How the packaged food business helped 3 Portland restaurants survive the pandemic


The restaurant business is always full of uncertainty. Decades before the epidemic, studies found that more than half of new restaurants failed within three years of opening. Anyone who has worked in the industry knows that the hours are long, the work is grueling and the profit margins are thin.

The current pandemic has forced many restaurants to close their doors for good. In Portland alone, Running Number now lists more than 200 restaurants that have closed in the past two and a half years.

For those chefs, bar owners and restaurateurs out there they have While they’ve stayed open, many have had to operate: high-end restaurants have retooled their menus to serve home-heated family meals, bars have pushed the Oregon Legislature to legalize cocktails, and some have found success in making the transition to bottled. foods.

Liz Davis, founder and owner of Zico Restaurant, said: “The decline in revenue from canned goods has helped us sustain the outbreak.”

An upscale Mexican restaurant. Opened in 2012, it is one of the few restaurants in the United States that grinds its own corn.

“We have a molino, which is a volcanic corn grinder,” Davis said. We process and grind organic, non-GMO field corn that we use for all of our tortillas, chips and field-based products.

When Xico closed its doors to in-person dining in March 2020, it had two locations and a staff of 70 people. Within a week, they were down to a crew of five and set about creating meals to go. Their strong mailing list gave them a direct line to their customers, and for the next year and a half, Xico created and sold family styles intended for home heating. They also offer canned salsas, corn tortillas and homemade chips. “It was definitely very experimental at first,” she said.

A break came after Davis marketed Zico’s chips to local grocery chain New Seasons.

“Me and Susu’s chef were frying hundreds and hundreds of bags of chips, packing them and figuring out how to get them to where they needed them.”

Liz Davis, founder and owner of Zico Restaurant, poses with sous chef Jamil Aguilar.  Throughout the outbreak, the couple hand-cut, fried, and packaged tortilla chips to sell to local stores.

Liz Davis, founder and owner of Zico Restaurant, poses with sous chef Jamil Aguilar. Throughout the outbreak, the couple hand-cut, fried, and packaged tortilla chips to sell to local stores.

Crystal Ligori / OPB

The decision to focus on chips for the retail market rather than other products was strategic. Selling perishables in grocery stores is more complicated than shelf-stable items, Davis said.

But going from restaurant owner to canned food maker is not an easy task. A second grocery store, Choice Market, was interested in Xico’s chips and invited Davis to participate in “Oregon Angel Food,” a three-month educational program organized by the nonprofit Oregon Entrepreneurs Network. The program is two-fold: providing both education and networking in the packaged foods sector, but also offering one year of shelf space in select markets after their products are developed.

“I learned a lot [and] We met a lot of people,” Davis said, noting that his restaurant space was already outgrown for chips.

Xico is in the process of expanding its chip production and bringing in a second flavor through another local company, Community Co-Pak NW.

Going forward, Davis sees packaged chips working with restaurants to complement each other.

“I think the seasonality in the packaged food world can be antithetical to the seasonality in the restaurant business, so they can complement each other in slow times,” she said. “That obviously helps the bottom line and helps us stay in business.”

Mexican restaurant Xico Molino uses a volcanic stone corn grinder to grind the corn for its homemade chips.

Mexican restaurant Xico Molino uses a volcanic stone corn grinder to grind the corn for its homemade chips.

Crystal Ligori / OPB

For Eugene Jung, co-owner of ping pong bar Pips and Bounces, the outbreak put an immediate end to his career, with no real alternative.

“Because you’re around people and you’re playing ping pong, this pandemic is probably one of the worst brick-and-mortar businesses you can own,” Jung said.

The bar saw a run of success in the six years it opened before the pandemic hit: an article in the New York Times, an appearance on Shark Tank and a second location to open in Minneapolis.

“We were actually having a Shark Tank viewing party with 50 or 60 people and we had local news crews. [there]” said Jung. “The videographer made a cell phone call during the viewing party and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to go because [Oregon] We got the first case of covid.’ They had to pack up, they moved out, and we closed in maybe 10 days.

Jung was running at full speed, concentrating on Pips and Bounces, and while he was upset when they closed, he knew it wasn’t healthy to just swallow in anger. Checking in on employees on their shared Slack channel, he saw one mention that Amazon’s fulfillment center was hiring.

“You know what? I thought about it. It gives me something to do as opposed to just sitting at home.’

Jung was employed as a ‘selector’ and the work he said could be back-breaking. “It was a crazy job because you were picking like a thousand items in one shift,” he said. “You can choose items as light as a chapstick or as heavy as a 50-pound bag of dog food.”

Within the first few weeks, Jung began to see a pattern emerge. Most orders fall into two categories: pet food or coffee.

If this is what people are ordering in the worst human crisis of our lifetime… this would be great fun.

