TASTE
Pressing pause
Loveless is the sole force behind City Kitchen , with only occasional part-time help . Several months into the pandemic , the pace caught up and Loveless pressed pause . “ One of the highest values for me as a businesswoman is to pay a fair living wage ,” Loveless says . “ I do not mess around with paying minimum wage . … That is literally poverty wages .”
With a rapidly expanding customer base but without the staff to support it , City Kitchen needed time to retool . “ I was working 12 , 14 , 16 hour days , seven days a week ,” Loveless says . “ Mine literally was just a cash-flow issue and a scaling issue .”
Loveless ’ s solution to the scaling issue was to pivot her business model into a brick-and-mortar City Kitchen location with a small cafe that would allow her to hire staff to grow both the cafe and the meal delivery service . Loveless secured an investor immediately , only to have them back out the day of the lease signing . Moving on from that blow has not been a seamless endeavor .
“ A lot of the landlords are very leery right now and they ’ re being extra thorough ,” says Loveless , who adds that she has had to jump through “ a bunch of flaming hoops ” in her search for a restaurant space .
Loveless is in the process of rebuilding that plan through a combination of pop-up events and microloans . She has about 35 micro-investors for her business . She says people are thinking , “ I can invest in the stock market , why don ’ t I invest with purpose into a local woman-owned business ?”
Rebecca Lujan Loveless is the founder of City Kitchen Sacramento , a meal prep business that serves fully-prepared meals to customers .
PHOTO COURTESY OF ERICA CERVANTEZ
“ I was working 12 , 14 , 16 hour days , seven days a week . Mine literally was just a cashflow issue and a scaling issue .”
Rebecca Lujan Loveless , founder , City Kitchen Sacramento
Relief in diverse revenue streams
For Kimberley Bernhardt , of Kimberley ’ s Kitchen in Sacramento , pivoting has been the name of the game for nearly a decade . A staple of local farmer ’ s markets , Bernhardt ’ s homemade soup mixes and other shelf-stable goods led to her expansion into fresh food after she built a commercial kitchen that allowed her to do so legally . In 2018 , Kimberley ’ s Kitchen added ready-to-heat meals to the menu . The meals became a staple of her offerings , especially since she offered vegan meals , which are still a relatively rare option among similar fresh food services . Her website offers a variety of plans , customizable in both quantity and protein .
With Bernhardt ’ s diversity of revenue streams and the pandemic hitting in winter ( traditionally a slower time of year for outdoor markets ), like Loveless , she didn ’ t feel the pinch right away . “ The first two weeks the state shut down , we were the busiest we ’ d ever been . It was absolutely record volume ,” Bernhardt says . “ And then … people realized , ‘ Oh my God , this isn ’ t gonna be over in two weeks ,’ we started getting a lot of cancellations .”
In true Kimberley ’ s Kitchen fashion , Bernhardt used the opportunity to dig deeper into a market she ’ d been toying with for some time : meal-delivery services designed especially for seniors . Bernhardt had been considering creating a line of well-balanced meals for folks who may still be living at home but are no longer able to prepare meals for themselves .
The pandemic gave Kimberley ’ s Kitchen opportunity for a test run into the senior meals market . “ We were also using the pandemic in a marketing way to a certain extent ,” Bernhardt says . “ We started … getting a lot of new customers , people ordering for their elderly parents .” Kimberley ’ s Kitchen ’ s involvement with Great Plates , the state and federally funded program that helped keep restaurant and catering businesses afloat by paying them to prepare meals for
22 comstocksmag . com | July 2021