Everytable: The Amazon of quinoa bowls
The chicken tinga is the same in both Los Angeles establishments: It’s a bowl of pasture-raised chicken, lentils, quinoa and black beans.
At the University Park outpost of Everytable, it costs $5.10. In Monterey Park, a 15-minute drive away, it’s $8.35.
That variable pricing — less in an area with students and working-class families, more in a spot with prime real estate — is part of Everytable’s Robin Hoodesque pitch to make healthy, fresh food affordable to everyone. It has won Sam Polk, its founder and chief executive, plaudits and millions of dollars in investment in the five years since he started the company.
By the end of the year, he expects to double the number of stores in California to 20, from 10, then double again in 2022. Next year, Everytable is coming to New York, where Polk plans to open 100 outlets in three years — more than the 94 spots that Chipotle has across the city after nearly 30 years in business.
“No one says, ‘I want to kill myself with food today,’ ” Polk said. “They also don’t want to cook, and they also don’t want to spend a lot of money. So you can see what the opportunity is.”
And yet, food that is
healthy, affordable and something people actually want to eat has long been an elusive goal in the United States. For one thing, healthy food isn’t often a big seller. And many lowerincome communities also resist the idea of do-gooders from the outside telling them what they should or shouldn’t eat.
But the biggest obstacle is making the numbers work. Fresh ingredients are more expensive than highly processed ones, and the result is grain bowls galore for those who can spend $10 or more per meal, and fast food full of salt, fat and sugar for everyone else.
Everytable’s sliding-scale pricing is one way to address the higher costs. But Polk’s real innovation is something his customers don’t see: a hyper-efficient supply chain that churns out the kind of fresh meals typically found in upscale farm-to-table chains at half the price. He is building commercial-scale kitchens and managing a fleet of delivery trucks to supply his stores and a growing network of subscription customers and smart fridges.
If this system sounds a lot like the ones used by the big food manufacturers and fast-food chains that entrepreneurs like Polk have vowed to defeat, it is — and intentionally so. Polk, a former hedge fund trader, is uninterested in being small or artisanal, preferring instead to co-opt the strength of the fast-food industry while pushing reform.
“The question is, how can you produce made-fromscratch meals for the same price as fast food?” he said. “We think it’s building out the same kind of infrastructure fast food has, with the same economies, for fresh food.”
Polk is a somewhat unlikely ambassador for the good-food movement. He spent eight years on Wall Street, first as a bond trader, then at a hedge fund, where at age 30 he quit in a rage over what he deemed an inadequate $3.6 million annual bonus. In a 2016 memoir, “For the Love of Money.” Polk, now 41, describes growing up with an abusive father, followed by years of struggle with bulimia and alcohol and drug abuse. His quest for money, and through it power, was an effort to prove he was worthy.
Then, in 2013, he stumbled upon the documentary “A Place at the Table,” which spotlights the problem of hunger in America.
“It was clear to me that healthy food should be a human right, not a luxury product,” Polk said.
Within a year, Polk started Groceryships, a nonprofit that provided money to low-income families to buy wholesome foods like fruits, vegetables, beans and grains, along with education on how to prepare them. (It was renamed Feast in 2018.) “I had this idea that nonprofits were how you do good in the world,” Polk said. “But what I learned quickly is that nonprofits were how you spend a lot of your time sucking up to rich people.”
Polk realized he needed a business model.
Unlike many reformers, who are keen to tear down what they see as a fundamentally flawed food system, Polk is single-minded about efficiency, often mulling aloud how Everytable
is, or can be, more like Amazon.
“We think of Amazon as a website, but its power comes from its operational and logistical efficiencies and scale — that’s where they win,” Polk said. “Honestly, I think Everytable is in a similar place for food as Amazon was in 1997.”
Call it pluck or hubris. Either way, Polk’s vision of how to make fresh food affordable is a departure from the way fast-casual restaurants usually operate.
In the traditional model, pioneered by Chipotle in the 1990s, each burrito, salad or bowl is prepared in house. That means that for each location, the company needs to build a kitchen, deliver ingredients and train a staff. Because these restaurants are generally located in urban centers, they are more expensive than an industrial facility.
In contrast, Everytable’s meals are prepared in a kitchen with pots big enough to cook 50 gallons of chicken tinga at a time. Its stores are small, usually 500 to 700 square feet, just big enough to house a wall of refrigerated cases, a microwave and two employees to stock shelves and work the checkout. Polk also assembled a fleet of refrigerated trucks to deliver food to stores and to customers at home. These decisions, he explained, allow him to sell meals at whatever price a neighborhood could afford.