Hyunjoo Albrecht runs a kimchi and hot sauce manufacturing company called Sinto Gourmet. Over the last decade, she has had an unusually intimate vantage on “food tech” companies. That’s because she has been a landlord to many of the Silicon Valley delivery apps and other venture-backed businesses who were trying to “disrupt the food space.”
This is the story of how Albrecht had to partner with these companies to build her own food business in the Bay Area, why she vowed to stop working with them and how in the pandemic she ended up partnering with a company that had burned her in the past.
The Road to a Sustainable Business
Unlike food tech companies that spring to life with venture capital, it took Albrecht years to build her business. She immigrated from South Korea in 2003 and started Sinto Gourmet with some recipes from her North Korean grandmother. Then she started slowly expanding her fermented offerings.
She sells tubs of spicy napa cabbage kimchi. There is a mild version and a crunchy option. In 2014, she started selling a mixture of fermented California root vegetables: red beets, daikon, turnips, rutabaga and carrots. Alongside the kimchi, Albrecht has developed two hot sauces: tangy apple and sesame garlic.
Albrecht began selling the products in grocery stores and then directly to individuals. Eventually, the business grew enough that she needed a commercial kitchen, which is hard to find in San Francisco. So she decided to take her life savings and build a large kitchen.
Her kitchen is one of the larger commercial cooking facilities in the city. It's in a roughly 5,000-square-foot warehouse in the Bayview neighborhood. The walk-in freezer alone is 500 square feet. She jokes that it's bigger than most one-bedroom apartments in San Francisco.
Albrecht's plan was to make her kimchi there and rent out the extra space to other local cooks. But the tenants that flocked to her space were not small independent chefs, but instead venture capital-backed food companies.
Albercht began leasing them unused space in her kitchen. Many of the companies she leased space to came with big plans and then disappeared when they ran out of venture capital. Her tenants included companies like the pizza-delivery app called Easy as Pi, a meal delivery service called Din and a ready-made meal kit company called Sprig.
A Different Business Philosophy
Over the last five years in the U.S., there have been over 2,000 venture capital investments made into what folks call "food tech companies,” which includes everything from delivery to bioengineered meat. According to a report from a venture capital fund called AgFunder, there was almost $20 billion invested in 2019 alone.
Many of the companies that have sprung up over the years, like Sprig and Munchery, have gone bust. At KQED, we covered how the local chefs Munchery was working with had to fight for over a year to get paid the debts they were owed when the business closed.
