“Want to buy a cookie?” a group of voices asked in unison, startling my wife and me. This was a few months ago and happened just as we were strolling home along Windward Avenue in Venice. Looking just to our right we saw a couple guys smiling through a rectangular hole in a whitewashed fence. On a platform above them, seated in lawn chairs were a couple young women in shorts and tank tops. After living off the boardwalk for so many years and regularly being approached by many random people asking for many random things, our initial instinct was to say no thanks without missing a step. Something about this was different though, and two steps after saying our rote “No, thanks,” we both stopped. “What was that?” I asked as we turned around. A blonde, long-haired surfer-looking guy named Kyle gave us the pitch from behind the counter.
“We’re farmers from Michigan, and we’re selling vegan, organic cookies using the wheat grown on our family farm,” he said, pointing to a display of four, slightly round drop cookies situated in front of him while holding up a glass jar full of whole grain wheat. “This is my apartment, and we do all of the prep and cooking in my kitchen. Want to try a sample?”
“Uh, sure,” we said. Why not? I could think of a couple reasons. However, they also informed us they were operating legally under a recently passed cottage food industry law that allowed the sale of l0w-risk foods, such as baked goods, to be prepared in people’s home kitchens and sold directly to the public. Another blonde, long-haired, surfer-type, who we learned was Kyle’s slightly older brother Wes, dropped back into the darkness and returned a moment later with a plate of small, pie-shaped samples of all of the cookies. We tasted as we talked.
“Where are you from in Michigan?” Erinn inquired. The cookies were good. Not incredibly sweet, but not bad for something described as vegan and organic and cooked by a couple of dudes in a studio apartment. They were from Custer, a small town of less than 300, halfway up the western side of the mitten. We told them Erinn’s brother-in-law was from Hart, only a few miles from there, and that we were going to be visiting her sister in Grand Rapids in just six weeks. “Cool beans,” Kyle said. Wes mentioned that at least one of them was going to go back in a month to help their dad with farming duties. We finished our samples, and they asked if we wanted to buy anything. I felt obliged at this point, but neither of us were carrying cash and the cookies were $3 a piece. “It’s okay. We take cards,” Kyle said with a shrug. I bought an oatmeal raisin and a peanut butter.
After returning home, just two blocks away, I realized that if I photographed them here and also visited them at the farm it could be a pretty cool project. There were a number of ways to look at it. It was a business story about young entrepreneurs, a story about modern, multigenerational farming, a story about health food and a story about the quirky things that could probably only happen in a place like Venice Beach. I went back to them and pitched the idea of my tagging along over the coming weeks and then joining them for a day in Michigan. They obviously said yes.
I started the next day and spent the next several weeks dropping in for an hour here, a couple hours there, shooting the daily occurrences that come with running a cookie stand from an apartment in Venice. Among those were the milling of the wheat in a small kitchen grain mill, experimenting with variations on recipes, baking in a countertop oven (the one-room apartment didn’t come with a standard oven), and interacting with customers at the front of the house. I was surprised by how many people were willing to stop — and frequently buy — on their way to and from the beach. Just two blocks from the boardwalk, their spot on Windward Avenue is a popular place for people to find free parking and gets a lot of foot traffic. The brothers also got business from locals and managed to land a couple accounts with area businesses that would have the cookies delivered by the dozen. Friends would regularly stop by and hang out on the rooftop deck, or stoop, the namesake of the business also known as Stuart Family Organics.
The Stoop had only been open a month before our initial encounter, but the Stuart Family Organics was actually formed the previous year after their father, a gentleman farmer, retired from his career as an English teacher and decided to give small-scale commercial farming a go. They quickly found out that at the scale they were working at, at most 80-acres, it was impossible to run a profitable operation just selling bushels of wheat. But if they converted the wheat into baked goods, their profits multiplied significantly. They began baking cookies and bread from recipes they’d developed over the years for personal consumption. They began selling the products at the local farmer’s market. Before and as this was occurring, Wes, then Kyle, had moved to Los Angeles and began working odd jobs and enjoying city and beach life. They worked in restaurants, local gyms and at other odd jobs (the oddest perhaps for a guy who sold a gun that killed flies using salt as a projectile). Eventually the two landed in Venice, living a couple blocks from one another. But they weren’t having much luck finding work they were passionate about.
