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