InBerkeley

David Gelles explains in the Financial Times the intertwined stories of PowerBar, Clif Bar and Gu. It’s a fascinating story of innovation, entrepreneurship and (seemingly friendly) corporate rivalry.

All were founded in Berkeley. Nestle bought PowerBar in 1999 and moved its base to Glendale in southern California. Clif Bar recently moved to Emeryville. Gu is apparently looking for larger premises, but plans to stay in Berkeley.

Business

InBerkeley was out of milk — as per usual — so we went to check out Ashby Marketplace, which has just opened near the corner of Ashby and College in the Elmwood.

First impressions are good. It’s a very nicely designed space — airy, with good lighting and well displayed goods. The emphasis is on healthy, natural food and organic produce. There’s a significant dairy section, fresh produce and baked pastries from the Paris Baker. We leaped to a verdict: it’s Star Grocery meets Market Hall.

Owner Ramiz Hasan (pictured, bottom right) is happy with both comparisons, but says he sees himself as friend rather than competition to both these venerable institutions. This is his family’s 18th store — most are around Haight Ashbury in the city — but it’s the first one he has got to run and he is brimming with ambition for the new venture.

“I have been a Bay Area native for 28 years and I’ve always wanted to own my own store — and I knew I wanted it to be in Berkeley,” he says.

Hasan says he’s bringing in lots of locally produced goodies to his “100% green” shop, such as olive oils and cheeses. He also guarantees that his cheeses cost on average $3 per pound less than at any other independently run vendors in the area — even though he is using many of the same suppliers. “I want to bring my prices down as much as possible and be a real old-school store,” he says

He mentions his niche specialty last: ” I have the largest selection of natural and organic pet supplies among independent stores, possibly in the whole of California,” he says.

Knowing how berserk Berkeley is about dogs, that should make a lot of people very happy.

Business, Food, Green living, Retail, The Elmwood Ashby Markeplace

Bill Fujimoto, who left Berkeley’s Monterey Market earlier this year, has been hired as a consultant by Lafayette grocer Diablo Foods according to a report in Diablo Magazine:

Since Fujimoto’s arrival in July, Diablo Foods has begun offering more seasonal fare from such farms as Full Belly in Capay Valley and Goldbud in Placerville.

Fujimoto, shown above with his wife Judy, says he may open his own store, possibly in Contra Costa county.

Bill Fujimoto: what’s fresh now, June 24 2009
Monterey Market Mystery, June 12 2009

Business, Food, News, People Bill Fujimoto, Monterey Market

In the midst of a polemic about how California is going to hell in a handcart, John Dvorak has some tough words for Berkeley:

UC Berkeley has one of the greatest engineering departments in the world. Now name one high-tech company in Berkeley. You can’t; tech companies scramble out of there as fast as they can. (There is a burrito place called High Tech Burrito. That’s about it.)

He’s certainly right about UC Berkeley. In the US News rankings, electrical engineering and computer engineering departments tie Stanford and MIT for top spot; other engineering domains are generally in the top three.

Dvorak cites Berkeley’s “anti-business” policies. I once worked in a Berkeley-based business, and I don’t think we found the city that difficult. So is it really Berkeley’s problem, or is it just that the business climate on the peninsula is so utterly conducive to tech companies that it becomes the natural home? I wouldn’t want to live over there, but perhaps if I were a tech entrepreneur I’d want to base my business there.

The world expert on what makes Silicon Valley what it is, AnnaLee Saxenian, is in Berkeley. But I don’t think her work looks at the micro issues of why one city in the Bay Area is successful in business creation and another isn’t. Any ideas?

Business

Bayer Healthcare has apparently decided to continue processing its Kogenate hemophilia drug at its West Berkeley plant, according to this article in the San Francisco Business Times. As a result, the company said it is investing $100 million in its West Berkeley facility — its largest single investment in the site — to increase production of the drug, but there is no indication as to whether this will result in more jobs at the site or not.

(Photo: Rupert Ganzer via Flickr)

Business, West Berkeley

“We keep doing it because we’re stubborn.”

Christina Creveling, co-manager and a partner in University Press Books on Bancroft just below Telegraph, is frank about the difficulties her jewel of a bookstore faces. An idle observer would think that Berkeley — with 35,000 students and a population filled with academics and literary types — should be a haven for bookstores. Indeed there was a time when that was the case. But in recent years book lovers in Berkeley have seen the peregrinations and eventual closure of Cody’s, the closure of Black Oak Books and even the closure of Barnes & Noble on Shattuck. Are we cursed?

