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- Many individuals, faced with furloughs and lifestyle changes, turned to their passions and entrepreneurial spirits.
- These businesses, often starting small and home-based, found success through online sales, delivery services and community support.
- Despite the challenges of the pandemic, these entrepreneurs persevered, with many eventually opening brick-and-mortar locations.
It feels wrong to call anything that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic a silver lining. A public-health crisis that killed 3.4 million people worldwide and put 20 million Americans out of work doesn’t have a bright side.
Yet the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonpartisan think tank, also reported that the pandemic produced another “unexpected and surprising” economic result. Americans started more new businesses between June 2020 and May 2021 than in any other period for which such records have been kept.
There were far more business closings — either temporarily because of Gov. Mike DeWine’s shutdown order in March 2020 or permanently because of its fallout — than new business startups during the pandemic, but the trends converged in central Ohio, too.
“Being slowed down gave a lot of people, even in their 20s or 30s, almost a midlife crisis. A lot of people were like, ‘What are we doing this for?’” said Lo Yost, whose husband’s pandemic baking hobby turned into a bagel shop they run full-time these days in Hilliard.
Would they have started their own business without the pandemic’s distruption?
“I think we would have still been on the grind of our jobs,” she said.
Here are the stories of four food-service Columbus-area businesses that got their starts during the pandemic.
Black Cap Hot Sauce
Black Cap Hot Sauce had fans before it even had a name.
Jack Moore created house hot sauces for several restaurants, including Watershed Kitchen & Bar after he became its founding executive chef in 2017. The self-described “fermentation nerd” doesn’t cook sauces. He ferments them — the same process is used for sauerkraut and kimchi — with peppers, salt, lime and other natural ingredients.
“We had some really big, raving fans of just the hot sauce who would come to the restaurant,” Moore said. “We kind of knew we had something special.”
But Moore also had a kitchen to run, and Watershed’s restaurant showed no signs of slowing down. “It didn’t really go anywhere past the thought of, ‘What if…,’” he said of starting his own business.
When Watershed Kitchen closed and the distillery began making hand sanitizer, Moore suddenly had a “what if…” time. He rented out the restaurant’s kitchen and got to work fermenting. He and his wife, Nicki, who was still busy leading Watershed’s sales team, began working with a designer friend on the visuals.
They chose the name Black Cap because friends who were asked to try out two variations of Jack’s recipe preferred the sauce in the bottles with black caps. A backward black ball cap is also the chef’s signature look. (The Moores’ company’s name is Ruffled Feather Ferments.)
The first batch — some in 8-ounce bottles sold at the Watershed bottle shop near Grandview Heights, some in half-gallon containers sold to the restaurant itself — was ready about six months later.
“We started this as a no-debt, no-investor, no-nothing-type company,” Jack Moore said. “Talk about being a solo project. There wasn’t a budget for anyone else other than me.”
Lion Cub’s Cookies
As he finished his degree in civil engineering, Brad Kaplan knew he didn’t want to be a civil engineer.
“I was doing an internship, and I remember I called my mom during a lunch break and said, ‘I hate this. I know this isn’t what I want to do, but I don’t know what else.’” But he continued, earning his bachelor’s degree, then working full-time while earning his master’s degree.
Kaplan discovered his “what else” in 2018 while searching for a pumpkin-flavored Thanksgiving-dessert alternative. The first cookies he ever made quickly turned into a passion for baking and a desire to learn more.
“It was new to me. It was fun,” he said. “I learned what the different types of flours are doing. I learned what brown sugar does. I learned what room-temperature butter does versus melted butter just by playing around. That’s how I kind of taught myself how to bake.”
By September 2019, he was in business. At his first pop-up that December at North Market Downtown, he sold 450 cookies in three and a half hours.
Lion Cub’s Cookies had just six pop-ups before everything shut down in March 2020. Kaplan turned to delivery with his own crew so he could continue serving cookies warm and provide more income for a part-time team.
“Delivery really took off quickly,” he said. “People went from working with me three hours a week to immediately like 20-plus, and then within a month or two, they were closer to full-time,” Kaplan said.
Bears Bagels
Like a lot of people in restaurants, Charis Yost was furloughed during lockdown. Like a lot of people during lockdown, he broke out the yeast and flour and started baking to pass the time. His wife, Lo, worked in e-commerce and got busier. She was pregnant with the couple’s first child, too.
“She had overloaded things to do, and I had nothing to do,” Yost said. “I was Mr. Mom, just cooking and cleaning and everything because she was working full-time.”
He didn’t go the sourdough route of other pandemic bakers, though. He’d try things like tortillas and English muffins. Bagels became his holy grail after a challenge from his wife and a not-so-great first attempt.
By early 2022, life was back to normal as the Yosts settled into parenting and returned to work. Around Memorial Day, Charis decided to make another batch of bagels.
“I was like, ‘OK, good luck,’” Lo recalled.
“They didn’t look the greatest, but they tasted great,” she said. “Every time we made a batch, it was like, ‘If you can fix this one little thing.’ Fix the appearance, fix the crumb, fix the crust. You could see the evolution happening. And then finally, one day, I’ll never forget: We were like, ‘These look like real bagels, and they taste like real bagels. Yeah, you could actually sell these.’”
That’s when it all clicked. Instagram flash for Bears Bagels sales sold out quickly. They set up at farmers markets and attracted new fans.
“By the end of that summer, into fall, that’s when we started talking like, ‘Do I leave my job for this?’” Charis said. “Or is it just a fun side hustle that we do when we have time?”
For the Love of Dough
Cooped up with nowhere to go and nothing to do, Loren Snow and his friends began chipping in for weekend dinners during the early months of Ohio’s pandemic shutdown. Snow did the cooking, “like actual food,” he said. Brownies were the dessert request for one of their gatherings.
Snow’s job was in sales, but he always enjoyed baking. He learned from his grandmother, but brownies were one dessert he was never able to master.
“I tried to make an Oreo peanut butter-chip brownie, and it turned out awful,” he said. “The next morning, I turned that into a cookie, and the cookie was actually really good. And my friends just kept asking for it repeatedly.”
For Snow, pandemic baking was both a way to keep busy and a way to tune out stress.
“For me, baking was freeing. When I’m in the kitchen, the outside world almost doesn’t exist. It’s nonexistent. And so I can really just focus on, ‘OK, this needs to have this much salt, this much sugar…’”
When friends kept asking for more cookies during lockdown, Snow quickly thought of turning his pastime into a business. When businesses reopened in May 2020, he set up a table outside Julep nightclub in the Short North and sold cookies from 10 p.m. to 1 or 2 in the morning. He could bake 60 cookies per hour at home and sold 500 per weekend.
He called his business For the Love of Dough.
5 years later
- Lo and Charis Yost opened a Bears Bagels shop in June 2024 at 4142 Main St. in Hilliard. They sell bagels and bialys (no hole), schmears and sandwiches six days a week from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Loren Snow, along with business partners Daryl Jones and Tim Steward, moved from farmers markets to a vendor spot at The Little Grand Market when the Grandview Heights food hall opened in August 2024. Flavors range from chocolate chip to brown-butter bourbon pecan chocolate chip.
- Jack and Nicki Moore produce, promote and sell Black Cap Hot Sauce full-time now. In addition to the original, they make a few “secret stash” varieties that used to be reserved for farmers-market customers who knew to ask for them. The sauces are sold at Giant Eagle Market District stores, Lucky’s Markets, Littleton’s Market in Upper Arlington, Weiland’s Market in Clintonville and other stores.
Instagram: @dispatchdining
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