Clover Food Lab

About 10 days ago this came in the mail. If you haven’t noticed we’re in the middle of a major breakfast upgrade. This includes coffee, menu items, consistency of opening and availability, everything.

I’ve been trying out a better way to heat water for coffee. We’ve been running out when busy, our kettles use a ton of energy, and it’s hard to control the heat precisely with the kettles.

I found this 2.5L Japanese water heater online. It has some handy pre-sets for temperature and digital control. It’s insulated, which means much much lower energy consumption. Best of all it plays a happy little tune when the water is ready!

This is the beginning of another coffee journey. Or rather the end. Rolando and I just got back from a big research trip that included food trucks, fast food, juice shops, some fine dining, and lots and lots of coffee. We’ve known for a while that coffee is really important to breakfast. We want our coffee to be:

- Your absolute favorite cup
- Cheap
- Simple and approachable
- Robust

There is a ton happening in the coffee world right now and Rolando and I, neither of us coffee insiders, are trying to sort it all out. We are starting to understand how Clover’s philosophy of food applies to the coffee world.

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Our sandwich boards are getting a bit ratty aren’t they? I need to find a more durable solution.

That said, we really don’t want them to look like the example on the left above, or like anything that would ever be anywhere near a Starbuck’s. Don’t get me wrong, I’d really like them to be cleaner than they are.

That said, I’m very proud that we write on our boards daily. They’re far from perfect, some have even complained about my handwriting. But they reflect where we are on a day to day basis. That’s the timescale on which our food is made, that’s the timescale our communications should obey.

I made the trek down to Berkshire Products. This place is about as far as you can get from Boston and still be in MA. But they mill some of the most beautiful wood anywhere. It’s just amazing. I’ve always loved wood. In the context of Clover I think wood can bring warmth to what is going to otherwise be a very cold and modern aesthetic. There are other things we do to ensure things don’t feel to sterile (e.g., breaking up planes and rectangles). But the wood plays a huge role for us. Those counters carry a lot of weight design-wise.

We went with a New England red oak. Well, there’s no way to be entirely sure it’s New England based. I pressed these guys on this issue this time and they admitted that they don’t track. So “almost all” maple, ash, and oak is New England in origin, but they can’t be certain.

They had a production sander this time. They either didn’t have it last time, or I just didn’t see it. Awesome. For $40 they ran it through for me down to 120 grit. That means I got a board that had been planed and sanded. Awesome.

After the break I’ve included pictures of the counter getting sanded and packed on top of my car. I spent the weekend building and finishing the counters. I’ll post the final product when it is installed.

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Our yogurt supplier, Narraganset Creamery, makes up some of the best yogurt in the Northeast. The only other producer that I’d put at their quality would be Sidehill Farm back from W. Mass (where I grew up). Sidehill is great, but they don’t really sell around here.

What’s good yogurt? Mostly it has to do with freshness, and lack of additives — stabilizers, preservatives, etc. The cultures are happy and active. It comes through in the taste, and also in the texture. You’ll notice if you get to breakfast early in the morning that we always stir the yogurt quickly 40-50 stirs before serving anybody. This creates a silky texture, it’s really beautiful.

If you haven’t had our yogurt it can be found with granola and seasonal fruit compote every morning.

The picture above is from a recent trip to Narraganset. It’s a huge operation, and they make a lot of cheese. More pictures after the break.

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So when you are building a new restaurant you talk to your equipment supplier, and they help you design the kitchen. They charge you of course, but then you buy away the charge as you buy equipment from the supplier.

You can understand why restaurants go for this, it appears to reduce your cash outlay. And you can see why suppliers offer this service, this way they can lock in purchases before all of that price comparing goes on (the kitchen has not yet been specified and designed, so what are you going to compare at this stage?)

I interviewed TriMark, they may be the largest equipment supplier in North America. I also talked to Eastern (pictured above). They are a smaller local supplier and have helped me with the truck. Believe me, I have my complaints about Eastern. They’re a bit disorganized, and only recently have they started to treat me decently, before that it was very gruff. And I’ve seen them treat other customers in ways that cannot be excused.

That said, they have been helping me to date, and they are local. Very local. We decided to use them for the design phase. Didn’t hurt that they are faster and less expensive than TriMark for this stage, but whatever the reason the choice makes me feel good.

My first day at Clover, back in August, was also the last day of order-taking by pen and paper. The next day, we got our POS system, with a server, an iPod Touch for order-taking, one at each sandwich station, and one for the expeditor, the person who hands out your food.

Yesterday the server wasn’t working and we were back to pen and paper – or in my case, pen and paper bag (or when the pen ran out of ink – expo-marker and paper bag). Columns for name, sandwich, drink, soup, and fries. Ayr was calling out orders to the folks on the truck (like: “I need one egg-and-eggplant followed by two chickpeas, a barbeque, and four fries”), and crossing orders off by hand.

If you stopped by yesterday during the lunch rush, you might have noticed we were a much noisier truck. iPod system is back up and running.

We’re working out our new restaurant. Here’s a rough sketch as we figure out the kitchen arrangement.

