Hotplate: A savvy way to heat up food sales

Want to make a living with your delicious cooking? Check out Hotplate, a site that helps professional chefs as well as home cooks organize their food sales.

What is Hotplate?

Hotplate is a software-as-a-service company that automates scheduling, order flow and pickup of food in exchange for a percentage of the seller’s sales.

How it works

All you need to sign up with Hotplate is to be older than 18 and be appropriately licensed to offer food in your state and/or local jurisdiction. (Food safety rules vary widely from state to state and sometimes by county or city.)

If you want to offer food via Hotplate, you’ll affirm that you read the site’s terms and conditions and the privacy policy.

The site will then lead you through a series of steps to set up a storefront and your payment preferences. At the end of this process, you’ll have created a website for your food business and can start selling.

Hotplate review:

Whether you’re a home cook or a professional chef, Hotplate can help you earn extra money with pickup food sales.

The great thing about selling food for future pickup is:

• You don’t need to rent commercial space. You can do your cooking at home.
• There’s no food waste because you know how many orders you have in advance.
• And you don’t need to pay a delivery service because your customers can pick up directly from you, or from a preapproved public space, such as a farmers market, during a set window of time.

Food ‘events’

Hotplate revolves around what it calls food “events.” Each event is a scheduled food drop.

To illustrate, let’s say you’re a maker of artisan breads. You may decide to offer fresh-baked loaves of raisin-walnut bread for pickup at your home on June 9, from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.

Go into the app and create this event. Describe what you’re making, post photos of your loaf and details about what each loaf costs. Also say when you’re accepting orders, where pickups will happen, when, and whether there are a limited number of loaves available.

Once you’ve plugged in all the pertinent information, the app will send a text message to your regular customers. And you can post this notice on your social media channels or whatever other means you use to advertise. By clicking your link, potential customers go directly to your Hotplate store.

Hotplate accepts orders to whatever limit you preset. For instance, you might have limited sales to 100 loaves of bread. And the site will collect payment for them, assuming you’ve chosen a form of prepayment (versus cash on delivery), and pass along the proceeds to you, minus a fee.

Scarcity as a selling point

One advantage to selling food via events is that it creates a sense of scarcity, said Rishi Talati, Hotplate co-founder and chief operating officer. The problem with restaurants, he said, is they’re always there waiting for you. So you have no sense of urgency to go visit. Thus, their dining room may be empty one night and swamped the next. It’s tough to know for sure.

But with a food event, your customers know that they have only so much time to book before they miss this drop. And you know precisely how many sales you have on any given day.

Self-employed with help

Unlike some gig companies that pay you to do their bidding, Hotplate is setting you up to be your own boss.

You simply use its software to keep track of orders, payments and customer contact information. Additionally, consumers don’t go to Hotplate to see what foods are available in the area. Each chef who is on the site has their own URL. While that means the site isn’t independently advertising your food, it also is not presenting competing food vendors to your customers.

Generally, Hotplate chefs advertise their events on social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram. Hotplate simply helps them alert their regular customers and provides the software that makes their food business run smoothly.

What they offer

The software does five things:

• Helps you keep track of your customers, letting you know how often they purchase from you, what they buy and how much they spend.
• Provides automatic text messaging to registered customers to tell them when there’s a new offering and when their order is ready for pickup.
• Offers a plug-and-play website where people can go to learn about your food “events” with photos and details about pricing and schedules.
• Collects payment via credit, debit or Apple Pay. (You can also have your customers pay via Venmo, Zelle or cash.)
• Keep track of your store’s sales, tracking total orders, average orders, visitors, tips and taxes.

Fees and commissions

What is particularly nice about this software is there’s no cost until you make a sale. Hotplate adds a 5% fee, plus 55 cents onto the cost of the customer’s order. So, if your customer orders $100 in food, the site gets $5.55.

It also passes on its Stripe payment processing fees — 2.9% plus 30 cents — to the seller.

Tips for getting started

For those just getting started offering food for pickup, Hotplate also offers some valuable tips.

The key to successfully starting on the site is to limit your food offers to a select few, the site says. Once those offers start to sell out, you may want to add a menu item or two.

Hotplate’s advice is to start small to get established and build a following of people who are legitimately excited about your food. Then, as you start seeing your drops gain traction, slowly add more items.

Hotplate also encourages chefs to use traditional local marketing, such as fliers, business cards and word of mouth. Since pickup food businesses are local by nature, talking up your events at school, work and the kids’ sporting events can have an appreciable effect on your sales.

Food prep caution

As already briefly mentioned, states, cities and counties often regulate food service companies, demanding licenses and kitchen inspections, among other things. Be sure to investigate and comply with the laws and regulations in your area. If you don’t, you risk getting fined and shut down.

Hotplate, as a software company, does not monitor your compliance with the rules. You are solely responsible for meeting your legal requirements and getting any necessary liability insurance coverage for your business.

Recommendations

We love this site for both professional and home cooks. You can sign up with Hotplate here. Free neighborhood social media sites, such as Nextdoor, could also be helpful to market your business.

Other good sites for professional and home chefs to consider include EatWith, which helps you offer paid meals in your own home, and Shef, which helps home cooks advertise meals for delivery.

Kristof is the editor of SideHusl.com, an independent site that reviews hundreds of moneymaking opportunities in the gig economy. This story is adapted from the blog.