Facebook Marketplace, a platform usually used for buying furniture, electronics, and other items at cheaper prices from sellers, is becoming a popular place to buy and sell freshly made meals right from someone’s kitchen.
With the rising cost of eating out, the coronavirus pandemic and changes to state laws, Marketplace and other digital platforms have become more commonly used for ordering food. The Meta-owned free site used for listing pretty much any commodity you can think of is now used as a side-gig by working-class people, many of whom are first or second-generation immigrants.
One of these meal-selling businesses is T’s Kitchen, a Jamaican-Puerto Rican made-to-go restaurant run by Queens-resident and chef Tiana Webb, 28, out of her home. Another one is WAfrica Taste, where Davila Dion, 33, makes plantains and other Ivory Coast dishes out of her home in Hutto, Texas.
“When you’re sitting down with a plate of her food, it’s not like food that you got out at a restaurant,” Brittani Bacchus, a friend and one of Ms. Webb’s customers, said of her cooking to The New York Times. “Somebody’s mom made that food or somebody’s grandmother made that food.”
These home cooks typically operate in a kind of complicated legal gray area, with some states expanding cottage food laws and broadening opportunities for home food businesses. Unlike street food vendors and food truck owners, who must apply for permits that can often be difficult to obtain, home restaurant businesses have fewer obstacles to go through and rules are often not as enforced, as many of these home chefs only sell a few meals a day or week.
Experts who observe food policy and social media trends have reported that home-restaurant businesses are expanding across the country.
On Marketplace, “selling food is part of a newer trend,” Cliff Lampe, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information who studies human-computer interaction, told The Times. “It’s not something that you saw on Marketplace five years ago.”
Nancy Qian, an economics professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, attributes the spike in sales of homemade meals on social media platforms to labor shortages, which have driven up the cost of food in restaurants and allowed at-home cooks to undercut them by starting their own businesses.
Webb says she started looking for a side gig after feeling the pressure of pandemic-era inflation, and Dion was looking for ways to make money at home. While they’re both skilled cooks, opening a restaurant was too expensive and risky of a venture, and neither could pick up extra work as they had to care for their families, leading them to becoming home chefs on Marketplace.
