Hatch exists because starting a food business should not require a lease, a licence lawyer, and a 30% commission.
Most food apps are built for restaurants that already exist. They are directories with delivery attached, and their economics assume a business with a kitchen, a landlord, and enough volume to absorb a third of every order going somewhere else.
The people Hatch is for do not have that. They have a recipe, a pot, and a Saturday. A birria window on 18th Street. Somebody’s grandmother who has been feeding a neighbourhood informally for a decade. A baker with a full-time job and a Saturday morning’s worth of pastry.
Anyone can open a window. No licence check, no approval queue, no gatekeeper. That is the entire point, and it has a real cost: Hatch cannot tell you a kitchen is safe, because we did not check. So we do not pretend. Every guest is told plainly before their first order, and every kitchen can show you the room they cook in.
A flat fee. Two dollars an order and ten dollars a month. A percentage punishes a kitchen for selling something expensive, and the work is the same either way.
No drivers. Hatch does not deliver anything. If a kitchen wants to deliver, they deliver. Building a courier network would mean needing volume, and needing volume is what turns a marketplace against the people selling on it.
Nothing invented. No surge, no fake scarcity, no countdown that resets. If a card says four left, a cook typed four.
New York and Chicago first, because that is where the kitchens we want are thickest on the ground. Anyone anywhere can open a window, and we would rather grow one street at a time than launch in forty cities with nothing on any of them.