG. Spent 2 hours this morning trying to fix this. Turns out I’m going to have to wait until they send me ANOTHER machine. BTW, machine is Nurit 8000, processor is total merchant services.

We’re just around the corner from an explosion of local produce. Right now we’re seeing radishes, fennel, broccoli, and berries.

We’ve got some new salads featuring those, including our first spicy salad (spicy broccoli). And a new one Rolando developed yesterday: fennel radish with a coriander citrus vinegrette. It’s inspired. This is one of my favorite salads we’ve ever sold.

The other weeknight wrote that I love the rain. I’ve changed my mind.

Nothing has changed, the rain is peaceful, it still reminds me of greater forces at work around us, you all are still coming out in the rain, there is still no awning, and the most obvious thing that hasn’t changed: it’s still raining.

To those of you who are muttering “you’ve got to love New England summers” this is NOT a Nrw England summer, at least not as I grew up knowing them.

I’m still in a good mood, mostly because we’re lucky enough to have you all coming out, even in the rain. Thank you! But aren’t we all dying for a splash of sunshine? I mean, isn’t this wearer unhealthy at some point?

Killer tea (MEMs) and Coffee $1 this morning only as a thanks to everyone who keeps braving the wet.

It’s too complicated to explain how this happened, but yesterday between our commissary and Kendall we dropped the credit card machine. I should say “I,” I dropped the machine.

Thanks for insurance, something I had the forsight to include with all electronic devices in the truck. They are ivernighting me a new unit, so credit cards should be back tomorrow.

UPDATE: $#%& Fedex driver wouldn’t leave it today, so looks like another day without the machine. Back on Thursday (if they don’t deliver it today I’ll go out and get it tomorrow myself).

Back in the fall, when the truck’s gas pedal first had a problem, I was shocked to find everything except chewing gum connecting the linkage. Check out this picture: zip ties, strung, key loop.

I fixed the first failure back then, but never got around to cleaning up the rest.

I’m not proud to say that I found myself yesterday under there with some wire adding to this sculpture after another linkage failed. Oh well… time for an appointment with the mechanic.

Colin made this up for us. Pretty fun. So for all of you wishing you had your own Clover truck, just hit print and pull out your scissors.

A bunch of you have been asking for Clover desserts. But here’s the thing: you shouldn’t be eating dessert with lunch everyday.

Now a couple of times a week? That’s an entirely different story. So we’re developing a tradition at Clover of celebrating birthdays with cupcakes. We don’t announce them, and we give them away for free to customers while they last. So breakfast customers always have a bit of a leg up.

Thursday we made parsnip cupcakes. Think carrot cake with local parsnips. We topped these with maple cream cheese frosting.

Btw, Teasel is my sister. Tease, you’re awesome, happy birthday.

A bunch of you have been asking for Clover desserts. But here’s the thing: you shouldn’t be eating dessert with lunch everyday.

Now a couple of times a week? That’s an entirely different story. So we’re developing a tradition at Clover of celebrating birthdays with cupcakes. We don’t announce them, and we give them away for free to customers while they last. So breakfast customers always have a bit of a leg up.

Thursday we made parsnip cupcakes. Think carrot cake with local parsnips. We topped these with maple cream cheese frosting.

Btw, Teasel is my sister. Tease, you’re awesome, happy birthday.

Those of you who have been with us since the begining may remember a post about IDEO (if you’re new, just search the site for IDEO). Last night those same folks invited me to speak to a group of their 100 closest friends about the future of business. And we got to feed everybody, which was really fun. It was packed with interesting people.

Colin introduced me with some impossible to live up to intro like- this is the future of business. And we shared a few stories about screwing up our salad introductory pricing, Having some terrible order management systems, and getting in a near accident on the way to service one day.

The talk was about failure, deliberately designing to fail. And we had fun.

It’s been too long. And you know how things get when you wait too long, expectation builds, and it gets tougher and tougher to do something that would have been simple a long time ago.

Many of you already know her. this is Leah, Clover’s newest leader. Above Leah is posing with her perfect pop-overs. Something that took a few weeks to achieve (Leah — that’s all it was, a few weeks!). Many of you were kind and supportive through the popover disaster days (half of which were Chris’ doing). But now Leah has conquered these along with a couple dozen other recipes and Clover’s thousands of idiosyncrasies. Someday we’ll be a machine, but right now Leah and others have to deal with a lot of problem solving on the fly. Leah’s been bringing us in line, and doing an awesome job managing the truck.

Leah used to be an organizer for the Obama campaign. She LOVES Ohio (don’t dare say anything critical about Ohio around her). Despite her passion for Ohio she is Boston born and raised (JP). I think Leah likes us all best at Thursday night drinks when the week is almost over and the pitcher is almost empty. But we love her all the time, and are thrilled to have her on board, even early in the morning when she’s a bit cranky.

This is one of my favorite juices. I love the buttery sweetness of the carrot and think the kumquat brings breadth to the carrot’s earthiness. We’ve had a lot of sucess pairing citrus with earthy root vegetables.

Today we’re running the beet apple lime.

You may have noticed juices are moving from a once or twice a month thing to a daily option. You also may have noticed the $4 price tag they come with. Some of you know that’s a steal (we’ve sold out of juice everyday since we brought them on). But some of you are wondering why anybody would lay down the same money they are paying for a sandwich.

Funny thing is that the juice is the lowest margin item we sell. If you’re a nerd like me you can spend an evening diagraming the price structure of soda and fresh juice and see what it tells you. There’s just a ton of great stuff in these juices. We’re happy to sell them. They taste so good, and are just packed with nutrients.

