Seattle’s Kinfood rethinks produce subscriptions

While other people were making pandemic focus areas, Kelly Singer took a pandemic jump and took the opportunity to turn a small side project into a full time job and the chance to be the change she so badly wanted to see in the food world.

When her management consultancy put all accounts on hold in March 2020, Singer decided to formalize the curated product baskets she made for friends. On the surface, Kinfood resembles a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) that offers subscription deliveries.

Each bag contains a stock item such as Milpa Masa’s organic corn tortillas, Palouse chickpeas or canned lemons from Villa Jerada. Bags come with recipes from Kinfood’s in-house chef and monthly guest curators like Melissa Miranda from Musang and Andrea Pons from Mamacita, while special add-ons include delivery of the hard-to-get Mt. Bagel.

In a place with endless farmers’ markets and delivery options, Kinfood has found its own niche and crossed the line between CSA, food set and cooking club. “I have a hard time describing it,” says Singer.

The idea came up while living in Paris working on a project for a European grocery store. “There is so much emphasis on what we eat,” she noted. “And so little about how food is grown, produced and transported.” She fell in love with the way the people there had relationships with their cheese merchants and the way families had bought meat from the same butcher at the Sunday market on their street for generations . “You shop in accordance with your values,” she remarked in Paris. “You see that money, your support, stays in the community and you really help your neighbor, and it’s just this beautiful kind of cyclical ecosystem.”

When Singer moved to Seattle, she started shopping at farmers markets and creating baskets of seasonal produce and food for friends to cook with weekly, the first seeds for what became Kinfood. This intent – a cohesive set of ingredients that feed a kitchen – helps Kinfoods Taschen stand out from other farm boxes on the market.

The bag’s basic architecture includes at least one herb, leek, fruit, some greens, and supporting vegetables (plus the pantry), which keeps things varied and closely aligned with what a cook might need to prepare full meals. The format allows for staple foods such as garlic, kale and apples and leaves room for funny surprises such as quinces, hedgehog mushrooms and fresh young ginger.

Kinfood mostly confines its grocery sourcing to Snohomish, Skagit and King counties, but leaves the flexibility to go further as they look for additional women-owned farms and BIPOC that adhere to sustainable practices to support them. When it comes to wine, they loosen up the geography of the entire west coast. “We just started Washington,” says Singer, “but there aren’t many natural winemakers, so we expanded.” Each wine is paired with recipes from Kinfood’s resident chef Signe Quitslund, which go in the bags every week.

Kinfood’s team of six covers the entire process of bringing bags to their customers, from procurement to delivery. At first, Singer considered using a third-party delivery service like UberEats, but decided the experience was too important to be separated from the company itself. “The Kinfood bag that is placed on the doorstep is really the tip of the iceberg,” she says. “The story of the Kinfood bag begins months and months before, when the farmers first decided what to plant for this season.” Then they take care of the harvest, Kinfood selects the ingredients, the farmer brings it to you and the four of you Drivers also help with the careful packing of the food. “Letting someone mess it up who didn’t invest in our mission or have 50 other deliveries to do was just not worth it.”

This attention to detail and the customer experience show what makes Kinfood unique and what it means to be a company that is community focused. The in-house team of drivers also ensures that the products are treated with the same care that people want their sensitive fruits and vegetables.