In the cramped kitchen of a home in Queens, Tiana Webb slowly flipped empanadas in a pot of hot oil as they turned crispy and brown — just like her Jamaican-Puerto Rican family taught her.
Nearly 1,800 miles away in Hutto, Texas, Davila Dion pounded plantains into a chewy bread the way her mother taught her in Ivory Coast.
“When you use a blender, it doesn’t give the taste that you want,” Mrs. Dion said, opting for a mortar and pestle to mash the fruit into dough for a dish called fufu.
Ms. Webb’s business, T’s Kitchen, and Mrs. Dion’s business, WAfrica Taste, have dozens of loyal customers.
But neither of them have storefronts, employees or commercial kitchens.
Instead, like thousands of other unlicensed restaurateurs across the country, Ms. Webb and Mrs. Dion have found success selling their home cooking through an unexpected platform: Facebook Marketplace.
Yes, that Facebook Marketplace. The internet’s garage sale. Best known for offering sweet deals on used furniture and electronics.
Thanks to the rising cost of eating out, the coronavirus pandemic and changes to state laws, Marketplace and other social media sites have become a popular place to buy and sell freshly made meals. On Meta’s plainly designed, free platform for listing just about anything, thousands of people — many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants — are working side gigs.
These home cooks operate in a sort of legal gray area, with some states expanding cottage food laws and broadening opportunities for home food businesses. Unlike street food vendors and food truck owners, who apply for permits that are often highly difficult to obtain, home restaurant businesses have fewer hoops to jump through and rules are not often enforced. Many only sell a few meals a day or week.
“When you’re sitting down with a plate of her food, it’s not like food that you got out at a restaurant,” Brittani Bacchus, a friend and one of Ms. Webb’s customers, said of her cooking. “Somebody’s mom made that food or somebody’s grandmother made that food.”
Everything Ms. Webb, 28, and Mrs. Dion, 33, know about cooking they learned from their families. Ms. Webb’s grandparents were from Jamaica and Puerto Rico and her food is inspired by both cuisines.
“It has helped me become more connected to my own culture,” Ms. Webb said of her cooking.
Mrs. Dion moved to New Jersey from Ivory Coast when she was 25, and settled in Hutto in March. It’s hard to find great fufu in Texas, she said.
“They have African restaurants, but they have more Ethiopian, Nigerian.” said Mrs. Dion, a stay-at-home mother.
Ms. Webb started looking for a side gig after feeling the pressure of pandemic-era inflation, and Mrs. Dion was looking for ways to make money at home. Both were skilled cooks, but opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant was prohibitively expensive and neither could pick up work that took them away from their children.
Mrs. Dion began advertising the food she cooks at home — a tropical smattering of flavorful rice, juicy chicken thighs, stewed meat and caramelized plantains — to Marketplace in June. Now she has 30 loyal customers who buy her fufu, okra stew, peanut butter soup and whole fried tilapia. She charges $15 a plate for pickup and an additional fee for delivery.
Often served in aluminum catering trays or Styrofoam clamshell plates, Marketplace meals have no-frills packaging but are packed with flavor.
In a plate from Ms. Webb, her pernil — slow-cooked pork shoulder — falls into singular strands of flesh at the touch of a fork. Her mac and cheese has a crispy Cheddar crust and a gooey core. But the scene stealer is arroz con gandules, or rice with pigeon peas. The rice is impeccably seasoned and provides the perfect bed for the pernil juices.
Looking for a way to make a little money on the side, Ms. Webb, who works in marketing, began selling food on social media in December 2023. She now gets thousands of hits to the Instagram and Marketplace pages for T’s Kitchen each month, she said.
“I didn’t even expect the response to be so crazy,” Ms. Webb said. “In the past year, it’s grown so much.”
A quick search for “food” on Marketplace in the New York area alone brings up hundreds of listings from home cooks like Ms. Webb and Mrs. Dion, selling Pakistani, Indian and Haitian cuisine, to name a few.
Experts who study food policy and social media trends say that home-restaurant businesses are growing across the country.
On Marketplace, “selling food is part of a newer trend,” said Cliff Lampe, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information who studies human-computer interaction. “It’s not something that you saw on Marketplace five years ago.”
Nancy Qian, an economics professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, attributes the boom in sales of homemade meals on social media to labor shortages, which have driven up the cost of food in restaurants and allowed at-home cooks to undercut them.
Daniela Morales, 33, a lab technician at a water treatment plant in Tucson, Ariz., spends her weekends making hundreds of tamales to sell on Marketplace. Tamale-making runs in her blood: Her grandmother sold the corn husk-wrapped dish out of her home in Sinaloa, Mexico, for nearly 30 years, she said.
“I use my grandma’s recipe,” Ms. Morales, who grew up in Sinaloa but now lives outside Tucson, said in a phone interview. “Everything is from scratch.”
And at $22 for a dozen tamales, it’s a bargain for her customers.
Today, in many states, what is known as cottage food — nonhazardous items like breads and preserves — can be sold legally from home. The rules for home-cooked hot meals are more stringent in order to prevent food-borne illness, but certain exceptions have been carved out.
In March, Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona signed into law a fought-over piece of legislation nicknamed the “tamale bill” that broadened the types of foods that can be cooked at home, allowing Ms. Morales to operate above board.
Where Ms. Webb and Mrs. Dion live, in New York and Texas, cottage food like cakes and preserves may be sold from home kitchens without inspections. But hot meals often cannot be sold without a permit, a process that usually requires the cook to have a second kitchen or to use a satellite kitchen. Those options can be prohibitively expensive for some, so Marketplace food is often served without obtaining the required permits.
The Food and Drug Administration said in an email to The Times that the agency was “working to address any gaps” in the regulatory landscape for home restaurant businesses.
A spokesman for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, declined to respond to a list of questions about food being sold on Marketplace. He pointed to the platforms’ rules allowing for food to be sold as long as sellers “comply with local laws.”
Ms. Webb hopes to eventually own a home with two kitchens so she can legally cook full meals from home.
But that’s a dream for another day. In two hours, customers would be at her door to pick up her empanadas that have been in her family’s recipe book for generations.
She took a breath to collect herself, refreshed her Marketplace profile, and flipped another empanada in the oil, watching it brown. She glanced at a photo on the wall of her late grandfather, Ralph. Ms. Webb thinks about him every time she cooks.
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