Food Biz Owners, Hopefuls Seek Clearer Path

For Ariel Diaz, who recently opened Big Apple Grocery & Deli on Blatchley Avenue, convenience stores are a family affair. 

When he was growing up in Brooklyn, his father ​“had stores all over Manhattan and the Bronx.” His uncles own stores in Connecticut. His own brother has one in New Haven, too. 

“You have to be running around” City Hall constantly in order to get anything done, Diaz told a group of city officials and fellow food entrepreneurs about the challenges of opening a business in the Elm City. ​“It’s very time-consuming and money, too.”

Diaz was one of roughly three dozen people to turn out to an ​“Entrepreneur Listening Session” Tuesday evening at the Q House at 197 Dixwell Ave.

Over the course of the night, city officials heard from beekeepers and convenience store operators and prospective business owners all about the obstacles facing entrepreneurs today, namely out-of-date legislation, inaccessible information, and a thicket of licensing and permitting.

Bringing the event together was a team effort — the list of co-hosts included East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, CitySeed Incubates (CitySeed’s food entrepreneurship program), city Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli, and the Grand Avenue Special Services District. Also in attendance were CitySeed’s Cara Santino and Christine Kim, city Environmental Health Director Brian Wnek, and Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller.

Getting proper permitting ​“is a byzantine path for many” food entrepreneurs, said Kim, who serves as CitySeed’s board chair.

As people arrived, they filled their plates with hummus, raw veggies, and slices of pita from Sanctuary Kitchen, CitySeed’s program for welcoming and training refugee and immigrant chefs. More and more people kept arriving — so the circle of chairs in the center of the room kept expanding. 

When the 35-or-so attendees settled, Smith kicked off the meeting with a round of introductions (your name, your business, your favorite food!) and three questions to tackle: What works in the permitting and licensing process? What doesn’t work? What can the city do to support its food entrepreneurs?

The session quickly turned into a lively conversation about the difficulty of accessing permitting information. After each comment, Grand Avenue Special Services District Director Erick Gonzalez translated from English to Spanish, or vice versa. 

“We need a really solid place where you can go and everything is there,” said Sheila Cain of Auntie Sheelah’s Cheesecakes. ​“When you’re starting out, you just want the information. There are so many brick walls in front of us.” 

Nadine Nelson, the owner and chef of Global Local Gourmet, a ​“roving community-supported kitchen,” echoed the sentiment: ​“Make things easy to Google.” 

Two months ago, Diaz opened Big Apple Deli & Grocery in Fair Haven. He discussed with his fellow entrepreneurs New Haven’s permitting and licensing process for food businesses, at Smith’s invitation.

Diaz’s Big Apple Deli & Grocery (deli portion coming soon) at 296 Blatchley Ave. is on the site of a former liquor store — a fact that complicated things with the zoning board when Diaz started the process of trying to open his grocery store last July. It took four months of back and forth. ​“It should be a little bit easier to try to better the community,” Diaz said.

Diaz offered a piece of advice to his fellow entrepreneurs: take advantage of small programs that are hard to find — like the DNA of an Entrepreneur workshops run under the umbrella of the city’s Small Business Resource Center. Diaz said the program taught him a lot, including how to ​“build something on paper” before going out and doing it in real life. He noted the lack of straightforwardness for food businesses at the local level: ​“There are five departments you have to go to. If you go to the state website, in five minutes you have an LLC.”

The conversation then shifted to the gray areas of the culinary business. Michael Co, who’s looking to start up a Filipino food venture, noted that food business models have changed since the pandemic. ​“I don’t want brick and mortar, I don’t want a food truck — I want something in between,” Co said. ​“I want to explore selling the food I make from my home,” he added, to approval and affirmation from the group. 

Co continued, emphasizing the need for the city to ​“encourage creativity and growth” without making small business owners ​“feel like they’re going through mountains and rivers” just to try something new. 

Two attendees who think of themselves as ​“in between” established business models were Sarah Taylor and Tim Dutcher of Huneebee Project, an organization that uses beekeeping as a ​“vehicle for trauma healing and for community connection.” Taylor, a former clinical social worker, founded Huneebee in 2018. Dutcher started his first hive as a senior at Wesleyan 22 years ago, and has been a beekeeper ever since. 

The fear that comes with bees ​“can really spark curiosity,” Dutcher said, which, Taylor added, is the cornerstone of the therapeutic approach. The next step is ​“talking about fear, normalizing fear, what are some ways to regulate that fear,” she said.

Taylor and Dutchman are ​“in the process of opening a commissary honey house,” a place where entrepreneurs can come to harvest hive products, including honey and beeswax, and also pick up information about local entrepreneurship. ​“This [event] was a lot more so on the food business stuff,” Taylor said, ​“but honey harvesting is very similar” in the permitting department. There are ​“lots of different levels” of governance that make licensing confusing, said Dutcher.

Isaiah Farrow, a prospective entrepreneur, got the last word in, asking for more such Entrepreneur Listening Sessions in the future. For Smith, the main takeaway, aside from the practical demands for centralization of business information, is that ​“we’re at a moment in the city where there’s a desire to evolve.” 

Though Diaz’s convenience store is a more of a traditional operation than an experimental pop-up, he still sees his business as something new for Fair Haven: ​“I wanted to bring a little of New York in, make something different.” Diaz wants to bring aesthetic and social dimensions to shopping: ​“A lot of grocery stores in Fair Haven, you don’t get the beauty,” he said. 

Smith considered the event a success, calling ​“the collaborative spirit” that came alive in the Q House ​“the most meaningful” part of the session. As for Diaz, he might be bringing a little of the Big Apple to New Haven — but, he said, ​“you will never get me to go back to New York.”