Business Seedlings

The post A Restaurant that Started as a Part-time Delivery Service is in the existing links on the old Log page that I'm updating. I've just added labels to it and I've been wrestling for days with trying to come up with some phrase for the theme of my recent writing. 

I've added the tags Basic.Industrial.and.Commercial.Development and Economic.Development to it which are new tags trying to capture what's been on my mind that led me to write Farms in the Game SimCity 3000, plus Food.Business which is an existing tag that I've had for a while. 

I've also added the tag Business.Seedlings to it to try to capture something. I don't think it really does so and I'm still thinking about how to label stuff and explain it.

The restaurant business is notoriously hard to break into. It has such slim margins that upgrading your lightbulbs to environmentally friendly, low wattage bulbs can be the make or break for a restaurant.

I don't have the source for that information anymore. It was a British piece. This looks similar.

Everyone needs to eat. Food sells if it's edible but it's a tough business to do profitably and successfully.

There's a saying: "Fast, Cheap, Good. Pick two." People want all three when purchasing food to eat. 

I write a lot about heteronormative culture and how it shapes our world. 

Food culture the world over is rooted in a model where mom does the grocery shopping and food preparation and she knows a lot about the nutritional needs and personal quirks of all family members and she keeps all that in mind while arranging to feed them. Meanwhile, full-time homemakers are steadily becoming a thing of the past, especially in developed countries where couples often need two full-time incomes to afford housing and other essentials. 

The developed world is in a state of crisis over this change and countless meal kit services are trying to solve this problem of people needing food that's fast, cheap and good and not knowing how to get that without "mom" doing it for them. 

I have an entire website devoted to my own efforts to solve this problem. It's called Nutrient Dense and it has a post about meal kit services. 

For people in extremely underdeveloped areas, growing adequate food after adding Very Basic Water Infrastructure is likely to be one of the first problems they solve. If you have not just adequate food but extra, the logical next step is selling food while wondering how else to turn your newfound infrastructure into economic development opportunities. 

Additionally, promoting economic development and women's rights goes hand in hand. And all of this is currently constrained the world over by a global model that relies on a full-time homemaker to do "the women's work" which includes acquiring food and preparing it.

I write Nutritient Dense in part because most women at the Fortune 200 company where I worked were still doing the cooking and cleaning at home, often while making more money than their husband. 

So I'm keenly interested in the food business because:

1. Adequate nutrition is health care.

2. Breaking out of heteronormative cultural paradigms is a women's rights issue and a global crisis currently for people trying to promote careers for women and not adequately able to address the issue of "How do I and my family members all eat adequately well that me getting a job doesn't lead to a huge crisis that destroys my career and sends me home to tend to everyone's health in crisis conditions?"

3. Global food security is a basis for global peace and prosperity and currently being threatened by #2 above, among other things. 

4. The food business is notoriously hard to do profitably though everyone needs to eat and food certainly sells AND it's a logical next step once subsistence farmers have adequate water infrastructure and enough to eat.

Business generally is hard to break into, even if you have both psychological and logistical risk tolerance in the form of capital, education and the right personality. If you're dirt poor and have education and ideas but no capital, I am baffled how you turn that into a business, something I'm actually interested in doing myself and can't figure out though I've been researching it for years.

So I'm keenly interested in solutions like the restaurant linked at the start of this post that began as a part-time burrito business delivery service using bicycles to deliver food during a limited window of time each week. 

I'm interested in vending machine lunches and breakfast bar ideas where you may be serving food with very limited ability to cook and other models for providing food that's fast, good and cheap while still turning a profit.

And I'm interested generally in how ordinary people start making money given the resources they already have, like my mother who owned a sewing machine and had skills and took in sewing to make money from home part time. 

There's no clear bright line between personal resources and business resources. 

When I first began working at Aflac, they were flush with funds and I was given free pens at meetings regularly and for a long time didn't need to supply my own. The recession hit, the free pens stopped and at some point I had to bring my own to work.

Services like Uber and Door Dash help people who drive and own a vehicle to make money using those resources. If you don't have access to a service that helps you monetize your existing resources or if that doesn't work for you for some reason, how do you roll your own?

I still don't have a succinct phrase for what I'm trying to talk about here where you have certain personal resources and want to turn that into earned income without scary levels of risk in the process. 

But that's a theme of my writing and has been for some time, well before I wrote the Farms in SimCity 3000 piece where that idea began to gel that having water infrastructure puts you at an important threshold that both opens up economic opportunities and potentially threatens the health of your homestead and ability to grow your own food.