There is a ton going on regarding the new restaurant and the truck. I need to set up a new page to handle all of that stuff. I’ve been hesitant to post it all here for fear it will quickly overwhelm this page. But in the meantime I’ll trickle a few posts here and there.

Our approach to kitchen design? Shouldn’t surprise any of you: we expect we’re going to get it wrong. We’re doing our best to build for testing and flexibility (e.g., equipment on casters). And we’ve learned a few things from the truck. Let’s just say we’re preparing for lines.

OK, so you’re going to be putting up with a lot of coffee talk from us over coming weeks as we tweak our offerings. We’ve got a few goals: (a) we want to better match your coffee tastes, meaning tons of customer feedback, (b) we want to make our offering better and more consistent, (c) we want to know what we’re doing.

On the last you’ll hear a lot from us. There’s a ton of fetishism around coffee. And with “pour over” (the buzzword for what we do) becoming all the rage, espresso geeks are bringing their finicky ways over to our world. I’ve read that Starbucks is about to offer pour over coffee nation wide, and Intelligencia has already converted all of their Chicago stores but one.

But before we get into all that subtle stuff we have a big improvement we can make without any testing. Right now we use straight Boston tap water for everything. We should be using filtered Boston tap water. We’ve known this but have just been too busy with everything else to get it fixed.

We need one of these, an Everpure industrial filter. Brian is going to be helping me locate, buy, and get one of these bad-boys installed.

We’re determined to develop Clover as fast food. I know, it doesn’t always feel that way when you’re stuck in the 12:15pm line, but believe us, we’re doing everything we can to serve this stuff up as fast as possible.

We’re committed to fast food despite many customer’s desire to compare us to fine dining or gourmet fair, or even calling us a (gasp) “gourmet truck.”

This is where these photos come in. I’m always stopping in at places to check out what they are offering. This one was particularly funny. You see that poster? Reality is slightly frozen in the center (where the microwave didn’t get to it). Wow. There’s actually a website that does this. Pretty funny hunh?

http://thewvsr.com/adsvsreality.htm

Those are our coffee beans. Raw. These are the ones I wrote a long post about a few weeks ago. Casa Ruiz, Panama.

I had a chance to stop by Barrington Roasters the other day, when I was picking up wood for the counters for the new truck. It was a ton of fun. A guy named Heck showed me around, and I had a chance to meet up with Barth (who runs the place) and chat coffee.

The timing is great. We’re getting ready for our restaurant and returning to some of our basic operations to tweak and improve. Breakfast is in the crosshairs. Expect changes to muffins, coffee, and perhaps some new offerings in coming weeks.

I’m getting a ton of coffee paraphernalia and we’re going to be upgrading our process, from start to finish. And you’re going to get to help. Tomorrow Rolando is coming up to the truck and we’re going to be going through the first round of testing. This is going to be a ton of fun.

As some of you know, when one of our staff has a birthday, we make cupcakes and give them away to customers first come first serve. Today was Jeremiah’s birthday. If you came by the truck early this afternoon, you got a birthday cupcake combining two of Jeremiah’s favorite things – chocolate and stout beer. You might have also seen these folks. They saw it was Jeremiah’s birthday on our Twitter post this morning and brought him a handmade card (notice the cupcake). We may have another birthday coming this month : )

One of the best things about working at Clover is that sometimes, your ideas get put on the menu. This fall I was talking to Rolando. He teaches world cuisine at Johnson and Wales, and they were covering Middle Eastern/Persian food. I said I had a soup for him to try.

I’m half Iranian, and I’d always watched my relatives spend hours finely chopping countertops of fresh dill, cilantro, green onions, parsley and spinach to make “ash,” a soup that’s traditionally eaten on Persian New Year in March. The green herbs are the soup  – rather than acting as garnishes or bulking up the flavor of other ingredients – so it comes out bright green in color.

Rolando and I made up a batch of a soup we started calling “Persian New Year.” A couple things changed from my family’s recipe. Since we make soups on-board the truck each morning, it had to be fast to make. Traditionally, the soup has long strands of Iranian noodles, which are hard to find and iffy to cook, so I replaced them with potatoes. Instead of finely mincing tons of green herbs by hand (which would take the entire morning)  Jeremiah suggested we roughly chop them and put the soup through the blender after cooking.

A lot of you tried “Persian New Year” soup when we ran it last week. Let us know what you thought. I might venture to say the soup born of Clover limitations actually tastes better than the original. But I’ll let our Iranian customers (Fareed, Sheba, and others) have the final say.

Yesterday our credit-card machine was down. We had just bought a new one, and when the company shipped it, they de-activated our current one. So we could only do cash. When you (customer in the picture on the left) found out, and didn’t have cash, you (customer on the right) offered to loan her $5. You guys had never met before! Leah and I were taking orders. It made us very happy.

I’ve got a few apologies to make. First, for Jeremiah, who should be writing this, we screwed up the other day. We were short staffed, we didn’t get everything prepped in time, we had a staff member call in last minute to say she wasn’t coming, it was a perfect storm. A perfect storm that had a ton of you waiting more than 10 minutes for your food. That’s not what we intend, and we’re super sorry. If you were affected by this please reach out to me directly as I’d like the chance to make it up to you.

