Farmer's Fridge

At a drab community center on Chicago’s West side, there’s a room where families sit around idly. Unemployment is high here, and so is crime: Last month, East Garfield Park was ranked the seventh most violent out of 77 Chicago neighborhoods. The center offers everything from domestic-violence help, to financial assistance, to warmth during the long winter.

It also offers salads, which visitors can purchase from a futuristic-looking vending machine. The salads are made from high-end ingredients like blueberries, kale, fennel, and pineapple. Each one comes out in a plastic mason jar, its elements all glistening in neat layers, the way fossils might look if the Earth had been created by meticulous vegans. They cost $1.

The salad machine is the invention of 28-year-old entrepreneur Luke Saunders, who launched his company, Farmer’s Fridge, a year ago at a nearby warehouse. His goal is to offer workers a fast, healthy lunch option in areas where there’s a dearth of restaurants. Instead of popping into McDonald's out of desperation, they can simply grab salads from their buildings’ lobbies and eat them back at their desks.

Most of Saunders’s machines are installed at private office buildings, food courts, and convenience stores, where the salads cost upwards of $7. Eventually, he wants to drive down the price to the point where anyone can afford them.

The Farmer’s Fridge machine at the East Garfield Community Center is his initial attempt to bring healthy food to a low-income area. The buck is a nominal fee—the salads are actually day-old donations that didn’t sell at the corporate locations. (All of the salads are perfectly good for up to three days.)

On a chilly recent morning, he and I wandered over to the building’s employment-assistance office and met the receptionist, Christina Morales, who told us that she loved the salads, and all of her co-workers did, too.

“Would you still love them if they cost more than a dollar?” Saunders asked.

She’d be willing to pay $2 or $3, but no more than that. “If I'm paying $7,” she said, “I'd want some meat, something more filling.”

The security guard, Margaret Harris, told us that there was often a line for the machine, and that people were always asking her when the delivery guy was coming. I asked her how she likes the salads.

“They're pretty good, I've heard,” she said. “I haven't had any because I don't eat salad.”

At this, Saunders leaped back a little.

“Why not?” he asked in a squeaky, incredulous pitch.

“It's just nasty to me; it doesn’t agree with my taste buds,” she said.

“What do you eat?” Saunders asked.

“The usual: burgers, pizza, chicken ...”

We left the center, and Saunders’ gentle demeanor crumbled. “That woman literally will not try lettuce! She doesn't want vegetables. What do you do?” he exclaimed. “Food is so emotional and driven by history. Just plopping a vending machine in front of someone is not enough.”

As an entrepreneur with a new startup, Saunders is confronting any number of challenges. Among them is a question that has stumped many of America’s top food-policy experts for decades: If healthy food were more convenient, would more people eat it?

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Before Saunders decided to feed leafy greens to the masses, he spent two years working at an industrial-lubricants business in New York. After his girlfriend (now wife) moved to Michigan for law school, he joined her in Ann Arbor, where he got a job selling metal finishings. His work took him through various industrial neighborhoods and far-flung food wastelands around the country. Nearly everywhere he went, he was surrounded by Burger Kings and KFCs, and yet, for him: “There was nothing to eat.”

Saunders grew up in New Jersey on the stuff Whole Foods now peddles to rich hipsters. Each day, his stay-at-home mom served up dinners with ingredients like wheat-berries and kale to him and his five siblings. Back then he pined for fruit roll-ups and Kool-Aid, but as an adult, his crunchy upbringing stuck with him. Out in the real world, burgers and iceberg-lettuce salads just didn’t suffice.

On business trips, Saunders would make grocery-store runs and prepare his own meals rather than grab fast food. “I would get in trouble because they'd be like, ‘Your [grocery-store] receipt doesn't say you were in Toledo at noon, so I don’t think we should reimburse you.’ And I was like, ‘But there was nothing to eat there!’”

Through it all, he saved. And saved. “I thought, this is the money that I'm going to use when I get an idea that's good enough to start a business,” he said.

One day, the idea dawned. He was at the gym, and by the exit there was a fridge stocked with pre-made salads. He grabbed one and saw that it had been made with exotic grains, fruit, and different types of lettuce. The memories of his mother’s cooking came flooding back. He emailed the woman whose name was on the salad, Susan Todoroff, and asked if he could work alongside her to learn her secrets.

Later, he began experimenting in his own kitchen, buying $300 worth of groceries at a time and mixing up nuts, grains, and vegetation until the resulting hodgepodge seemed like something people would want to eat. He noted the more promising combinations on a spreadsheet, along with the components’ wholesale prices.

For his salesman job, Saunders had visited a lot of commercial food businesses—big plants where gargantuan apparatuses stamp out granola bars and pretzels. “I thought, what if I inverted this process,” he said, “so I make everything by hand, but use a machine to distribute it?”