Not knowing when Pips and Bounces would open, Jung began his research. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he didn’t want to make pet food, but he says the barrier to entry for a new business, roasting coffee, is pretty low. Especially for a commercial kitchen that had a 4,500 square foot building.

“So I was like, ‘OK, I can repurpose Pips and Bounces for a while and learn how to make coffee.’

It also had another advantage on its side – lots and lots of time to learn. He said brewing coffee was an art, not a science equation, and much of the process was trial and error. At first, he wasn’t sure about the barbecue, but as the outbreak continued, he knew he had to go inside.

“Like many small businesses or entrepreneurs, you have that belief,” he said.

Scout Coffee Roasters’ first customers were friends and family, but Jung knew that expanding into the grocery world was his next step. With many cafes, bars and restaurants still closed or limited to take-out, grocery stores still had a built-in clientele.

“It kind of came out after I walked into the first grocery store, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m onto this,'” he said.

Through other small business owners, Jung connected with the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, learning through their program and finding retail space. He was one of two new business owners recognized this year with a $5,000 grant from the BFM Fund through the Emerge Initiative Award to support entrepreneurs of color in the early stages of business development.

With Pips & Bounce now reopening, Jung Scout Coffee isn’t going anywhere.

“Roasting coffee is a growing business for me,” he said, “so I have a foot in both businesses and I’m keeping myself very busy.”

Chef Sandra Arnerich has a baked bianco verde pizza from Renata.  She and her husband, Nick, created a frozen pizza line for their pantry program during the pandemic.  They have now closed the restaurant to focus all energy on the pizza business.

Chef Sandra Arnerich has a baked bianco verde pizza from Renata. She and her husband, Nick, created a frozen pizza line for their pantry program during the pandemic. They have now closed the restaurant to focus all energy on the pizza business.

Crystal Ligori / OPB

“The restaurant business is tough,” says Renata’s chef-owner Sandra Arnerich. “And I never want to cover it because I think it would be a disaster for the people in it.”

Her wood-fired Italian restaurant with her husband, Nick, made waves as soon as it opened and was named “Restaurant of the Year” in 2015 just six weeks after opening. A year later, the couple started a sister cafe, Philia, and a third location opened weeks before the outbreak.

The same week Oregon Governor Kate Brown instituted a statewide stay at home order, Renata was ready to receive a whole cow from a local farm.

“My first thought was, ‘We don’t have a restaurant, we can’t take this cow!’ It was,” Arnerich said. But as the farmers are on the road and the animal has already been slaughtered, she decides to accept the meat and says “to help”.

By that Monday, Thursday, Renata already had a pantry program going. They had a lot of items from the restaurant, so they decided to put everything into a program designed to feed families at affordable prices.

“We are parents too,” Arnerich said. “Our struggle was the same struggle that everyone else was going through. No one wants to go to the grocery store, everyone homeschools, everyone is working from home and people want food.

That initial idea changed over the following weeks and months, as things were changing so quickly. People are more comfortable going to the store again, but dining out is still a no-go. Sandra’s husband, Nick, suggested renovating and freezing Renata’s pizzas at his restaurant for a home customer.

“We put them into our pantry program and we couldn’t keep them. [in stock]He said. She said. “People were buying six at a time.”

By then, supply chain issues had begun to change what supermarkets had in stock. Arnerich said she noticed that New Seasons Market was struggling to fill their shelves now that many of the products that were coming in were in epidemic demand, such as toilet paper. So they approached the grocery store to see if they would be interested in carrying Renata’s pizza.

“Can you deliver 3,000 pizzas in three weeks?” And I want you to understand that when we had the restaurant, we thought we could bake two pizzas in our oven at once,” she said.

Not only did they create 3,000 pizzas, but they also created branding, packaging and labels for them. For the first two years, Renata’s pizzas were available in stores, where they were the No. 1 and No. 2 best-selling frozen products the grocer carried.

Par-baked pizza cooling on a wire rack at Renata's Restaurant in Southeast Portland.  The pizzas are packaged and frozen for resale at local grocery stores.

Par-baked pizza cooling on a wire rack at Renata’s Restaurant in Southeast Portland. The pizzas are packaged and frozen for resale at local grocery stores.

Crystal Ligori / OPB

What started as an answer to how to keep a restaurant afloat during the pandemic has now turned into its own successful product line.

“It really changed the way we operate as a business.” She said. “Walking away from here is not an option for us.”

After the return of indoor dining, Renata was working double duty as a pizza maker and restaurateur, but things were still challenging. Aside from the massive damage caused by the outbreak, everything from hiring workers to the desirability of their surroundings changed.

“Returning to day-to-day restaurant work is three times more difficult than it was before the pandemic,” Arnerich said. “And it was already very difficult. [before that]He said.

Last month, Renata quietly closed the restaurant, posting on social media that they had decided to focus all their energy on their frozen pizza line.

They still host private events in the former restaurant space. But Arnerich says, “The pizza business is a great way to continue doing what we love.” [but] Do it differently.





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