Charley Wang, Co-Founder & CEO of Josephine on Building Community through Home-Cooked Food
Food Innovation Circle recently had the honor to speak with Charley Wang (Charley Wang), Co-Founder & CEO of Josephine about building community through home-cooked food.
Josephine is a website that allows you to buy home-cooked food made by your neighbors. In 2014, Charley and his Co-Founder Tal Safran moved to Los Angeles for professional reasons and stayed in a woman named Josephine’s house temporarily. Josephine was not only housing them but also feeding them great food. The experience was so cathartic so much so that Charley and Tal started their venture championing the one-to-one relationship through food, the de-commoditized food. “The more interesting opportunity in the food world, is not how to make cheaper faster, more convenient or healthier food options, but how to make a space for cooks to succeed”, Charley said in his introduction to Josephine.
As a big fan of Josephine’s blog THE DISH, I recently noticed that you have a separate site called Humans of Josephine. What do you want to convey through this site?
If you ask people what’s the best food they have ever had is, overwhelmingly, you get this response of the food cooked by my mother or my grandmother, so a dish attached to a person. It is really interesting to see that all our most memorable food experiences are attached to home cooking. So it’s great if you get to Josephine, you find someone in your area, you try and fall in love with them. This is also really wonderful for us to try to thoughtfully tell the story of who those people are.
We also want people to read those stories and say “This is wonderful, I want to meet THIS person.” If people come to eat someone’s meal because they want to meet this person, then, for sure, 9 out of 10 times they’re going to keep coming back, you don’t have to worry about how the food was at all.
You put a lot of effort into building a community and convey the mission. However, the investors are usually more profit driven or growth-driven. Have you been able to find any investor who understands what you’re trying to accomplish?
Our investors are wonderful. We have a couple of well-known impact investors who value the social impacts, most notably the Kapor. They are a big pillar of the push for diversity and inclusion in the technology world. Some of the angel investors that are historically in tech just like the idea or the execution. We’ve been really lucky. When we go out and pitch Josephine, we pitch: “Here is what the future is going to be. You’re going to a future where businesses that are ethical and transparent are the ones that are going to succeed.
We’re going to a world where communities and consumers are observing how you’re operating and how you’re treating every single person in your supply chain. So it’s a matter of we’re building for the success in the future.
I know you like to describe Josephine as the Etsy for food and not as Uber or Lyft for food. Why is that?
Very frequently, those companies are together described as marketplace companies. There is a nuance and a distinction that hasn’t been really well articulated in that. If you’re in a marketplace where you’re buying a commodity if you will, then that looks very different from if you’re in a marketplace where you’re buying a human craft or a human relationship.
Example: Uber and Lyft: their goal is to standardize their ride as much as possible. Etsy, on the other side, depends on the diversity and the variance as a value proposition. When you go to Etsy, you don’t expect to have a price range, you don’t even expect to have a quality range. The whole idea is: I’m going to buy a product that’s made by a human being, craft products. I want to be able to see and find whatever I’m looking for. They also provide a lot of tools to help entrepreneurs succeed. We at Josephine are also providing the tools, trainings and support to help home cooks successful.
The regulation is making the selling home-cooked pretty challenging, or I should say it is a legal gray area. Can you explain to what are the challenges and how is Josephine involved in changing those legislations?
Recently, the Cottage food bill was passed which allows for specifically certain types of non-potentially hazardous foods to be sold out of houses. Those are nuts, breads and very light processed food. So if you were currently have your friends over for a diner and you want to charge them all, and have them chip in 5 or 6 dollars, technically, that would be illegal. With the emergence of the tech platforms, like ourselves or other companies like Eat With and Feastly. The regulators are given this new question: “There is now a way to regulate and know that these people are paying for their food in private homes. What do we do with that information?”
I think that different companies have taken different stances. We had to decide whether to slide under the regulation or try to catalyze a conversation we deeply care about. We went very far to the latter side.
That’s why we started sponsoring bills, organizing our community and town hall meetings with regulators and legislators to discuss what the future regulation should look like. Ultimately we can reduce the barrier to entry monetarily, we can reduce the barrier from the education perspective, but we don’t want the law to become the obstacle.
Besides the connection part, what other benefits can making home-cooked food available cultivate in our society?
Cooking is one of the most fundamental sources of income or skill-set that you can possess. By making home-cooked legal can help a lot of people get additional income. It also helps the local food system. If you’re looking at other countries around the world, that naturally manifests in a vibrate local diverse food system. In the US, the fact that we’ve cut out a lot of the people that would be starting those local, sustainable food businesses or endeavors, has resulted in increasing reliance on the top of the pyramid, which is the industrial production.
If we want to help Josephine and help home cooks, what can we do?
I’ m sure a lot of you share characteristics like you are conscious consumers, you care about buying or supporting sustainable products, sourcing locally which is all amazing. It is part of this movement that is very much fueling what I believe would be what comes after the industrial revolution.
But on top of being conscious consumers, the biggest thing that I have really taken hard this year is becoming politically active. I’m not saying which direction, but being part of it. When we decided to go to Sacramento to introduce our bill, it became very apparent to me how many people are trying so hard to do a little bit of good in our world by introducing some sustainable changes in our legislation.
The more you can get to know your local assembly members, your local government officials, and read what’s happening in your own community and neighborhood, that’s usually helpful.
Since we talked about home-cooked food today, I am wondering if you can imagine inviting 2 people to your house and cook a dinner for them, who would they be?
Michelle Obama is high up on that list. I’d love to have a conversation with her about Josephine (laugh). Questlove has been diving into food a little bit and would be a really cool guest!
Written and edited by Lingling Chen, Founder of Food Innovation Circle. Special thanks to Food Innovation Circle member Mahaut Launay (@MahautLaunay) for taking notes of the Q&A session.
Food Innovation Circle is a San Francisco Bay Area based meetup community dedicated to exploring the intersection between food, design, technology, public policy and new business models. Follow us Food Innovation Circle.
