Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Speaker 2: tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: According to the US Small Business Administration, the US is
Speaker 1: more than thirty six million small businesses, and those businesses
Speaker 1: provide close to forty six percent of employment in the
Speaker 1: private sector. And our next guest knows a lot about that.
Speaker 1: He is someone I have known for a long time.
Speaker 1: Brad Finkel is CEO of Hoboken Farms. It's a family
Speaker 1: owned company, started out in local farmers' markets and has
Speaker 1: grown into a business that sells pasta and sauces all
Speaker 1: over the country. And it's taken you. First of all, welcome,
Speaker 1: it's great to have you here.
Speaker 3: Birthday, Oh thank you.
Speaker 1: But I have known you a long time and I
Speaker 1: want to get into how you've gone from farmers' markets
Speaker 1: to so much more. But I want to also ask
Speaker 1: you because you guys, I've been to your you know,
Speaker 1: bought from your different stands.
Speaker 3: In Southton Park, Jersey City.
Speaker 1: I have, I have, I have, And so you guys
Speaker 1: have people out in front talking with consumers all the time.
Speaker 1: How would you say the consumers doing right.
Speaker 3: Now, I think the consumer is scared. I think the
Speaker 3: consumer is confused. I think the consumer is trying to
Speaker 3: grab on to some form of an idea of what
Speaker 3: they can plan for, and they can't find it, so.
Speaker 1: Being more discretionary and spending. Do you see that?
Speaker 3: I Well, in my exact world, I find consumers are
Speaker 3: not going out to eat to restaurants as much. They
Speaker 3: are cooking at home. So they're coming to us, but
Speaker 3: they certainly want unbelievably high quality, and they also want
Speaker 3: value for their money.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I see that too. People aren't ordering food as much
Speaker 2: here in New York City. They're not getting delivery as
Speaker 2: much of.
Speaker 1: The We're definitely not doing that.
Speaker 2: I've talked to some folks about this for a couple
Speaker 2: of reasons. One, the prices have with all the fees
Speaker 2: added on the crazy incredibly high. So yeah, I think
Speaker 2: people are cooking more at home. Is this a different
Speaker 2: How is this moment different from other moments that you've
Speaker 2: sort of experienced being in this space. I know that
Speaker 2: your business has grown a lot in recent years, but
Speaker 2: you've had a good eye on the consumer for quite
Speaker 2: a long time.
Speaker 3: You know. I started my business in nineteen ninety two.
Speaker 3: We participate in up to eight hundred farm markets a year.
Speaker 3: That's outdoors, underneath tents, on the street, face to face
Speaker 3: with our consumers in two thousand and one. You know,
Speaker 3: we were there during nine to eleven. Then during the
Speaker 3: recession we went through that. This feels kind of like
Speaker 3: a combination of both, not just confusion, but fear.
Speaker 2: This is such a different message than we're getting from
Speaker 2: the executives of big companies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, who seem to be still a beat about a
Speaker 1: lot of things.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, if you're an investor, that's great, But
Speaker 3: if you're trying to feed your family and you're not
Speaker 3: going to restaurants anymore, and you're going to supermarkets, and
Speaker 3: if not supermarkets, farm markets, Brad. You know, it's so.
Speaker 1: Interesting because I think about some of the things that
Speaker 1: we spend headlines talking about today's day, where we talked
Speaker 1: a lot about the Federal Reserve. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: ask for your view on that.
Speaker 3: But it's just one of the Kevins.
Speaker 1: Nice well done, But this is why I've loved talking
Speaker 1: to you over the years. You've also been a real
Speaker 1: estate investor, you've sold businesses, but it's it's what really
Speaker 1: matters when it comes to small businesses. Is it changes
Speaker 1: in the administration? Is it any of that stuff?
Speaker 3: Far be it for me to be able to say
Speaker 3: what matters. What matters to me is stability. If I'm
Speaker 3: going to plan for next month, next year, I have
Speaker 3: to be able to have an understanding of what it
Speaker 3: is I'm planning for. I mean, for instance, our pasta
Speaker 3: sauce is you know, popping up on shelves across the
Speaker 3: supermarkets of America. Tariffs hit our ingredients, our cogs go up.
