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The Holyoke Hummus truck is active about 10 months of the year, John Grossman said.
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events and festivals.
“The food truck was great for us during lockdown because res-
taurant lobbies weren’t open. So we pivoted back to the truck and had a couple of temporary kitchen situations after we closed the res- taurant,” Grossman recalled. Then, two years ago, he and Cordeiro, his wife and business partner, set up shop in the shared commercial kitchen of Mycoterra Farm in Deerfield.
“A friend of mine saw on their Facebook feed that they were start- ing to rent their kitchen out,” he noted. “It seemed remote to me, especially coming from from Holyoke, but then I started to think about the geography, and so much of our work was north of there. So we’re just as close to, say, our Northampton work as we were in Holyoke. And when I came to visit the kitchen, I saw what a great fit it was. I’ve always been looking for something that could accommo- date the food-truck production as well as wholesale production.”
Which leads us to the latest pivot — the launch, three months ago, of Holyoke Hummus’s wholesale distribution business.
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“Since we started 10 years ago, people were like, ‘oh, where else can I buy your hummus?’ We never planned to have a restaurant, but that happened, and we took that opportunity,” Cor- deiro recalled, adding that wholesale was some- thing they had long discussed as well. “We got to 2024, and I was like, ‘we have to make this work this year. This needs to happen.’”
While the truck is typically active from late winter through the end of December, outdoor events definitely slow down in January and Feb- ruary, and the couple saw wholesale as some- thing they could do year-round.
“During the pandemic, we stayed open through the winter, out of necessity. But we’ve been trying to find something more produc-
tive for us during the winter,” Grossman said. “We’ve always done catering, but the wholesale project, getting hummus into the grocery stores, we knew was a year-round proposition.”
“We do one flavor of hummus on the truck, and people love the hummus; people have been asking us where they can we get the hummus when the truck isn’t out.”
After completing the process to get their wholesale license, they connected with a nonprofit food distributor based in Brattleboro, Vt. called Food Connects.
“We do not want to be in the business of driving around and try- ing to figure out how to distribute. They know how to do that. We know how to make hummus, and we know how to talk to people about it and get them interested and excited about it.”
They’ve Bean Entrepreneurial
Backing up a bit (well, 10 years), Grossman has often told the story of how Holyoke Hummus started, when he attended the Holyoke Brick Race, an annual stock-car event in the Paper City, in 2013. Organizers arranged for food vendors, but none showed up. That was his inspiration for opening Holyoke Hummus, buying the truck known as the Great Garbanzo, and setting up shop across the
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