One day Wes found out about the before-mentioned cottage food industry law, which had passed in California in 2013. The idea came to them to convert Kyle’s apartment into a miniature kitchen and storefront. Health-conscious Californians would be a great test audience to try out their recipes. With the help of friends from home, they built a small roof platform that was over the fenced-in courtyard extending from the front of the apartment and christened it The Stoop. They applied for their permit, and on Valentine’s Day, they opened for business.
In April I visited Kyle and his parents on the farm and spent a few hours watching him and his father, Jim, prepare a new field for planting. There was a stark contrast between the urban California beach environment where I’d come to know him and this rolling green Midwestern landscape, but Kyle seemed to fit equally in each setting. He and his father Jim had just returned the night before from a trip to Illinois, where they purchased a 1962 red and white McCormick combine. They run the farm exclusively using antique machinery, and own several other machines of the same era, including a handful of red Farmall tractors from the ’40s and ’50s and an old wooden A.T. Ferrell & Co. clipper to clean the wheat.
The farm is largely dedicated to growing red winter wheat, as well as oats, and includes around 80 acres between their property and a nearby tract of land that they manage. Just behind the house, set far back from the main road, is a small plot dedicated to the family’s own vegetables. The afternoon was spent tending to the personal garden and clearing an unused plot of land at the back of the property. The main field behind their modest, two-story farmhouse was covered in young, bright green wheat that had recently sprouted after lying dormant since its planting in the fall. Clearing the field was hard work. The gnarled roots of the invasive shrubbery put up a fight and had to be yanked by hand when the tractor couldn’t unearth them. Rocks had to be cleared too before the plow could safely till the soil. It was too much to finish that day.
Before I left, they stopped working and showed me the grain cleaning process. The clipper, an old wooden device with faded red paint exposing the wood grain below, shook steadily, but did its job sifting the grains and sending them up a small conveyor belt where they made a rhythmic clang against a metal spout as they flew out to a bucket below. It was getting late and I told Kyle I’d see him back in Venice.
The presence of this unusual business in the middle of a residential area was generally well received. Most who passed by, tourists and locals alike, seemed to get a kick out of it. A lot of people were certain they were selling marijuana cookies — not an unreasonable assumption considering the area — but the guys were quick to assure them that it was just health food, nothing more. The health inspector would come by occasionally to make sure everything was up to code and reminded them of the rules, to which they quickly complied. They couldn’t sell beverages such as coffee and couldn’t display the food on the front counter. They couldn’t put out a water bowl for passing dogs. Occasionally the inspections came due to an anonymous tip. Apparently not everyone was pleased they were there. But they passed them all and were permitted to stay open.
Finally, a zoning complaint was made. It wasn’t for running the business in a residential area, but that the stoop itself, the covering they had built over the fence, was an illegal structure. The Stoop temporarily closed as they awaited a ruling. They could stay open, it was decided, but the roof had to come down. Around this time Wes had returned to the farm to help out, so Kyle decided to stay open, but only for deliveries. The window remained closed. As summer rolled around both of them returned home to work on the farm and are presently working toward opening a farm-to-table restaurant in nearby Ludington, on the Lake Michigan shore 20 miles west of the farm. They entered a local small business grant contest and are currently in the running to receive $50,000 in funding. If all goes as planned, they will work on the farm and the restaurant during the warm months and return to Venice to operate The Stoop when things are slow in the winter. They plan to expand beyond the direct-to-customer sales here and apply for a class B permit. This would allow them to sell wholesale to local retailers, broadening their market beyond people who happen to pass by or find them online. I’m looking forward to seeing them back in the neighborhood again.