The Flyover Series: Foodseum with Kyle Joseph

by Kathleen Richards
January 9, 2015
 

The Flyover Series is a collection of interviews with founders and key contributors of Chicago-based tech companies. Our goal is to help illuminate some of the terrific people and work in the Chicago technology scene. This interview is with Kyle Joseph, founder of Foodseum. 

Who are you?

Kyle: My name is Kyle Joseph and I am the executive director and founder of Chicago Foodseum, Chicago’s first and only food museum. 

What is Foodseum? 

Kyle: What we’re working to do is to create a museum around food, where you walk through exhibits on different food types: chocolate, cheese, and coffee. The first one we’re looking to create for May is the hot dog and encased meat of the world exhibit. Being Chicago, we thought it would be fitting to start with a hot dog, and we’re excited to be a part of Chicago. Inside these exhibits, you learn about the history of food, how the product first originated, and how it immigrated to the United States. We look at how it’s changed over time, looking at craft artisans, the industrialization of food, to what we really get to enjoy today, and the great stories behind it. We showcase the farm to table aspects so you get to see what ingredients go into that food type, what it looked like in the farm or on the ground, and how they translated that to a chefs table. We showcase ways where you can see it come together, to see the actual cooking process, so people can see that it isn’t rocket science. This is stuff they can start to do at home, to engage them with the idea of cooking. The last big component is discovery of international flavors, so you can see what other cultures do in that food type around the world. We, as Americans, have a tendency to stick to what we know. We want to challenge that and push people outside of their comfort zone and start to discover these great flavors from around the world. Overall, the mission is to reconnect people to their food. We’re an education-based, non-profit, museum, so ever altruistic in our mission to educate people on food, to inspire a passion, to create that spark, to want to learn more, to go out and adventure a bit in this wonderful world. 

What does a hot dog taste like in other cultures, for example? What is done differently with a hot dog? 

Kyle: That really plays into the encased meats piece. Almost every culture has some kind of encased meat, whether its blood sausage, chorizo, or Kielbasa. There is a very wide breadth of Asian sausages that, this goes back to how people have always eaten, is full animal. They utilize the different components and they create flavors. Over time, those flavors have changed and innovated. But again, we tend to stay pretty true to what we know, which is the frankfurter, without even investigating these wonderful different flavors. One of the fun things we’re doing is we formed a culinary advisory board, so we’re getting some very fun big named  chefs from around Chicago to actually create recipes for us. So when you taste Korean sausage for the first time, it’s Ed Kim’s Korean sausage from Ruxbin and Mott Street. So there’s a familiar face behind it, which makes it more accessible and more fun to taste. 

What was the genesis of the idea? What made you want to start a Foodseum? 

Kyle: This is something I came up with but it’s been developing over many, many years. I was originally born in California but when I was three my parents picked up and moved us to London, England. They thought it was their one and only chance to see Europe, and so they carted my sister and I around every weekend to a different bed and breakfast in a small part of town.  From a very young age, I got to experience new cultures on a regular basis. I fell in love with the food. I fell in love with, even though these people couldn’t talk to me, with their food. They could share their culture with me, they could share who they were through the food we ate. It was an exciting piece that stayed with me throughout my life. We ended up spending five years in England. I was in Frankfurt, Germany for high school and ended up traveling mainland Europe a ton, and again, really fell in love with this, this piece where I started to see beyond that, the stories that led to where the food came from. When I came back to the US, that connection was lacking. There are so many great cultures here; I wanted to figure out a way for other people to experience the passion that I had found in food. And, coming from a line of educators, professors, and teachers, the natural way was for me to create an educational piece, and in this case, a physical museum. We do a lot of fun interactive learning pieces, which is something that’s a core belief of mine. 

How do you get started with this type of educational non-profit? 

Kyle: Well I’ve done a couple of tech start-ups but this is definitely my first non-profit start-up, but it’s still a start-up.  The Lean start-up philosophies still apply, and so we went out first and said, what do we need to know in order to execute this?  What’s the pain point? And we did our research. We’ve partnered with all the different local museums in town; we’re close with the Field Museum, the History museum, the Children’s museum, Adler Planetarium, MSI, and the Shedd Aquarium.  We just did an exhibit, Adler After Dark, at Adler Planetarium and it was really cool. We went out and said “Ok, how do people do this? What do their books look like? What does their accounting look like? What does their income look like? How do they manage that?”  We also learned a ton about experiential design from them and were connected to a very interested niche world, in Chicago, of experiential design. The CMEG, the Chicagoland Museum Exhibitors Group, have taught us how things are done currently.  And also using our teams’ tech background we created a model for what we wanted to build. We’ve talked to architects, we’ve talked with construction companies, we’ve partnered with schools to define a plan for how we are going to execute this. And then, just like any other start-up, we go and start to raise money. We actually are currently running a Kickstarter campaign right now, you can find us at Foodseum.org/kickstart. We’re trying to get our fans to help us in some of the fundraising pieces, but we are looking for some corporate sponsors, as well as just individuals who are givers. As a non-profit, you also have access to grants, which is interesting, but a whole other process. 

What does your team look like? 

Being a non-profit, we are all volunteers at this point, but we’ve made a ton of traction. People are very excited about the idea, and that has been our main motivation, as people really seem to want this. We have a current team of thirteen dedicated officers who are working on this, not full time, but they have large roles that they own. We have about seventy active professional volunteers outside of that, who each take on very small parts of what we’re building. We get about three emails a week from people who find us and reach out wanting to help. So, to be honest, one of the biggest challenges for me as the only one who’s really full time on this, is how you manage all of these people who want to help. At some point you almost get overwhelmed because you’re spending all of your time trying to manage all of them.  However, I’m a big believer in surrounding yourself with great people and we have some amazing officers really doing some cool things. On top of that, we have worked hard to form partnerships with other organizations, as I mentioned, and so that’s also been a key piece. We’ve gathered a ton of in-kind donations and in-kind sponsorships to get our plan in order so that it really is ready to execute once we raise the funding for the actual exhibit itself. 

