The best meal near you tonight was probably cooked in someone's home, by a person who would happily make you a plate. We are just building the door.
Good home food had no honest way to reach the next street.
Every neighborhood has someone whose cooking people quietly line up for: the auntie whose tamales sell out at the office, the friend whose curry you would drive across town for. Their food never made it to a menu because the only paths were a restaurant lease they could not afford or a delivery app that takes a third and treats them like a ghost kitchen.
California's MEHKO law changed what is possible: a permitted home cook can legally sell meals made in their own kitchen. Silo is the storefront that was missing. Neighbors reserve and pay ahead, the cook makes only what sold, and you walk over and take it hot. That is the whole product, and we would rather do that one thing honestly than ten things loudly.
Four things we will not trade away.
The cook keeps almost all of it.
Cooks keep 90 to 95 percent of every order and set their own prices. Our small service fee is the whole business. We grow only if cooks do, never by quietly taking more of their plate.
Permits are real, not decoration.
Every cook is a permitted MEHKO kitchen, and we help them get there for free. Food made by a stranger should be food a county inspector has checked. We do not bend that to grow faster.
Local actually means local.
Pickup-first, on purpose. The person who cooked your dinner lives a few blocks away, so there are no drivers, no cold bag on a porch, and your money stays on your street.
It should feel like a kitchen.
Warm, personal, made by a real hand. If a screen ever feels like a vending machine instead of a neighbor's table, we built it wrong and we fix it.
Small, in Los Angeles, on purpose.
We are not pretending to be everywhere. We would rather get one neighborhood right, with real cooks and real eaters, than spread a thin version of this across a map. Here is the honest state of things.
We are a pilot in LA.
Starting with a handful of permitted cooks and the neighbors around them, learning what a good drop really feels like.
We talk to real cooks first.
Much of what we build comes straight from sitting in real kitchens, not a roadmap dreamed up in a boardroom.
We answer our own email.
Write us and a person who actually builds Silo writes back. That is the kind of company we want to stay.
This is where a real photograph will live: a Silo cook in their own kitchen in warm afternoon light, the real dish on a real plate, the block it came from. We are holding the space rather than filling it with stock photos of food that no one on Silo cooked.
Come find out if your block can feed itself.
See how a drop works, or, if you are the one people ask to cook, start a kitchen on your street. Either way, say hello.
Or email us at hello@silo.market. We read every one.