Market Forces: Hoboken Farms

This week, Patch spoke with Brad Finkel, owner of Hoboken Farms. His stand at the Summit Farmer’s market includes the makings for an Italian feast—homemade mozzarella cheese, bread, and marinara sauce. The stand is located at the corner of the market lot nearest to Maple St and Springfield Ave.

What’s the best part of your job?

I know it sounds really clichéd, but the saying hello to everybody, it really is. When I was a kid in Hoboken growing up, in the spring all the sudden everybody would end up on the stoop. You wouldn’t see them all winter, and then everyone’s out; the neighborhood really came together. That doesn’t happen anymore. The farmer’s market is where neighborhoods come now.

In Summit, every year for 13 years, my first customer’s name is David. We’re set up by 6:45 a.m. and I send my guys to get breakfast, and I read the New York Times. If it’s a nice day, it’s the greatest time of the day. And David comes, and David and I have a five minute conversation about our week and our families. I said to him last week, I really realize how important you are to my ritual. At the end of the day, he’s going to bring my bread home to his family, and I’m a part of that, and that means the world to me.  

 What’s your connection to Hoboken?

My family moved into Hoboken, it’s questioned if it’s 1896 or 1898. We are Hudson County through and through. My grandfather was from Hoboken; my grandmother was from West Hoboken. My grandmother helped raise me. She was a great cook. She was the philosophical inspiration for my business. My grandmother, no matter what was happening, I could go to her house, and she would cook for me. I always asked her why she did that, and she said, ‘Because I love you.’ The motto of Hoboken Farms is “Eat Love.”  

Would you describe your business?

Hoboken Farms started in 1992, when an old friend from Hoboken, Peter Beronio, who was the economic development coordinator for Engelwood, NJ, and I had a small gourmet food distribution business. I always was a foodie. To put myself through college, I started a small food business, and soon after went to my first farm market. We started with select homemade pasta, and selling homemade bread and fresh homemade mozzarella. We quickly found we had stumbled onto something great. That became a wholesale business, and that thrived, and we ended up selling our bread and mozzarella to almost every farmer’s market in New Jersey. I didn’t like wholesale because it didn’t fit my personality, so I quit that 10 years ago, and we now sell our product exclusively through farmer’s markets. We’re in 30 markets every week. I’m personally in Summit every week—it’s one of two markets that I do.

The mission is, everything we have is sourced exclusively from New Jersey. Ninety percent of all of my products are sourced within 15 miles from Hoboken. We are local. That doesn’t mean everyone of our ingredients is local, our wheat–you can’t get wheat from New Jersey, so the wheat that makes our flour is not.  Our milk is from our coops, but we make our mozzarella local. But buying our supplies–all of our partners are literally right here within a 15-mile radius. We have 15 employees that are working for Hoboken Farms seasonally, going out to markets, producing food, and manning the warehouse.

What’s your typical day like?  

We’re up at four in the morning. Myself and some of my employees are at the warehouse by generally five o’clock. We’re getting deliveries of hot warm bread. We are checking the curd of our mozzarella. We are putting orders together for our various markets. We have coolers that have to be packed with dry ice. We have a maximum of eight markets a day, so it’s really setting up eight small businesses each day.

We have year-round markets in New York City, and the prep work for the season really starts in March. We have a couple of months that are down, but starting in March we start contacting new markets. We start hiring for the season and training starting in April . It’s a seven-day-a-week job eight months of the year.

What’s your best-seller at the Summit Farmer’s Market?

Our mozzarella cheese, our baguettes, and our crabcakes, and our marinara sauce. We make our marinara sauce every ten days. The sauce that will be sold this Sunday was made today, Sept. 25. When you buy it the week after, it will have another date and it will taste a little bit diff because the tomatoes are a little different.

What’s the hardest part of what you do?

One word and it’s the hardest part of the job: rain. It means you’re standing out there, with low sales. I keep statistics on our computer and it will tell you over the years we had a 17 percent average inclement weather rate. But since May to August, 58 percent of our markets have had inclement weather.

How come you personally come to the Summit Farmer’s Market?

Because I love it. I love the people. We’ve been in Summit for 12 or 13 years. It’s part of the ritual; it’s in my blood. Sunday mornings, you’re in Summit, that’s it. At the end of the year you’re kind of thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t wait 'til this is over,’ and then two weeks later I can’t wait for it to begin again.

The employees too, they say they miss it. We’re there together for 25 weeks before the sun rises, like a rock band on the road, meeting up in the warehouse. In the rain, in the cold, you’re out there. So you better find a way to make you smile. I could work for someone else and have a terrible time. So that’s one of the main things: I will only hire people that I like. We pay them real well. The philosophy of the business is everybody gets paid way over minimum wage, around $15 an hour; everyone’s on the books, everyone gets insurance, Social Security, unemployment.  So if someone says we pay 25 cents more for mozzarella… my guys get paid like human beings. We have to make the rent; we have to support our families on 22 weeks a year. You take out rain and inclement weather you have to support your family on 15 weeks a year. And we love doing it.