Ipsa Co-Founder Joshua Brau: Use this as an opportunity to focus
Joshua Brau and Micah Fredman launched Ipsa Provisions in February 2020. Brau, a former brand director at Blue Apron and Chipotle, and Fredman, a former cook at Gramercy Tavern and Eleven Madison Park, developed a menu of frozen, locally-sourced meals that could be popped in the oven at dinnertime.
Ipsa quickly accumulated hundreds of customers in Manhattan and Brooklyn, growing without any paid marketing.
Then — just four weeks after launch — New Yorkers were ordered to shelter in place.
“It was scary first and foremost,” Brau says. “We considered shutting down temporarily for the safety of our team, customers, and partners.”
But Brau and Fredman continued. As the pandemic wore on, Ipsa’s convenient dinners, a respite from pantry ramen packets and endless take out orders, surged in popularity.
“[Ipsa’s] soups, stews, and casseroles … are the sort your friend who is an exceptional home cook might drop off when you’re under the weather,” The New Yorker’s Food Critic Hannah Goldfield wrote of the dishes.
I asked Brau for his playbook on launching a consumer brand in 2020, navigating change, and predicting the future of food. His answers have been lightly edited and condensed.
What inspired the idea for Ipsa?
I took a job as brand director at Blue Apron, they had hired me to do many of the same things that I had done for Chipotle. I was laid off within six months of joining the company. When I was laid off, my wife was about six weeks away from giving birth to our daughter. Under normal layoff and severance circumstances I would have gone on a trip for a few weeks and started to look for a job.
That wasn’t in the cards. My wife said one of the things you can do while you’re home is make a bunch of large batches of some of our favorite dishes and freeze them for this long, cold winter we have ahead of us with a newborn. (Our daughter was born in early December.）
I’d always frozen leftovers but I had never really cooked for the freezer. We found having that sort of stuff around was incredibly convenient but also really delicious. I made all of these things using the same type of ingredients I always cook with: I’m a big farmer’s market person and very focused on seasonality. When our stock of homemade frozen food started to dwindle after a couple of months, I started to look in grocery stores and couldn’t find any frozen prepared dishes that were exciting to me.
How did you launch the company?
I reached out to my old friend Micah who was a cook at Gramercy Tavern and Eleven Madison Park and said, ‘Hey I’d love to pilot this idea to make really high quality frozen food and deliver it around New York City.’
We came up with a menu and sent an email to 100 friends and family asking for orders in July of 2018. We said ‘Give us your money, we’ll produce the food, and we’ll deliver it to you after Labor Day.’
We expected to get 20 orders and we got 70 orders for an average of five dishes each, which was quite a lot of food to produce in Micah’s home kitchen. We made all the food and we delivered it and before we could even send out a survey we got a ton of texts and emails asking, “When can I get more?”
We realized we were on to something. We were both doing other jobs — I was consulting and Micah was doing some private chef work — and we continued to pilot this concept for a year before slowly building up to the launch of the brand in earnest this February.
We launched the business on a shoestring. We raised $75,000 in loans from a couple of relatives and that was it. That was what we used to pay for our branding and our packaging and our website and the cost of producing our initial inventory.
How have consumer behaviors toward food changed in the last six months?
There was initially this excitement around home cooking that emerged as a result of being stuck at home. The cliche has become the sourdough bread trend.
But I think there has been burnout, especially for people who are cooking for others, who are cooking for a family, and who want to feed their family food that is nutritious and delicious but requires a minimum of effort. Our offering is in a really sweet spot for that. It can be the centerpiece of a really nice, civilized meal at home.
It’s not like a lot of the options out there that require a ton of packaging, sometimes eating out of the packaging which is a bummer for me, pulling things out of the microwave, or the deceptive convenience of a meal kit where you’re actually doing a lot of work.
What do you think is coming next for the future of food?
Home cooking is still going to be for many, many people the core pillar of their routine. But people are going to be looking for ways to approximate the experience of eating home cooked food without cooking from scratch.
Restaurant take out is so appealing in theory but in my experience, it rarely lives up to your expectations at the moment when you place your order. Since you’re typically paying the regular menu price but missing out on many of the most pleasurable aspects of the restaurant experience, take out and delivery often feel quite expensive. And most restaurant food simply doesn’t travel well. Some things, like pizza, tend to travel just fine, but much of the type of food that makes dining in a restaurant so appealing is really designed to be eaten right away.
I still think in the denser cities, like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, restaurant takeout is going to continue to be a thing provided that the restaurants are able to sustain themselves with takeout only, because at least in the colder parts of the country, it is unlikely there will be much indoor dining over the next six months or so.
I think prepared meals, whether they’re from the freezer or fresh prepared meals, are going to become a bigger part of the mix. The last thing I’ll say is the thing I’m most hopeful about in the food industry, which is innovation in restaurants.
How do restaurants adapt? How does the concept of the restaurant adapt and change to these very difficult circumstances? Eating food outside of your home that was prepared by someone else is always going to be an appealing option. It has been for centuries.
What’s your №1 piece of advice for other entrepreneurs navigating change?
I’m constantly struggling myself with all of the things that we could be doing better, with all of the things that I’d like to be doing differently, with all of the shortcomings inherent in any business but especially a brand new, very young venture.
One thing I’ve learned is to accept that during these especially challenging and uncertain times we’re going to have to do less. There are opportunities that we’re going to have to put on the back burner, and there are initiatives that we just can’t execute at the level that we would like to. For the time being we’re just not going to do those things, and simply focus on the core. For a new business like Ipsa, focusing on the core is essential.
It’s easy to become distracted as all of the shiny objects, all of the potential opportunities available to a new business begin to show themselves. To the extent that there is a silver lining in the current climate, it is that we are being forced to focus on the fundamentals. In our case it is about making really good food and getting it to our customers in a way that ensures a high quality experience.
By being forced to do that we’ve learned so much about our core business in a way that puts us in a position to grow intentionally, in a manner that’s aligned with our long-term vision for improving how people eat at home. So the bottom line is, don’t try to ignore the fact that this is a really, really difficult moment, but instead recognize the opportunity to narrow your focus toward doing fewer things, but doing them really, really well.
