Marco Flavio Marinucci Transforming Health Tech

Cook Here and now

Founder and PRODuct owner
 

Challenge

As an Italian working in San Francisco, the low point of any workweek was eating a processed sandwich alone at a desk. Informal polling revealed that I wasn’t actually alone: all around the Bay Area, people were hungry for more satisfying, sociable, meaningful meals. So I founded Cook Here and Now in 2005 to organize community cooking events, where a broad cross-section of Bay Area residents could create dishes to share family-style using local, seasonal, sustainable ingredients. 

ROLE

As founder of Cook Here and Now, I created a user experience design for an online platform that enabled cooks to share recipes, meet farmers at Tenderloin and Alemany farmers markets, and join neighbors and producers at community cooking events. I hosted these free, low-cost monthly events in Bayview and the Mission, with first-come, first-served signup open to cooks of all ages, backgrounds and levels of experience. I established partnerships with local farmers, winemakers and award-winning chefs, many of whom provided in-kind sponsorships and participated as peers.

RESULTS

•  Cook Here and Now quickly grew into the West Coast’s largest cooking group, and launched spin-off chapters in Austin, TX and Melbourne, Australia in conjunction with Slow Food. With my mission to prove that anyone can cook with local, sustainable ingredients accomplished by 2011, there was no for further San Francisco events – though many participants continue to organize community dinners, sharing skills and inspiration.
• Key partners championing Cook Here and Now included Slow Food pioneer Alice Waters, the City of San Francisco’s Park & Recreation department and James Beard Award-winning chef Charles Phan, who offered Slanted Door’s industrial kitchen as an event space.
• Cook Here & Now received rave reviews in Food & Wine magazine, The New Yorker, Lonely Planet’s California and San Francisco guidebooks, and Raj Patel’s bestselling food politics manifesto Stuffed and Starved. The group was featured in "The World’s Top 10 Cooking Clubs" by Travel + Leisure in 2008 and San Francisco Bay Guardian’s "Best of the Bay" in 2009.