Business good for local hummus producer
Chelsea Gandy, left, works in the Local Roots commercial kitchen in Wooster with David Kelly, proprietor of Hummavore, to produce locally sourced hummus.
Local Roots has added a new specialty for its daily hot lunch. Each Thursday David Kelly’s Hummavore is featured for the Local Roots lunch of the day. Local Roots features lunches made from scratch by local chefs daily between 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays.
Choices on Hummavore’s menu for the day include a hummus platter (veggies, pita and hummus), red lentil soup, roasted beet salad and hummus kawarma (grass-fed beef over hummus with lemon sauce).
Kelly said hummus is a food that traces its origins to the Middle East.
“The Jewish, Palestinian, and Iranian and Iraqi peoples all claim its roots,” he said.
Basic hummus consists of dried chickpeas or garbanzo beans, which are soaked overnight and then cooked the next day. Tahini — ground sesame seeds — is added in what Kelly calls the “peanut butter of the Middle East.” Lemon juice, water, garlic, salt and pepper complete the hummus. Different varieties include parsley, cilantro, scallions and garlic.
Why hummus?
Kelly’s journey started when he was attending a small liberal arts college in the country on the East Coast. “Students were required to work for the school for 15 hours a week, and that was my entry point for farming and natural foods,” he said.
After college Kelly traveled Europe and Turkey for a year. “That’s where my inspiration for hummus and flavors comes from,” he said.
After farming up and down the East Coast for a couple years, Kelly connected with former college classmate Chelsea Gandy, who was able to let him do vegetable farming on her family’s livestock farm, Fox Hollow Farm Naturally LLC in Fredericktown.
“Chelsea’s been a great supporter,” Kelly said. “She is coming to Local Roots now to help me on hot lunch days.”
Gandy raises the cattle used for the all-grass-fed beef used by Kelly. When he began farming with Gandy was when he started making hummus.
“I started at a small farmer’s market in Columbus. At that time I was still doing the vegetable farming, so that was a long drive,” Kelly said.
Kelly said he began focusing on hummus because it was so popular. His version has quickly become a hit. “People like my hummus because, unlike what you buy in a grocery store, it’s a much creamier product with a very distinctive taste,” he said.
Kelly said when the business really took off was when he started using the commercial kitchen that is available at Local Roots. “Due to the Local Roots commercial kitchen, I can run my own business,” he said.
Kelly said he pays a reasonable rent to Local Roots and shares the kitchen with several others. “In a year or two I hope to be able to build my own space,” he said, “but this is great for now.”
Kelly commuted to Wooster for the first three years of his business. “Being on the road for nearly three hours a day got to be really rough,” he said.
Kelly now sells at several farmer’s markets in Wooster, Akron, Cleveland and Columbus. He said he typically sells somewhere between 700-900 containers a week and works about 60-70 hours a week. He has several part-time employees in the summers and looks to add a full-time position in the future.
“I just look to continue to scale up gradually, but I don’t want to grow so much that the quality of the product suffers,” Kelly said. “I really enjoy that connection with community, being able to talk to my customers about my products. I never want to lose that.”