We were lucky to catch up with Kayla Abe recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kayla, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

My family on my dad‘s side are all farmers from Salinas, where they grew lettuce, celery, and onions. My mom had her own fish & produce market in Berkeley where Alice Waters shopped for Chez Panisse.

For some reason though, I thought I found food myself. Mainly because I found my way into it through the environment. I was always a sustainably fanatic, but really bolstered that interest in college through environmental studies and geography. Agriculture and land use makes up a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, so it’s made sense in my mind to focus on that as an important environmental lever.

Food waste was one of those environmental issues I heard about in theory, but when I started working for the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in SF after college, I began to see the hyper-local manifestations of this issue emerge. Not only was it terribly inefficient to waste food, but to hear farmer friends suffer financially from it was a tragedy.

Wanting to help on a local level, my partner David and I started a pickle company, Ugly Pickle Co. to sequester some of this waste and drive more income to our local farmers. Only around this time did major studies start to crop up naming food loss one of the largest environmental issues of our time. In 2020, climate solutions organization Project Drawdown, named reducing food waste the #1 most impactful way we can combat climate change, its impact surpassing that of a full conversion to vegan diets, electric cars, or solar energy.

In 2021, my partner–and chef–and I doubled-down on these food waste commitments by opening our restaurant Shuggie’s. Between our two companies, we are proud to have saved over 80,000lbs of food from the waste stream thus far.

Kayla, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Shuggie’s is a climate solutions restaurant and natural wine bar making trashy pizzas and sexy share plates, highlighting upcycled produce, byproducts, offcuts, and bycatch. By diverting perfectly good food from the waste stream, driving more dollars to local farmers, and engaging the community on all our roles in fighting food waste, together, we can begin to combat the tremendous environmental impact wasted food has on climate change.

With our restaurant Shuggie’s, we hope to become an example of what it can look like to create meaningful climate solutions through food. In a sector riddled with constraint and limitations, I wanted to show that environmentalism can also be maximalism and abundance by utilizing our existing resources to their fullest potential.

We’re grateful to have been awarded Best New Restaurants 2022 in Esquire, Best New Restaurants 2023 by Bon Appetit, Best Restaurants in San Francisco by New York Times, as well as receiving coverage from The Today Show, Eater National, Fast Company, CBS News, and NPR.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Fundraising is one of the most difficult parts of the job. Especially when you’re down to your last thousand dollars with rent and labor to pay. It was a very piecemeal project, with fundraising happening in tandem with the restaurant buildout.

We did nearly every type of fundraising possible, starting with a Kickstarter campaign. We wouldn’t have done crowdfunding had we known how bad the success rate is for a raise over $30k. It’s a full time job promoting it at the start, and by the end, you basically become a merch company for two months fulfilling gifts for donors. By the end of it we still had to raise 6x more in traditional investing. It did however garner us good press and showed future investors that we had the community’s support.

We reached our investor network by tapping every friend of a friend of a friend. We spent time getting to know each of them, and tons of time cultivating relationships that didn’t go anywhere. But by the end, we managed to gather about 20 investors, all invested in us, in the future of San Francisco, and in the prospect of doing right by our planet.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

David and I actually met at the farmers market! It’s, well, embarrassingly cute. He was shopping for his restaurant and I was writing an article looking to interview chefs.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.shuggiespizza.com
• Instagram: @shuggiespizza

Image Credits
Erin Ng