Last week I drove an hour north to Boca Raton to visit Hatchery, a second year food-tech startup launched by Max Friedman as a subscription service for home cooks. Each month, for $20, Hatchery subscribers receive a box of sample-sized items like honeys, oils, sauces, mixes, and jams. The products, made independently by small makers from around the country, include items like 7 Salad Dressing, made by Balsamo’s Family Kitchen in Dale City, Virginia or Jalapeno Jam by Jammy Yummy right here in Miami, Florida. Hatchery, sort of a “Birchbox” for the home chef, grew to over 5,000 monthly subscribers. Friedman wanted to do more, though, so in September of this year, Hatchery added a marketplace to allow anyone to purchase its maker’s items. With over 300 products for sale from 150 makers, Hatchery is now a full-blown e-commerce site selling great artisanal food items from around the country. These are the people Friedman wanted to help; they are the reason Hatchery was hatched.
Max Friedman is a 28-year-old serial entrepreneur who sold two businesses before founding Hatchery. A Boca Raton native, Friedman got his start as an entrepreneur at the age of 13. Growing up in a large Jewish community and attending lots of Bar Mitzvahs, led to his first business idea, a video production company. While the venture was short lived, Friedman said it was a great experience as a teenager. An entrepreneur at heart, Friedman launched three more ventures while attending college at UCF in Orlando. All of his ventures were motivated by a desire to solve problems and help others succeed.
Arriving at UCF, Friedman found a large Jewish student community with only one Jewish organization to care for their needs. In response, Friedman launched his own Jewish network, and it grew quickly, with sold-out events and over 200 students at the average party. The new venture kept Friedman’s entrepreneurial spirit alive, but when a Chabad on Campus Rabbi moved to UCF, Friedman decided to hand the Rabbi his customer list and move on to something new. Looking for other problems to solve, Friedman discovered many local restaurants that students didn’t know about because there was no online directory of great local restaurants (remember this was before Yelp or Foursquare), so he launched College Food Network, an online directory where students could find great local restaurants.
College Food Networks grew, but Friedman wanted to do more, so he and a partner launched Innoboom, a product development agency focused on helping small independent makers gets their products into retail stores. After two years, Friedman decided to go on his own, launching Friedman Creative. Whether the client was a restaurant owner who wanted to bottle his special sauce to sell it in Whole Foods, or an artisan baker who wanted to improve his packaging to sell at a local farmer’s markets, Friedman Creative helped with marketing, packaging, web-development retail relationships and more.
Within five years, Friedman helped launch over 50 brands, most of them food-related. Despite juggling college and his growing business, Friedman felt he’d finally hit his stride as an entrepreneur by helping other small business owners make their dreams come true. But in his success Friedman found another problem: by working closely with his clients on packaging, branding, cost, production and more, Friedman could help them get their product into stores like Whole Foods; but once they got in, the small businesses had a hard time selling and staying in.
Because the grocery business is so competitive and shelf placement so important, small makers are expected to constantly “showcase” their products with in-store sampling and even pay-for-placement. Friedman decided to help these makers another way: instead of perfecting their product to get into retail, why not help create sample sizes that could be easily shipped around the country? Then if someone tried a maker’s product and fell in love with it, they could order directly from the maker. So in 2013, after being on his own for five years, Friedman sold his agency and launched Hatchery.
From day one, Hatchery was all about the maker. Because Friedman was passionate about helping these independent business owners sell their products, he built Hatchery with a promise at its core: he would not only help makers perfect their product, he would also help them get the word out to customers, in their local markets and nationwide. By working with makers at no cost, Friedman not only helped them improve their products and get their samples ready for the monthly Hatchery box, he helped them get their brand and products in front of thousands of customers. But as Hatchery grew its subscription and maker base, Friedman discovered his final problem, a problem that would make Hatchery what it is today.
Although Hatchery and Friedman were accomplishing their mission of getting new and exciting brands and products into people’s homes, the makers were having a hard time handling the orders. While artisanal food makers are usually great at producing their core product, they lack the necessary skills, or capital, to manage the logistical problems that come with success. Friedman found that in addition to bringing his makers orders, he also needed to help them with ordering and fulfillment—that’s when he added a marketplace to his model and took over the distribution. This important pivot took the burden off the makers while bringing in a clear revenue model for Hatchery. Friedman’s start up was now not just a monthly subscription business of food samples, but a place for home cooks to buy hard-to-find products from indie-makers around the country. In addition to buying the products, customers could learn the maker’s stories and find recipes to go along with the products. Today Hatchery warehouses all of its maker’s products in two locations and fulfills orders within 48 hours—something most makers could not afford to do on their own.
Friedman and his team of ten are committed to bringing the best products from across America into your kitchen. Friedman has used his passion for helping small business to fuel his own success. Hatchery is currently looking at raising a $2 million dollar seed round and is likely to close early next year. Friedman plans to use the capital to continue putting the right processes in place to scale Hatchery and bring in a few key hires. As the food-tech space continues to heat up with other e-commerce platforms like Mouth and GoldBely leading the way, Hatchery seems poised to be the breakout brand of 2016.
Hatchery is poised to scale up, with over 600 makers on its waiting list. But this company, initially launched as a subscription service for home cooks, has flourished because of that most important ingredient: a passionate entrepreneur with a lot of experience and a fire to help others succeed.