Speaker 3: What do you do about that? So its a small business,
Speaker 3: you know, it is something that hits our pocketbook. Last night,
Speaker 3: I just read a posting from a really well known
Speaker 3: restaurant that is closing its doors, and it was really like,
Speaker 3: I cannot do this anymore. Is just a horrendous place
Speaker 3: in the country to be able to do? You know,
Speaker 3: we still have.
Speaker 1: During COVID, we were shocked by how many, even like
Speaker 1: very well known chefs and restauranteurs who were struggling and
Speaker 1: we thought they would be good. We want to get
Speaker 1: to your story because farmer's market is where you began.
Speaker 1: You have tons of farmers' markets and you're doing it
Speaker 1: in crazy weather and even this weekend in the cold.
Speaker 1: How do you get to where you've got multiple brand
Speaker 1: not brands, but jars of sauces, different things, and you've
Speaker 1: become a much bigger business. You're in a ton of
Speaker 1: stores around the country. And tell me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: because my daughter said, I think I bought them in London.
Speaker 3: There we do have a couple of places in London
Speaker 3: that you can buy it at a small, smaller independent.
Speaker 3: In fact, yeah, we've just got an order from Ireland
Speaker 3: today and the tiriffs affected. Now all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: there's a lot more hoops that we have to come through.
Speaker 3: So I was a teenager living in Hoboken, New Jersey,
Speaker 3: playing bass in a band in a van, touring from
Speaker 3: Hoboken to Maine, down to Virginia to Memphis to Nashville
Speaker 3: into Austin, Texas. And as you could imagine, that is
Speaker 3: not a great plan for financial stability. So I was
Speaker 3: going to Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, up Route seventeen,
Speaker 3: and I would meet these nice kids who weren't from Hoboken,
Speaker 3: and they would say, would you like to come over
Speaker 3: from my house? And I said yes, and then I
Speaker 3: would get a phone call, Hey, my mother wants to know,
Speaker 3: could you bring some once at all? Sure, my father
Speaker 3: wants to know, could you bring a baguette? Some baguettes
Speaker 3: from Dom's Bakery at six and grand absolutely. And this
Speaker 3: kept on happening, and I said to my grandmother, do
Speaker 3: they not have breading shees where they live? But what
Speaker 3: it was in my sociology class that I heard about
Speaker 3: was the gentrification in Hoboken had started. These were ex
Speaker 3: Hoboken ice who had moved to the suburbs. And I
Speaker 3: started did a home delivery service. Literally, if you called
Speaker 3: me and left the message on my old cassette answering
Speaker 3: machine on Monday, I delivered to you on Tuesday. If
Speaker 3: you called on Thursday, I delivered to you on Friday.
Speaker 3: And I ended up with a couple of hundred customers.
Speaker 3: One of those customers was a gentleman named Peter Baronio.
Speaker 3: Peter Baronio became the economic development director for Anglewood, New Jersey,
Speaker 3: called me up and said, we're having a farm market.
Speaker 3: Would you like to come? I said, what's a farm market?
Speaker 3: And he said, I don't know, but we're having one.
Speaker 1: So crazy because they're everywhere.
Speaker 3: Now, well now they are. But yeah, kind of started
Speaker 3: as a side hustle. I made a marinara sauce, and
Speaker 3: that marinara sauce really took off. Now that's kind of
Speaker 3: the short story. People would stand downline and buy it.
Speaker 3: By the case. A very important buyer from Whole Food
Speaker 3: saw that line of people tried our sauce and called
Speaker 3: me up on a cell phone and said, we'd love
Speaker 3: to have you in our stores. And I said which one.
Speaker 3: They said, all of them across the Northeast. So that
Speaker 3: started my journey from farm markets to supermarkets across America.
Speaker 2: We're speaking of Brad Finkel, founder and CEO of Hoboken
Speaker 2: Farms here in the studio. You brought the selection of
Speaker 2: what you do offer includes pasta and sauces. How have
Speaker 2: you been able to keep the taste and the ingredients
Speaker 2: consistent as you've scaled and gotten bigger?
Speaker 3: Oh wow, we go? Have you?
