It’s been a while since my last blog, so I have a lot of catching up to do here. We are halfway through the fourth of five projects in our program, and this one is a passion project. All of my team members are foodies, and so we agreed to work on a food-centered project together. 

We came across an interesting startup called Meal Sharing, which allows people to host or be a guest at a home-cooked meal. Our team is designing for a new feature which will allow people to buy and sell home-cooked food for take-out or delivery. Essentially, an Etsy for amateur chefs. 

This is actually a difficult problem to solve. As we learned through interviewing potential users, food is a deeply personal thing. We need to trust that cleanliness standards and dietary restrictions are respected. Food has the potential to make our bodies feel fantastic or incredibly sick, and when we eat someone else’s food we’re trusting them with how our bodies feel. 

We also learned that people feel very comfortable going to potlucks with friends, acquaintances and friends-of-friends and eating all the food there. When asked to define what made them feel comfortable eating food at potlucks from people they don’t know well (or at all), many people found it difficult to explain. Intellectually, people knew that eating random contributions at a potluck is not actually safer than buying home cooked food from someone in your neighborhood. However, the level of familiarity they had with the cook, even just by meeting them through a friend at the potluck, increased their feeling of safety tremendously. 

From these key insights, we learned that our Meal Sharing feature must make customers feel familiar with a given home chef. Therefore, we prioritized making a chef’s profile page robust, including a general introduction to the chef (aka a short bio), pictures of the food and the kitchen, and of course customer reviews.  

Here is a preview of our chef profile page, which is a medium-fidelity wireframe for the purposes of testing and iteration in the future:

It’s not often that I would say this, but Bart and Homer clearly had it wrong:  you can win friends with salad.  

Each Thursday at the Impact HUB in SoMa, our coworking space, we close our computers at 12.42pm and gather around to share a bowl of salad and actually talk (in that satisfyingly old-fashioned face-to-face kind of way).  Somehow this weekly gathering became known as the Sexy Salad Society, and we like to think of it as the most exclusive inclusive sexiest salad society in San Francisco (try saying that three times).

It’s usually simple fare - garden salad, beans, rice - but I think that’s part of the attraction.  At $2/head, and for an allocated time of 18 minutes, you can’t kid yourself that you could buy something cheaper, faster or healthier from the neighboring shops or food trucks.  And while you’re helping yourself to a simple, healthy lunch, you may as well make friends with the people you pass in the corridors or see at the printer.

I kind of like the fact that the food is unfussy.  I have previously had workplace potlucks escalate into semi-competitive events (which is fun in the short-term but hard to sustain when you’re up at 11pm the night before making shortcrust pastry for your rustic quiche that you brought along because that’s just the kind of casually impressive mid-week cook you happen to be).  It also emphasises that a meal doesn’t have to be fancy in order to create a special experience.

SupperShare’s co-founder Kim leads the charge every week to serve salad to the hungry masses as they connect with each other between bites. For her, a dining experience doesn’t have to be an expensive, long-winded affair, but an opportunity to break bread and make new friends. Beyond Sexy Salad Society, each week, SupperShare hosts use simple food as a tool to connect with others in more meaningful ways and to give back.

I’m on a mission to consume my body weight in peaches this Summer, so this week I made a peach tabbouleh.  It’s one of the recipes that I discovered when looking through Nigel Slater’s book Tender the other week and it’s currently on high rotation in my household.  It takes all of about 10 minutes to prepare, fits the $2/head budget, and yet somehow still feels quite indulgent.  I guess that’s the magic of perfectly ripe Summer peaches.  Kim teamed it with a simple Greek salad and Gigantes, an herbed white bean and tomato dish.

Some of my (new) Sexy Salad Society friends asked for the tabbouleh recipe, so I thought I’d post it here for our SupperSharers.  Maybe it will inspire you to make some new friends in your workplace ... or serve at your next Supper!

Peach tabbouleh (Nigel Slater)

1 ½ cups bulgur

6 slim spring onions

4 ripe peaches

a small, hot red chilli

1 bunch mint

1 bunch flat-leaf parsley

1 bunch cilantro

juice of a lemon

olive oil

Pour the bulgur into a bowl and just cover with boiling water, then set aside.

Finely chop the chilli, then roughly chop the spring onions, mint, parsley, and cilantro. Dice the peaches into bite-sized pieces.

One of the nice things about being part of SupperShare in the Bay Area is that you certainly don’t feel like Robinson Crusoe.  You don’t have to look too far to find like-minded souls.  More often than not, I don’t get too far into telling people about SupperShare before they’re nodding in agreement and telling me about how they’re involved in something that shares similar aims, or asking me how they can get involved in SupperShare.  (Just FYI, the answer to the second part of that is quite simple – check out suppershare.com and just sign yourself up for one of the dinners that are going on across the city).

Anyway, when Kim and I were introduced to Leah from Wild Soul, we had one of those moments, where we realized that each of our projects come from shared values and have a lot in common.  They’re both about bringing people together around food (but outside of the stodgy restaurant scene).  They’re about finding new ways to build connections and create a sense of community.

I would love to be able to tell you about attending a Wild Soul breakfast club.  Every month, Wild Soul holds a small breakfast event at a secret location that brings together an interesting crew of people over healthy, homemade food made by different guest chefs.  But it seems it’s so popular that it’s booked out for the next couple of months.  So maybe ask me about it in September.

In the meantime, I (or you) stand a fighting chance of being able to go to one of their regular farm-to-table events.  These events combine yoga, food and farming in delightfully unusual settings.  The idea is to allow us to open up and have the same kind of unexpected experiences that we have when we’re traveling, but closer to home.  Just like SupperShare, Wild Souls is about challenging our ideas about what is public space and what is private space.  When we disrupt those assumptions, we are more open to start sharing in different and more meaningful ways.  It’s also just kind of interesting to change your scene and meet new people in unexpected surroundings.