Josephine

» see josephine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Josephine was a website where you bought dinner from somebody who lived near you. A cook posted what they were making that week and people within a few blocks ordered it. Pickup was from a house instead of a restaurant. Charley Wang and Tal Safran started it in Oakland in October 2014. The cook set the price and kept most of it, and Josephine took a fee off each plate.

It stayed small the whole time. The company recruited around 75 cooks and had somewhere between 50 and 100 of them actually selling in a given month, with the Bay Area making up roughly a third of the business and the rest split between Seattle and Portland. Reported funding runs from "more than $2 million" to $3.1 million depending on which outlet you read, with Kapor Capital and SV Angel named among the investors.

Demand was never the problem. California's retail food code had no category for a meal cooked in a home kitchen and sold to a stranger, which meant every cook on the platform was running a food business the county could not have licensed even if it had wanted to. In 2016 Alameda County environmental health served cease-and-desist letters on roughly a dozen Josephine cooks. The cooks were told that what they were doing was a misdemeanor and that jail time was on the table.

Where I live, this is just how food moves. Meals come out of somebody's home kitchen and go around a Turkish neighborhood all day, money changes hands, and nobody has ever needed a platform or a permit for any of it. Reading about an American company that had to get a bill through a state legislature so a woman could sell a plate of food to the family upstairs is like reading a legal brief about breathing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the letters ~

The enforcement date has two versions. A former Josephine employee, writing later in Quartz, put the cease-and-desist letters in April 2016. Berkeleyside, reporting on 11 May 2016, described them as recently served. The effect was the same either way: people who had been cooking for their neighbors with a company's name on the transaction were now hearing from a county inspector that it was a crime.

What Josephine did next deserves recording. It turned itself into a lobbying operation and sponsored AB 626, a California bill that would create a license class for something the text called a microenterprise home kitchen operation. The company spent most of the life it had left pushing that bill through Sacramento.

~ AB 626 ~

AB 626 passed the Assembly floor on 29 January 2018. Three days later Charley Wang published "Josephine is closing its doors" on the company blog: "After nearly four years of operation, it's with heavy hearts that our team has decided to wind down Josephine. The last date for meals will be Friday, March 30th." The reason he gave was that the team had "simply run out of the resources to continue to drive the legislative change ... needed to build Josephine."

Jerry Brown signed AB 626 on 18 September 2018, five and a half months after Josephine served its last meal. The law took effect on 1 January 2019, nine months after. In between, the platform kept running for an extra 60 days with its fees waived so cooks and customers could finish out, and cooks were sent a transition packet containing their business data and, where customers had opted in, their contact lists.

~ the address ~

josephine.com does not resolve today on either scheme. The COOK Alliance, the advocacy group that came out of the same fight, is still running and still working home-kitchen law state by state.

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