Still in testing phase so don’t forget to tell us what you think.

Ok, so we’ve had tea for a while. But it was nothing like this. We’ve been sampling many vendors, and they’ve been OK, but now we’re running MEM’s, and it’s awesome.

Ask us about it, bit be prepare to chat for a bit, we’re really excited about MEM’s tea.

So it’s raining today. But I’m happy. What’s up? I mean it’s bad for business right? Yeah, that part isn’t so great, but:

(1) It’s going to rain like it or not, so might as well enjoy it right? The sky just doesn’t care if I’m in a bad mood, but everybody around me can benefit from a positive disposition

(2) Great time for us to experiment, some things are easier to try out on a rainy day

(3) It’s sort of chill and peaceful, better chance to get to know all of you (and post to the blog twice already in one morning:)

(4) Most important: we actually do really well on rainy days, like within 80% of normal. For me that is super gratifying. Anybody can sell hotdogs in a crowded park on a busy day. The real tes of the business is when things are working against you, like rain. And you all come out anyway. It’s a great feeling.

Clover is built to make mistakes, lots and lots of mistakes. Now I know some of you read that and say “oh… That explains…” but let me finish. Besides being yummy our mistakes are special in 2 ways:
(1) they are cheap
(2) we learn as much as we can from every one

This is at the core of our philosophy. We train our staff to focus more on trajectory than absolute position. So we’re constantly asking the question: what didn’t work. Sometimes we even talk about what is working.

Ask anyone (especially Leah) and I’m the undisputed king of screwing things up. But we all run our own little experiments, spanning menu adjustments, operational innovations, training approaches, etc. This is why Clover is evolving so quickly, on so many fronts, in such a robust way.

One of our less formal learning mechanisms is Thursday night drinks. I buy (iced tea for Hat and Jerry), everyone talks. The picture above is from this week’s drinks. Which column do you think represents the failures?

A bunch of you have asked why we don’t make a big deal about the press we’ve been receiving, and why there hasn’t been a mention of any of it here on the website.

The truth is we needed some time to sort out our conflicted emotions regarding the recent coverage. You see we actually told some of those reporters to go away, that we didn’t want stories. We’ve turned away TV cameras. And we’ve had other reporters jump through hoops — the work-a-full-shift-on-the-truck kind of hoops. But they’ve written anyway.

So what’s wrong with us? We’re set on building a company that’s going to be around 10, 20 years from now. This means developing meaningful relationships with our customers and fostering a community around the Clover truck (and in the future stores). We’ve built this company by word of mouth, friends bringing friends to try our food. And we like that. We like the intimacy, the local-ness, the community that develops. These aren’t served by the food snipers who cross the city to check out what the buzz is about.

And as you know we’re doing our best to keep up with the traffic we have. Heck, today we were serving an average of almost 3 customers per minute. So we can’t really absorb a ton more demand right now.

That all said, we want to share this great thing called Clover with everybody. So a big unqualified welcome to those of you who wouldn’t have found us without the help of the Wall Street Journal, or the Boston Globe, or Boston Magazine, or Stuff, or WBZ, or any of the other places we’ve been featured. Say hi when you come by, and we’ll do our best to remember your name when you come back.

One of our long term goals: sell the best tasting yogurt our customers have ever had. If you’ve made your own yogurt from happy raw milk using a nice culture you have a sense of what I have in mind.

As much ad I love what Stonyfield has achieved, their yogurts aren’t much different than Danon these days. (you’ll notice we use only the plain yogurt on the truck.)

I haven’t had much luck finding a great supplier. One of my customers just turned me on to a new yogurt being made in Ashfield, not far from where I grew up. So it was French toast, Rhubarb, and this killer yogurt this morning for breakfast. Look for it this week on the truck.

Some of you may have noticed, we’ve changed our start time from 8am to 7am for breakfast. And we’ve been mostly on time this past week.

Whether it’s the extended hours, Leah and Hat’s morning cheer, or the expansion of the breakfast menu, we’ve noticed that more of you are stopping by for breakfast.

Which is great. Breakfast is such an important meal. And if you haven’t had the rhubarb on yogurt on granola you need to come by tomorrow and give it a try. I was telling Rolando we could stop serving all of our other food and just serve that and I think we’d do great… well after everybody figures out what it’s all about.

You’ve asked us about these, tasted them, been confused by our pricing, and sizes, and lack of lettuce, and loved them (beet in particular). Now it’s time to explain what we’re up to with these “salads.”

Back when Rolando and I started to imagine this menu there were no soups. At some point we let go and decided to let the salads become soups in the winter, which makes sense on many dimensions. So when it’s cold out you get to eat root vegetables, and grains, and legumes in soups. And now that it’s warm out this part of the menu is giving way to salads showcasing the best seasonal vegetables.

More after the break.

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T shirts arrived Friday. Here are our first t shirt customers.

We’ll be selling these on a first serve basis. We made an edition of 50, and will retire this design after those are sold. Right now we have 18 left for sale. $30 each. Organic cotton, soy inks, made in America.

Rhubarb cooler, rhubarb muffins, rhubarb and yogurt with granola. What’s up with Rhubarb?

I LOVE Rhubarb is what’s up. And it’s local, and it’s in season. But most of all I’ve loved it since I was a little kid. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Rhubarb is tart (think lemon or lime), but mellow, without the citrus bite. It’s a bit hard to describe. Sour without the pucker. And there’s a little bitterness in there, but even that isn’t harsh at all. And there is a special unique rhubarb taste that’s unlike anything else. It’s this taste that makes me so excited about this time of year.

Rhubarb recipe and more history after the break.

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