Catching Up With Anton Nocito Of P&H Soda

“Retail is such a weird animal. Sometimes people will stock the syrups because they love the labels, and they never taste them,” he says, “Restaurant people don’t care what it looks like, just what it tastes like.” There’s a full list on their site, but Nocito confesses to a favorite: “The Modern is just killing it with a hibiscus cocktail they have.” The company has been working with a distributor for its northeast retail business, which requires producing large volumes of product and adjusting to a tighter margin, since they’re now selling to someone who has to make their own profit on the product. And if the distributor goes out of business, you can lose a lot. When this happened to P&H, they lost some product; friends who used the same distributor lost more than $40,000. Nocito is still doing all of the production himself, despite the increased volume. “Once you go to a co-packer, the quality really goes down,” he explains. Plus, soda syrup is pretty easy to scale up as recipes go. “If you were using three pounds of hibiscus, you’ll be using 30 pounds,” he says, “And a bigger kettle.”

Farmigo Launches

via Brooklyn Based

Farmigo, a new online farmer’s market, is launching today in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and they’re looking for a few good food communities.

Here’s how it works: an office, school, neighborhood group or even an apartment building works together to form a food community. You just need a minimum of about 30 members, or 30 orders per delivery and a set pick-up and delivery location. One member (or a few) takes responsibility for coordinating with the Farmigo team to determine which producers you’ll work with, and handles the pick-up and delivery of the produce. Farmigo creates a custom shopping experience for your community