Foodnome is a collective of local Davis home restaurants serving the community delicious homemade meals.
What Is Foodnome?
Foodnome is a Davis-based company that supports a network of decentralized home restaurants. Foodnome offers a platform for cooks to manage, market, and monetize home restaurants, helping to connect communities and empower cooks to start successful businesses. Foodnome is about creating community, meeting new people, and rethinking food systems to make homemade meals affordable.
The Origins
Foodnome officially started in 2017 as a way for Akshay Prabhu, founder and CEO of the company, to manage and market his own pop up dinners. Foodnome soon turned into a larger movement of over 15 cooks running pop up dinners all over town. Although it quickly gained traction in the Davis community, its success drew opposition from the Yolo County Health Department in March of 2018. The county ordered Foodnome to cease events because the concept of a home restaurant did not comply with state regulations governing food safety. Fortunately, California State Assembly Bill AB-626 passed in the 2018 elections and will legitimize home restaurants beginning in January 2019.
Why Use Foodnome?
Foodnome believes the food revolution will be led by those who are least represented in food business ownership today: people of color, women, disabled people, and immigrants. Disproportionately low food business ownership among these groups is not due to inferior ideas, products, and entrepreneurs, but to a food regulation system that makes it impossible for many people to get started. Foodnome strives to address inequalities in our current food system and aims to increase economic opportunity and food security for underrepresented communities.
Interested in becoming a legal home cook? Foodnome wants to help. Contact [email protected] for more information on getting started.
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