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Street Food Profiles: SoupCycle in Portland, Oregon

Posted by Erin Zimmer, November 2, 2009 at 1:40 PM

"On any single route, our trailers can carry 20 salads, 30 breads, and 40 soups—about 200 pounds in total."

Jed Lazar showing off some chili. [Photographs: Ashley Sturm]

Name: SoupCycle
Vendors: Jed Lazar and Shauna Lambert
Twitter: @SoupCycle
Location and hours: All soups are bicycle-delivered to soupetarians (aka customers) at their homes and offices in Portland. We have three wonderful delivery folks, each of whom makes about 50 bicycle soup deliveries a day. We adjust our routes often to be as efficient as possible. Between that and the changing cycling weather, time to chat with customers during deliveries, and en-route bike repairs, we give you a big window of time when we'll deliver your tasty soup.

What's on the menu? We sell a soupscription, a weekly delivery of organic soups, breads, salads and dressing and deliver to people in Souplandistan.

How long have you been food trucking? One year.

How has Twitter affected business? Twitter keeps our customers up to date on SoupCycle and connected to the company's mission.

Shauna with tubs of "Purple Passion," a smooth beet soup blended with pear, sour cream, and a splash of white wine.

Why a mobile business over brick-and-mortar? By not having a storefront we avoid most rent costs, though we do rent a commercial kitchen for cooking (but the cost is still much less than a retail space).

Who are your typical customers? Families and office workers mainly. Parents love SoupCycle because they want to give their family a healthy, organic meal but don't have time to cook seven days a week. Many of our customers also work in downtown Portland and don't have time to leave the office to buy lunch. Plus they're tired of unhealthy chain food restaurants.

Unfortunately, we can't let you taste the soups before getting a SoupScription. We've been working long and hard to provide scratch-and-sniff soups straight from our website to your home computer. Unfortunately, the only scent we've been able to upload successfully is called "Computer Screen." The effect, however, is quite believable.

Describe a typical day from start to finish. Our busiest days are Mondays through Wednesdays. Mondays we cook all day for all of our soupetarians. Our first week in business we had just seven customers but word spread and now we're cooking and bicycle-delivering soups for nearly 200 weekly customers.

Monday's cutting and cooking takes about 18 hours so we start at 6 a.m. and typically finish around midnight. Tuesdays and Wednesdays we load all the packaged soups into coolers (they're delivered chilled), load the coolers onto our extra large bicycle trailers and deliver the soups to our wonderful customers.

On any single route, our trailers can carry 20 salads, 30 breads, and 40 soups—about 200 pounds in total. A typical delivery day means 15 to 25 miles of cycling pulling the trailer. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are big days for us, since we have just two SoupCyclers doing our deliveries.

Jed cruising on his soupcycle.

What are/were you doing before this? I was in the non-profit world working with at-risk kids. Shauna was in the high tech world. We met at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, a business school where we were both studying sustainable business.

What makes your food so special? Can anything like it be found in the city? We have 53 popular soups that we rotate between throughout the year depending on what farmers are growing and what's in season. No other business focusing on bicycle-delivered, organic and local soups exists in Portland.

Your comfort food after a long day? Grilled cheese and a side of our African peanut chicken stew.

Advice for an aspiring vendor? Be ready to work more than you've ever worked before. If you do it right, you'll still love what you're doing.

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Tags: Oregon, Portland, soup, street food, Street Food Profiles