The Uber of home-cooked meal delivery, Josephine, wants to give employees stock options.
The gig economy is an environment in which temporary positions are common. It’s not an industry well known for the good treatment of its workers. Josephine, a meal-sharing company that distributes home cooking, is hoping to change this. Josephine first set up its offices in Oakland, California and is now expanding into Seattle, Denver and Portland.
The app-based service connects home cooks with those looking for meals locally. The emphasis is on community connection rather than simple convenience. When would-be Josephine cooks apply to join the organization, one of the company’s masters of public health inspects their kitchen to ensure that it meets standards of cleanliness. Once a Josephine cook is on the platform, users of their service can leave reviews, contact a cook or the central team directly, ensuring that accountability is built in. The company takes a 10 per cent surcharge on all the food sold, and supports its cooks by enabling them to start their own micro-enterprise, providing them with tools and resources — the payment processing, customer management, ongoing education and more.
‘We’ve been thinking for a long time about how tech platforms can be less extractive and provide more value to communities,’ explains Josephine CEO Charley Wang. The company is named after a friend’s mother who took care of Charley and his co-founder Tal when they first moved to LA. This was their inspiration to build a compassionate, generous model for communities.
This is an ethically admirable and potentially globally applicable enterprise, but it is not without its problems. While there is built-in accountability to a degree, one of the key challenges of this model will be ensuring quality control and food safety across the board. While there is an initial food safety inspection of cooks’ kitchens, it is more than likely that they won’t be held to such a high standard of food safety as a professional business, and as people pay for this service, they must be expecting a certain level of professionalism and quality.
Josephine will give 20 per cent of its company to the cooks via stock options, which will be distributed according to how long the cooks have been with the start-up and how many meals they serve. Josephine is also launching a ‘Cook Council’, which will be a rotating group of cooks able to meet with the company’s leadership team and function as a conduit for feedback from the chef community. The Cook Council will have at least one seat on Josephine’s board of directors.
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Website: www.josephine.com
Contact: hello@josephine.com
Innovation name: Josephine
Country: United States
Industries: Food / Food & beverage / Home & garden / Transport & automotive