For chefs · Boulder Farmers Market

Cook the market. Let households pick you.

You walk the market anyway. You already know whose peaches are worth the queue this week and which farm cut chard early. Write that down as a menu — a title, a story, three box prices and a box built from real stalls — and it goes in front of every household in the zone alongside every other kitchen’s. They choose. Whoever they choose, cooks their week.

No kitchen lease, no prep shift, no inventory. The crew shops your box on Saturday morning and carries it to the door. Your work is the writing and the sourcing, which is the part you would be doing in your head regardless.

What you earn

10% of every box sold from your menu
Levied on the box subtotal at settlement, written to the ledger as a Fee event with your menu on it, and transferred in one payment per cycle. Two kitchens in one week means two fees, each on the boxes that kitchen actually sold — not a split of the pot.
0.25 patronage points per dollar of boxes sold
Patronage is ownership, not a loyalty scheme: points accrue to you as a member and convert to a share of the surplus the co-op returns. It accrues on the boxes your own menu moved.
The rest of the card is published too
Producers keep about 68% of the food dollar, the co-op takes 15% of order revenue and 3% goes to the reserve. Those numbers live in the co-op’s charter, version 1, and changing any of them is a vote — not a memo. You can read the whole card before you write a word.

The one rule: a menu is bound to real supply

Publishing is gated on feasibility, and the gate is arithmetic, not taste. The studio holds your box next to what the farms actually posted and refuses to publish while:

  • the box is empty, untitled, or a box size has no price;
  • a size would ship empty — nothing goes in the small box;
  • an item would need more than the farm said they’d have.

Where supply is a plan rather than a promise — most of what a market stall has is expected, not committed — the studio says so, and the box you write is a plan too. Nothing here lets a menu promise food that isn’t on a table. Price roll-ups are shown against your box prices as you write, so you find out before the household does.

The week

  1. SaturdayWalk the market. What is actually on the tables is the raw material for next week's box.
  2. Sunday – MondayWrite the menu in the studio: title, story, three prices, the box, three to five recipes. Nothing is visible to anyone until you publish.
  3. PublishFeasibility passes, you publish, and your menu joins the week's picker beside every other kitchen's.
  4. Boxes close wed 8pmHouseholds have picked. The count on your menu is the count you sold.
  5. Saturday, againThe crew shops your box at the stalls and delivers it. Settlement pays the chef fee on what your menu sold.

Competing is the point

Every kitchen buys from the same farms and cooks the same week. What differs is the box you build and the reason you give for it — which is why the picker shows your story under your name, and why the fee follows the box rather than being divided by seniority. A household that switches to you this week is your box this week. Nobody is anybody else’s default forever.