We want to serve everybody in less than 4 minutes. Sometimes it takes a bit longer, sometimes a bit shorter, but it should never take more than 8 minutes to get your food. This stuff matters to you, it matters to us.

And now a second apology: sorry for the lines in general. We just weren’t expecting January and February to be as busy as they’ve been. We’re working on getting this back in line with what you came to expect at the end of the Autumn.

Which brings us to the last announcement, not an apology: we’re officially hiring again. So if you’ve been wondering what it would be like to wear the apron, or have a friend who is a hard worker, let us know.

Some of you might not know that we clean the truck every night. Cleaning the truck is a process. It’s one of the first things you learn when you start working here, and it’s actually pretty fun, if you enjoy solitude and blasting Top 40 on the radio (like I do). Everything comes out. Every surface (counters, sandwich stations, oven, fryer) gets scrubbed with a brush and soapy water, dried, and sanitized. Floors are swept and mopped.

Last Friday it was 19 degrees during dinner. Some of you might have seen Brian, Bobby and I keeping warm with Clover hot cider that night. When it came time to clean the truck, I naively dipped my brush in soapy water and started scrubbing. I turned around to grab a wet rag. All the soapy suds on the stainless steel had turned to ice. I tried to clean the windows, but the blue window spray turned to ice on contact. Then it started to snow.

We figured if we mopped, Clover would become a mobile ice rink. Luckily it was a Friday, and we came on Sunday afternoon to finish.We’ve been working on ways to keep us – and the truck warm as the temperature dips below freezing, like space heaters and long underwear (the kind skiers wear).

Hi, Jeremiah here. This is my first post. Look for more in the near future.

Some of you may have noticed one of our recent experiments: flavored oils. We’re making these almost completely from things that usually get tossed away. So far, we’ve experimented with three flavors; paprika oil, made from some paprika that we have had on hand for a while; herb oil, made from the stems of the herbs we chop up;and lemon oil, made from the zest of the lemons we squeeze for lemon juice. Not only are they tasty, but the colors are rocking! We get those colors by filtering them through layers of cheese cloth at a cold temperature. This helps the oil hold the colors better, and be more vibrant. Look for these and maybe a few more things to start making some appearances helping garnish soups this week.

OK, I got burned. We called out first ever Clover snow day. The city of Boston called a snow emergency last night. Johnson and Wales was closed. The media was going nuts. And let’s admit it, if you grew up in a snowy climate few things are as exciting as the words “snow day.”

Oh well. Not much snow, but staff had all been called off. I sat down with Leah, Jeremiah, and Brian and bored them with very vital financial lessons (we’ve been doing little lessons to get them up to speed as they take over operations).

OK. I owe you a ton of posts on the new truck. I’ve been meaning to set-up a new page, I have an entire architecture in mind for our web communication. But it hasn’t happened yet. And in the meantime you’re missing a ton of great stuff.

So here it goes, First real post of Clover truck #2. Sad thing is that picture doesn’t capture everything that’s going on. It’s really a 3 dimensional beast.

The quick catch-up: we’re doing a second truck, it’s being built right now. The City of Boston has invested in the truck, which is awesome. We’re going to reward them with 20 new jobs in under 9 months, a very nice ROI. So the new truck is going to be in Boston. Sorry Cambridgians. We’re still working out the location.

My architects have all sorts of ideas about this truck. Those window angles were a bit of a leap of faith for me, but the architects (SSd) spent hours making sure they were just right. And they are. This thing is gorgeous. There’s a crazy awning planned, and this one is going to actually get completed, I promise. And the truck itself, well we’ve learned a few things. We’re expecting no less than 2x the current throughput. You read that right. When the MIT truck hits 160 customers in an hour, we’re expecting this one can hit double that. Double the friers, double the sandwich stations. Double the staff ? : ) ? It’s going to be crazy.

So what’s with these shoes I’ve been wearing?

If you took the our online survey the other week you already know. But I thought I owed the rest of you an explanation.

We’re going to be surveying you all once a month going forward. It’ll help us serve you better food faster. This most recent survey included a free fry/ free soup offer for those who completed the survey. I didn’t want to get caught up in some silly matching of customers to numbers etc., so for those who completed the survey, I emailed a “secret password.” I told them to say “I like your shoes” next time they came by the truck and we’d hook them up with the fries/ soup.

So I thought if I’m going to have hundreds of customers noticing my shoes, they better be something worth noticing, right? So I found myself at Concepts in Harvard Square. I actually love this shop. It’s run by a friend of a friend named Tarik I think, but I’ve never met him. For those of you not into the whole sneaker culture, these guys are one of the top shops in the country. A feat given Boston leads nationally in almost zero retail. Actually, in my opinion, this may be one of the only world-class retail shops in Boston. They didn’t invent what they do, but it’s a business that’s all about what happens behind the scenes: shoe design, promotion, social networking. And these guys do it with relatively little gimmick.

I went in and bought the most showy shoes I could find. So that’s the story of my comic book shoes. I sort of like them, do you? (you’ve got to be honest now, the survey give-away is over)