Great At Their Jobs
Quick Recap: Prasenjit and I are students at Cornell Tech building a platform to connect farmers with institutional buyers like hospitals or schools. We want to compare local vs. non-local food on price and food miles. Our goal is to show that by buying directly from local farmers, buyers can save on both. I used to be a farmer in Upstate New York.
So far our adventure has included Qualitative Interviews, exploring the Ag Census, and finding data on the Origin of Every Product. We’re building an algorithm that matches farmers and buyers using some dummy data. Setting prices is tricky.
Donna Costa and Louie Sanchez are great at their jobs.
Donna is the general manager for the dining hall for the Stony Point Center. The dining hall is cafeteria style. The food is simple, filling, and healthy — but not boring or bland.
Louie is Donna’s produce guy — he buys all of his produce from Hunt’s Point and then sells it to his clients, like Stony Point. He is the reason why we found the Hunt’s Point data in the first place. They’ve been working together for 15 years. Louie is trying to retire and sell his business, Donna said “You better sell your business to someone I like.” with a smile.
For our trip to Stony Point we ate dinner in the dining hall. I ate roast beef, potato wedges with hot pepper oil, sautéed zucchini/carrots/peppers/onions, and lettuce salad with chickpeas. Prasenjit had the lentils and veggie burger instead of the roast beef. It was delicious. It’s not fancy, but it’s very cozy. It’s similar to Dig Inn.
Twice a week, on Monday and Thursday, Louie drives to his clients and gets their orders in person. Then he goes to Hunt’s Point in the afternoon and checks out what everybody has.
Sales officially start at 6pm — that’s when the sales guys arrive at Hunt’s Point. Louie loads up by 10 pm and is in bed by midnight. He does deliveries early Tuesday and Friday mornings — we talked to him at 6:30 on a Friday morning at Stony Point.
Louie is more than a middleman or a truck driver- he’s making judgement calls about quality and substituting different products if the original product is not up to his standards. Donna can do a better job with managing her budget and menu because Louie is so good at his job.“You’re not a number on a piece of paper. You’re a person.”
Donna told us a story about opening up a case of honeydew melons and finding that one had a hole cut into it. Donna knew immediately that someone else at Hunt’s Point who looked at the box cut the hole. Louie would not need to cut a hole to check for quality — he has a good feel for what a quality honeydew should look and smell like. Louie would also never cut a hole in a melon and not tell Donna that is what happened, he’s way too professional for that. Louie says “I believe in personal service.”
When he sets prices for his clients, he tries for 10 cents on the dollar, but sometimes he’s selling things at cost. The way he tells it is he’s winging it on pricing, but Louie’s been doing this for 43 years. He has decades of data points informing his decisions. This isn’t winging it.
Empire State of Food has largely been treating delivery as a separate problem from matching farmers and buyers because it is such a large hurdle. I had been imagining hiring a third party service like Uber to do the deliveries, but now I’m not so sure we can. Louie’s commitment to personal service is not something you could consistently get from a third party. Louie won’t even hire a driver to do this route for him.
It became clear after talking to Louie that maybe we need to be defining local differently. The capacity of the truck and the number of pick-ups and deliveries a driver can do in a day are the real limiting factors. We can’t ignore this if we’re trying to make something that is competitive price-wise with conventional distributors.
We really lucked out with getting to interview Donna and Louie. Especially getting to talk to them together and see how well they communicate in person. Thanks Donna and Louie!
