I have never carried the title of chef. I have also never had the privilege of working in a French Brigade style kitchen. Mostly, I would be most comfortable with the title of cook.
Now, it’s funny because even that title seems to be a little more overreaching of a description for what I do currently and professionally. In recent times, the exhibition of my cooking skills have been limited to and focused on the cooking of meats. Specifically, the barbecuing of large volumes of beef, pork, chicken, turkey, and sausage through the use of 1000 gal offset smokers.
The art and skill of barbecuing is something I have pursued both as an amateur and as a professional. Low and slow smoking is the style of cooking I am most adept at right now, and I do believe it is quite a refined set of skills that I have developed in my pursuit of tender, juicy, smoked meats.
Now, since I work professionally for a barbecue restaurant, I am prevented from pursuing gainful opportunities in the barbecued food space that may be viewed as competition, or detractors, to my current employer. Therefore, I am prohibited from opening my own barbecue business on the side that would be in direct competition with my employer given the assumption that the level of my skill is the product of my proprietary knowledge based on my employers techniques.
I understand their point, but the truth is that I have a skill that is being utilized mostly for my employer’s benefit, which could also be utilized for my own direct benefit. So, I decided I was going to craft my own barbecue for sale at a local food market once a week as a way to cash in on my own skills of business and barbecue in a “side hustle” kind of way.
My first concern was how do I cook and sell barbecue without violating my non-compete contract with my current employer. The answer I came up with was to cook something in the barbecue space that they are not pursuing: whole hog barbecue. It is a genre and a challenge unto itself, and ultimately it produces delicious and uniquely flavored pulled pork.
Whole hog cooking is a time honored tradition of the Carolinas and Tennessee, to my knowledge, but it has a very limited history here in Arkansas. That’s not to say pork doesn’t have a huge presence or following here, it’s just very few people are doing the whole hog cook. In the professional barbecue world, whole hog is in a league of its own.
My idea was to do a whole hog cook once a week on Friday to have it ready for the market on Saturday morning. Easy enough, right? My wife was going to make some of her signature sauces and phenomenal pico, and we’d sell the pork as tacos or by the pound. Simple, right?
Everything seems simple from the 10,000ft overview of a daydream, but it becomes very complex very quickly when one starts to dig into the steps and requirements of making that happen. I thought obstacle number one was the grill, so I began working on that problem first. Where could I buy a portable grill to accommodate an entire hog, where could I store it, and where could I do a live-fire cook for 24+ hours. Seemed like a problem that I could simply work my way through, but I seem to be running into problem after problem as I turned over stone after stone chasing an ideal circumstance.
It turned out that the expense of the grill and a place to store it was not the biggest obstacle. The Health Department requires that any food that is temperature controlled for safety (TCS) must be prepared in a Health Department certified restaurant kitchen or in a rented commercial kitchen, which is also known as a commissary. So, my challenge now was not only did I need to find a place to park my large grill, but that place also needed to be Health Department certified. That detail forces me into an unexpected expense and inconvenience because this put an end to my hope that I could simply park the grill in front of my apartment once a week and cook up a whole hog, then take it over to the market on Saturday and sell the 80 pounds of meat in taco form.
In my daydream version of this endeavor, I would have earn back the initial $4000 cost of the trailered grill and then just the cost of wood ($200) and pork ($250) before I could start turning a profit. To cover the wood and meat alone in this scenario, I would need to sell 180 tacos at $2.50 a piece in a 5-hour window on Saturday morning. If you figure the average person would buy two tacos, then that would mean I would need 18 customers an hour starting at 8am to break even on just the meat and wood alone.
That is a big pressure on a perishable product to sell in a somewhat limited window of time. Unfortunately, this also ignores many other costs that seem negligible, but really aren’t upon deeper consideration. For example, the cost of ingredients for the pico and the sauces, the tortillas, the paper boats, napkins, drinks, and tax are some that come to mind. Again, all these costs with the expectation of recovering them during one five hour sale.
So when you start to factor in additional costs like renting time at a commercial commissary space and storage for the grill during the week, the starting price point for the taco quickly rises to $4.73 a taco to break even on an estimated $850 in costs per week (not including the capital investment of the grill or the tent). But that price again rises to over $5 a taco when you include the cost of the insurance, tax, licensing and market fees. Expecting 90 people to buy two $5 tacos each in five morning hours is pretty wishful thinking. Unfortunately, all this speculation does not include tow other critical costs: labor and vehicle fuel.
So what began as an effort to utilize my barbecuing skill-set to benefit myself more directly, turned into a very steep upfront cost gamble situation in which I would actually have to work for free. That seems counter productive to my original intention, and it explains why this idea is something I have never seen at a market. Anyone able to sell tacos at a farmers market is either absorbing some costs by operating a full-time restaurant or food truck, or they are side-stepping some of the other costs in creative ways.
The food business is a high risk business. It is even more risky than my previous forays into creative-product based businesses I have endeavored to undertake before because food not only has the challenges of subjectivity and popularity, but it also has the added pressure of its perishable nature. You have to sell it today because you’ll have to throw away what doesn’t sell.
I thought it was a good idea, but at the end of this mental exercise I realized that my cooking skill may not be one I can capitalize on in a once-a-week venture. Back to the drawing board.
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