Business
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.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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