Have you found working with these Museum partners easy? Are they excited about the idea? 

Kyle: At first, I was nervous that they would look at us as competition. I don’t’ know the museum world and I didn’t know how they would react, but I was blown away by how excited and welcoming they were. I’d like to say it’s Midwest, just kindness with them opening doors. We learned so much from them in the early stages with “Hey, here’s how everything works, here’s what you should be careful of, make sure you do this when you’re setting up the structure.” It really has been mind-boggling. At the end of the day, though, Chicago is a great tourist destination. About 65% of all museum traffic is tourist based. If we can bring in even more people, they’re not going to go to just one museum they’re going to go to a couple. So, the more attractions the city has, the more everyone benefits. They get all of that too, so having us here, having George Lucas here, which we’re really excited about that, is great. Again, the more attractions there are in Chicago, the more the city benefits. 

Having experienced a tech start-up and a non-profit, is there a difference in how you’ve conveyed your vision for the idea?  

Kyle: Without a doubt, the pitch is completely different. In a tech start-up, or a for-profit start-up, you’re much more about developing a strategy for executing business, to make money. Here’s our revenue cost structure, here’s what we’re doing to try and make this pain point. When you’re pitching for fundraising, you’re trying to get dollars. They want to know the execution parts and what your structure looks like. On a non-profit, where you’re pitching donors, sometimes they want to know what you’re doing. They want to know what you’re doing with the money, where it goes to, they don’t care much about the details. It’s very much a heartstring pitch. You’ve got to come in and say “Why are we changing the world?” That’s what they care about, they care about your mission, and they care about how clear it is. You can’t just say “I’m going to feed the hungry,” that’s great and a lot of people want to do that, but they want to know how and where you’re vision goes. It’s not so much about where your money goes but the clarity of your vision, how are you different from the other guys? We’re about education and celebration of food. To keep that vision clear has been a challenge for us. Now we know where we’re going, what we’re doing, it’s just a matter of how you communicate that in a way that resonates with everybody. 

How has Foodseum changed over the course of its existence? 

Kyle: When I first started really working on this is was almost a Disneyland of food, where it was really just about the passion, finding the fun of it, and trying to help people get excited about food. That’s what I was, I was passionate about food. As we brought on more people, learned about the museums, the education part really became the core and the staple, and we found a big pain point where food education is not a part of any school curriculum, minus some very specialty groups that are working very hard to make it there. Most people are getting farther and farther disconnected with their food. We eat stuff and we don’t really ask where it comes from. We don’t really ask why it tastes that way, and so we pivoted from the fun to teach a little more on the core of it. To ask, where did it come from? How does it come together? Really fun, interesting insights, on what we all should know about what we’re eating. 

What have been the most important resources that you’ve utilized to get to where you are now? 

Kyle: The easiest answer is people. This has been just a total team effort of a lot of people in Chicago. It’s been about getting as many people behind it as possible. And with the team that you have, you go and try to execute it with the power of the city behind you. Beyond that, having tech startup background has been pretty helpful. We threw up websites pretty quickly. We’ve been pretty strong on social media. Being scrappy, being intelligent, and knowing the right people really, is the only way that we’re surviving. 

What’s the most difficult challenge that you’ve faced thus far, or a lesson that you’ve learned, up to this point? 

Kyle: The biggest lesson so far has come down to the difference in running a volunteer based organization versus a for-profit organization. In a for-profit, you’re pretty much all paid employees or contractors. They have a responsibility to you based on the fact that you’re paying them. Now we’re working with people who are donating their time because they really believe in something. And so, you’re really selling that passion, and you’re selling the heartstring pitch, but then you have to manage them, but they all have full time priorities, which is how they survive and live. We’re always a second priority, which you just have to come to understand. When you need something from somebody, you have to know that either you might need to go to somebody else or you’re going to have to wait. It’s just something that you have to get used to, and you’re managing that across eighty-five people, you’re just balancing a lot. “You’ve got to keep your head up and know that it’s going to happen but it’s going to take some time, and we’ve got enough support, we’ll just keep rotating.” We’ll have people volunteer and really do some dedicated work for two months, and then get a new job, and then they can’t volunteer at all anymore. It’s this constant kind of churning and I guess the lesson learned in that, and how we’ve survived, is that we have a very good core structure of how we bring people quickly on and introduce them to our system. We keep as much organized as possible so that we can say “OK here is your small chunk that you’re gonna take on, here is everything you know and you need, everything you need to know to execute it , and then, let us know when it’s ready. Here’s the general deadlines we’re looking for.” That organization, that ability, to clearly and concisely communicate our brand, what they represent, and what we need them to do is, again, the only reason we’re still alive. 

What made you want to base your business in Chicago? 

 

Kyle: We believe Chicago is the greatest food town in the country right now. It was founded on beef and grain production. It’s named after an onion, which is a fun fact for people who don’t know that. The onion used to grow on the shores; it’s an old Native American term. This city grew on food production, and food is still a major part of its economy. It’s a tourist destination and a great museum destination, I couldn’t think of a better place to be. 

 

Jobs at FlyoverWorks

Chicago startup guides

LOCAL GUIDE
Best Companies to Work for in Chicago
LOCAL GUIDE
Coolest Offices in Chicago Tech
LOCAL GUIDE
Best Perks at Chicago Tech Companies
LOCAL GUIDE
Women in Chicago Tech