Speaker 2: Were you able to do that?
Speaker 3: Well? We go, Yes, we go to every run. We're there,
Speaker 3: so we're tasting tests. We're tasting color, we're tasting viscosity,
Speaker 3: we have sugar content. So if it does not meet
Speaker 3: those expectations, it gets donated to the Community Food Bank
Speaker 3: of New Jersey.
Speaker 1: But I want to go back because I know this.
Speaker 1: You had mentioned to me that one of the reasons
Speaker 1: you got to disauce is your customers started asking for
Speaker 1: it because I've bought your ravioli, and people were like,
Speaker 1: can I get some sauce?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: So, all day, every day we sell now hundreds of
Speaker 3: thousands of lows of bread and tons of Mazdela and barrada,
Speaker 3: countless coolers of ravioli, and people would come to us
Speaker 3: and say, do you have any sauce to go with
Speaker 3: that ravioli? Nope, have any sauce to go with the pasta?
Speaker 3: I do not. Finally, a guy, very Jersey guy, came
Speaker 3: over and said, hey, dummy, who are you standing next to?
Speaker 3: And I looked to my right and it was Kurt
Speaker 3: Olsted from Osted Farms. That was Dale from Stony Hill Farms,
Speaker 3: it was Match from Cherry Grove Farms, it was Dug
Speaker 3: from Race Farms. Fellas got to get some tomatoes and
Speaker 3: some basil and we started making some sauce.
Speaker 2: But you also mentioned that you have to get some
Speaker 2: ingredients from outside of the US.
Speaker 3: Well, olive oil, Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: Okay, So is that it is that everything else is
Speaker 2: from from Jersey.
Speaker 3: We do our very best. You know, our original ingredients
Speaker 3: came directly from the farm markets we are. We have
Speaker 3: to make sure that we have the best tomatoes, the
Speaker 3: best basil, the best onions. What I think is a sauce. Now.
Speaker 1: What is so cool is though it's like you listen
Speaker 1: to the community or the community says do this, and
Speaker 1: then when you go to make sauce, you look around
Speaker 1: you and you embrace the community to.
Speaker 3: Do it well. A form market is both an ecosystem
Speaker 3: and an incubator, right. So as an ecosystem, right, you know,
Speaker 3: I need tomatoes and basil, and there's tomatoes and basil.
Speaker 1: Okay, Now I want to go to the community because
Speaker 1: there's a point where you grow in the business and
Speaker 1: you got to think about financing and capital and raising capital.
Speaker 1: And again I feel like the community kind of came
Speaker 1: to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we kind of have a one in a
Speaker 3: million raised story. It became obvious that the opportunities that
Speaker 3: were coming our way meant that I needed a bigger boat.
Speaker 3: So I was ready to kind of start going to
Speaker 3: institutional investors and you know, the banks of America and
Speaker 3: telling my story. When word got out to our customers
Speaker 3: kind of through the grapevine that we were contemplating this,
Speaker 3: some very savvy really it's some very savvy investors said, wait,
Speaker 3: we want to be part of this. They've invested in
Speaker 3: CpG products before. And I didn't have to do any
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 1: I got it. We've only got about a minute left here.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, when you raised four million dollars in funding, we.
Speaker 1: Have Okay, so where do you go with this IPO?
Speaker 3: Sell it?
Speaker 1: What do you want to do? No?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, we are We are building our business
Speaker 3: straight down ninety five, down south to the Midwest. We
Speaker 3: have Pavilions and Lassons in California. We have jewel uh
Speaker 3: and uh, Tony's and Pette's in Midwest Central Market in Texas.
Speaker 3: We are growing our distribution certainly also online as well.
Speaker 3: Uh you know, direct to consumer.
Speaker 1: Do you plan to expand the products?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have a pizza sauce coming, we have we
Speaker 3: have a couple of other things. But we are a
Speaker 3: small but mighty group of experts. So I was able
Speaker 3: to get those economics to bring on expertise and better execution,
Speaker 3: and that's allowing us to scale a crossomer.
Speaker 1: So why we like talking. It is the backbone of
Speaker 1: the US economy.
Speaker 3: Bred THINKL. Thank you so much