Allison Hadley Photos
In these days of quarantine there are few thrills like that of the doorbell — a mix of danger and excitement, anticipation and fear of contagion. When a crisp and optimistically white Atticus Bookstore Cafe-branded paper bag awaits, the day becomes like a holiday. When it’s filled with products birthed of partnerships and local flavor, doubly so.
The doorstep food delivery last Thursday was part of a multi-organization event hosted by Atticus and Chabaso Bakery (one combined corporate outfit) — attended online, with delivered food at hand — to announce and explain the preliminary phase of Atticus’s unveiling of a new CT Food Launchpad program.
What is a “food launchpad?”
“The CT Food Launchpad is a co-manufacturing program managed by the team at Atticus/Chabaso that helps startups get their products into Connecticut grocers,” as Reed Immer, the Atticus and Chabaso communications director, described it. “The program partners with startups with successful early-stage products and helps them to optimize their recipes for wholesale production, and then produces the products for startups. The program covers all costs for recipe optimization and production, and splits remaining proceeds with the startups.”
The CT Food Launchpad will be run out of the soon-to-open Atticus Market at 771 Orange St. The first two “startups” for the program are Huneebee Project and Sanctuary Kitchen. (Atticus is now accepting applications for startups to join our second cohort.)
As it formalized its partnerships with Sanctuary Kitchen and Huneebee Project, Atticus also took the time to map out resources for other food entrepreneurs in New Haven, as can be found on its site.
Last Thursday’s event — the delivery of the sample bags, then the online session — offered a taste of what the CT Food Launchpad has in store.
The bright Atticus bag on my doorstep boasted three products from the organizations involved so far. A salted honey tart was designed to feature the flavors of Huneebee honey without exhausting its limited supply. From Sanctuary kitchen were za’atar rolls, a sumac-driven savory answer to the cinnamon roll, doused in za’atar, a spice mix; and keyk kaddoo, a cardamom-spiced butternut squash cake.
The idea in the Thursday evening food delivery was to attend the meeting, get to know the partnership and the partner organizations, then eat the food afterward, though it is possible this reporter jumped the gun on the eating. The tart, visibly flecked with sea salt, was a perfectly balanced pastry, with honey flavor brought forward by the salt-cut sweetness and the neutral background of the locally grown spelt shell. About the size of the palm of one’s hand, it was the perfect size to be gobbled immediately. The rolls, soft and savory, melted in the mouth, with each flavor coming through in the blend of spices that is za’atar. A roll like this could easily be seen on any dinner table, doubly so on a cold winter night; there was something warming to eating the rolls. The keyk kaddoo, a more spice-forward cousin of pumpkin bread, was perfectly moist and visibly marbled with chunks of butternut squash, giving it a lovely orange hue. The cardamom, while subtle, helped keep the flavor deep and nuanced. Portions of all disappeared easily within the first 10 minutes of the event.
The showcase itself was as much a demonstration of the village it took to bring these products to my stoop as it was the products themselves. Speakers included Michael Harris of the New Haven Innovation Collaborative, Lathha Swamy from New Haven’s Food System Policy Division, and George Black of Collab and Cortney Renton of Cityseed, jointly representing the Food Business Accelerator, as well as Reed Immer and baker Brian Lance at Atticus. Each cog in this delicious wheel spoke not just on what they were doing, but why. Harris remarked early that “New Haven has forever been a food city,” but Swamy noted that often the pathway to becoming a food business in any city wasn’t clear. The CT Launchpad would be a way to “streamline the process.” The final portion of the presentation involved introductions from both Sanctuary Kitchen and the Huneebee Project.
All parties involved in the event stressed community: fostering it, strengthening it, and growing it, through the vehicle of food. One cannot help but think of a beehive: many individuals working toward a common goal, each with their own role, and not only nourishing themselves, but their entire ecosystem. A sweet thing indeed.