Three years ago Rachael Mamane was living in Seattle and struggling to find work that combined her parallel passions for technology and food. “Now I’m encountering companies that are based in food, technology and farming,” she said. “New York offers an opportunity to bring seemingly disparate industries together in very different ways.”
Mamane is the founder of Brooklyn Bouillon, which produces its bouillon using the leftover, high-quality ingredients from local farms. Her introduction to the New York food scene came in 2010 when she worked with Hudson Valley Duck Farms at greenmarkets and noticed a gap in the farm-to-market system. “The bones are the gold of the animal and stocks are the foundation of cooking,” she said. “Yet you rarely see them at the marke.”
Food had always been a touchstone in Mamane’s life; she has run a catering business on the side since she graduated college, even while she was working in management consulting. “Whenever I get stressed at work, I always think of recipes that I want to work with or I develop menus in my mind,” she said. “It’s a safe, comfortable place that I can go to refresh myself.”
Mamane recently spent a month honing the Brooklyn Bouillon business model at the Local Food Lab in Palo Alto. The first of its kind in Silicon Valley, Local Food Lab is an incubator devoted to nurturing innovation in food systems. “It was interesting – there were more women than men in the incubator but that wasn’t by design,” she said. “It seems that to become a chef and be female has been somewhat of a challenge. I’ve worked in and out of professional kitchens my entire life and often I’ve been the only woman in the kitchen. I think that in food production women see an opportunity to develop their own ideas and see them through without that hurdle.”
The next step for Brooklyn Bouillon will be to bring additional help on board. Right now Mamane runs the business alone and is working ceaselessly, chasing opportunities to grow the business and strengthen its margins. She attributes a fair amount of the success to the burgeoning culture of food artisanship in Brooklyn. “I know what I’ve done inside of two years building a concept and now shopping it; I would never have been able to achieve that in Seattle in such a short time.”
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