🔒Fork Food Lab, Atlantic Sea Farms cook winning recipes in move from food retail to ‘etail’

Something’s cooking at Fork Food Lab these days, but not the pre-pandemic markets and events that had become regular happenings.

Closed to the public since mid-March, the shared commercial kitchen and food-business incubator in Portland’s West Bayside neighborhood has opened an online market that’s keeping more than a dozen of its 26 members busy as the restaurant sector remains on hold.

They include Hannah Lake White, who runs and co-owns Lake & Co., with her husband, Charles, a chef.

The seasonal catering company, normally quiet this time of year, is busier than ever selling ready-to-heat-and-eat frozen comfort food dishes like macaroni and cheese and chicken pot pie through Fork’s online market for curbside pickup, as well as dishes through an ecommerce site of their own they built with Square.

“It’s going to be hard for this to compete with the money I can make from events, but I never opened in March or April before, so my numbers look amazing,” White says.

Fork Food Lab, headed by Bill Seretta of a Yarmouth nonprofit that bought the business in 2018, set up the online market as its five-person staff reconfigured the building for the new setup, creating more room between work areas. It also gave Plucked Salsa more room after it doubled production, picking up Shaw’s grocery stores as a new customer “during all this madness,” Seretta says.

Including Lake & Co., 16 Fork Food Lab members are participating in the online market from a hemp lollipop, tea and candy maker named Anoids to Local Babe Food, a newcomer peddling organic baby food and cloth bibs and sandwich sacks. Just before Mother’s Day weekend, beer and wine were added to the online market.

One month since the launch, Fork Food’s online market has attracted 66 unique customers, 17 of whom have ordered between two and six times. That translates into $1,000 in weekly sales, which on an annualized basis is the same as what on-site markets brought in last year.

Seretta says the goal is to increase the customer base, as well as to change the public’s buying behavior to online.

“If we can get to a base of 200 customers, we’ll be in pretty good shape,” he says.

For its members, Fork Food also aims to create a buying club for bulk ingredient orders as it launches professional development workshops. Seretta is also thinking about the longer-term future after slowing down a planned move he says is still on the table.

“We’re in the process of trying to figure out where our members are going to be six months from now,” he says. “We’ve got a whole bunch of unknowns, but we’re still getting new members.”

At the same time, he says that while food is recession-proof to the extent that everyone needs to eat, it’s also a high-risk business even in the best of times.

“What you want to do is minimize the risk as much as possible,” he says.

‘The way kelp should be’

If organic baby food and chicken pot pies don’t float your boat, then how about some fermented seaweed salad or sea-beet kraut made and sold by Atlantic Sea Farms?

The Saco-based brand of Ocean Approved sells its products — made from kelp grown in Maine—to a growing number of retailers. Led by CEO Briana Warner, it employs seven full-time and two-part time staff and works with 24 partner farmers it supplies with seed and buys from.

Since mid-February, it’s been working with iBec Creative, a Portland-based digital agency headed by Becky McKinnell, to ramp up its ecommerce activities. That partnership was sparked by a $15,000 grant it received from Tastemakers Initiative, a program of Coastal Enterprises Inc. and FocusMaine.

“The way kelp should be,” says the new and improved site, which Atlantic Sea Farms marketing director Jesse Baines says led to a 176% increase in online sales in the last two months.

“Normally what we would be doing right now is in-store demos, which is the most effective way to support your products in store, especially a product like seaweed,” she says. With the current shutdowns making that impossible, “we’re leaning into our digital marketing in a big way.”

Behind the scenes at iBec, digital marketer Devin Temple set out to help what he says was a “beautiful,” educational website use its ecommerce platform to its full potential. That became even more important during the crisis.

“I don’t know what would have happened if they didn’t pivot,” he says.