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January 26, 2022

You won’t see a Clover sign here

By ayr

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I visited our newest site yesterday and felt a tingle of the excitement that I felt when we were first launching food trucks.

This is Widett Circle, an industrial area in Boston that is slated for demolition and redevelopment. The operators who used to be here are gone and the developers are waiting on permits or something. We’ve arranged to rent one of the buildings on a short term lease. So don’t expect to see a Clover sign installed here. It’s not a long term fix, but we’re hoping this space allows us to grow our subscription meal kit business 5x in coming months.

We’re making a few moves to support scale. First, we are turning the space that was formerly BISq into a new bakery space. More pita!! Second, we are upgrading our production space at what we call the “HUB” in East Cambridge, our commissary space. These changes will help us increase pita and food production capacity by about 2x. Widett is the last piece of the puzzle. We won’t be making any food there but we’ll use this space to distribute the meal boxes + kits to the vans that deliver them.

As an example, we’re currently making seasonal salsas, taco fillings out of local ingredients, etc. to fill out the Taco Tuesday boxes on Monday and packing them Monday night. Drivers then deliver them on Tuesday. If you’re a subscriber, every Tuesday your household gets everything for a huge taco feast. The platform is consistent but the recipes change every week. It’s delivered straight to your door, and we’re already at something like 500 subscribers. So we need to load a lot of vans. Currently about 12. Soon it will be 30. Hence the new space.

(Btw: subscriptions start at $35/ week and if you’re interested the best thing to do right now is sign up for the Taco Tuesday wait list. We also have waitlists going for Pasta Saturday and Burger Friday.)

Widett will be up and running soon and that will allow us to increase the number of Taco Tuesday subscribers, Pasta Saturday, (Veggie) Burger Friday, and Soup Wednesday subscribers.

So that’s the plan. I’ll keep you all updated!

(And yes, this used to be a fish distributor or something. Don’t worry, we’re just moving boxes, not doing any food processing here. But honestly it’s pretty new and clean. Much, much better than some of the spaces we looked at…)

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