I hope not. University Press Books is celebrating its 35th year and, for all the struggles, is a fantastic bookstore. It stocks 16,000 titles, about 70 per cent of which are the academic works that give the store its name. The other 30 per cent are so-called trade books, such as you’d find in any ordinary bookstore. The stock is a superb mix of books you might read about in The New York Times Book Review and more arcane volumes (very much to my taste) you could uncover through TLS or review pages in academic journals.

According to Creveling, University Press Books has been hit by a number of factors. The rise of Amazon.com and other web-based booksellers has hurt bookstores everywhere. In academic books, there are additional problems. Most books are sold to bookstores at a discount of around 40 per cent. That’s the bookstore’s potential for profit. In academic books, however, more and more books are now sold on “short discount”, only 20 per cent off. Sales are made directly to libraries and university courses. There’s insufficient profit at that discount for stores like University Press Books. Creveling also recognizes that the store faces particular difficulties with its location. Many potential customers no longer come to the Telegraph Avenue area to shop, even though stores like University Press Books provide parking validation.

So what can the store do? Creveling and her colleagues have been innovative. The store has launched a Friends of UPB program. An annual donation of $35 gives members 10 per cent off on one day’s purchases as well as an invitation to a members-only party. Lifetime memberships are $350 — ten people have signed up for lifetime memberships so far. Additionally the store has a program for local authors: donate two copies of your book and University Press Books will display one copy for at least a month and commit to always reordering copies of the book should it sell, so that one copy will remain in stock.

University Press Books is precisely the kind of store that Berkeley needs to support and retain if we want to keep some of the best aspects of the city’s character. I hope it’s here to celebrate its 70th anniversary.

Books, Business

The 636 solar panels atop the new Berkeley Bowl West building at 920 Heinz Street in Berkeley must be doing their job pretty well.  Tomorrow, the market’s owners are receiving a $167,029 solar energy rebate check from PG&E.

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, representatives from PG&E and Sun Light & Power President Gary Gerber will be on hand, too, no doubt to promote solar energy, boast about what a great job they’re doing and to get their photos taken. In preparation for tomorrow’s event, southeastern Berkeley and parts of the downtown area were plunged into darkness early this morning to remind citizens of just how important electricity is to our daily lives. No word on whether Berkeley Bowl West was affected by the blackout or not.

The solar panels atop the acclaimed Berkeley Bowl West facility are expected to produce 149,633 kilowatts of electricity per year, and were installed by Berkeley-based by Sun Light & Power.

You, too, can attend the rebate-receiving ceremony. It will take place at noon on Friday at the Berkeley Bowl West.

Architecture, Business, Environment, Events, Government, Green, Politics, West Berkeley

An insider’s account of the demise of Eccolo on Fourth Street:

Fifty hardworking people lost their jobs when Eccolo closed on Berkeley’s Fourth Street strip last week, released into a vast ocean of unemployed restaurant workers. But the ripple effect is even more discouraging. Farmers, handymen, our cleaning crew and the neighborhood preschool we made lunch for daily are only a few of the dozens of local small businesses affected.

Ultimately, it was the piddling state of the economy that made us decide to close. Most restaurants never make much money, and Eccolo was no exception.

via SFGate.

Business, Food, Issues, West Berkeley, restaurants

Are you technically oriented? A hacker? Are you thinking about one day starting your own company? Or maybe you’ve already started one?

How’d you like to get free advice from some of the tech industry’s most notable startup experts? People like Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus; Chris Anderson, Wired editor-in-chief; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Paul Buchheit, founder of Friendfeed; Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos; and others.

The 2009 Startup School will be held on Saturday, October 24, at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Auditorium, and is sponsored by Berkeley CSUA, St@b, BASES, and Y Combinator.

The event is free, but because more people may want to attend than there room for, the organizers have asked that you fill out a brief application form if you want to attend.  The application deadline is noon, Pacific time, on October 1, and acceptance notices will be sent out by October 8.  Because the purpose of this event is to teach technical people about startups, they will get priority.

Where: Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley.
When: October 24, 2009, 9:00 a.m.
Application Deadline: October 1, 2009.

Business, Education, UC Berkeley

Pure democracy and representative democracy continue to duke it out on the streets of Berkeley as the petition drive to bring the downtown Berkeley development plan to a vote of the people approaches today’s deadline to reach 5558 valid signatures. Opponents to the petition include many political and business leaders, who have been unusually vocal in their support of the current plan and have mounted a strong defensive campaign against against the petition drive. Proponents of the referendum are reported to be paying some signature gatherers $2 per signature while complaining about tactics being used to deter signers.

Opponents of a downtown Berkeley development plan were still on the streets Wednesday gathering the 5,558 signatures needed by Thursday to put the plan to a citywide vote.

City Councilman Jesse Arreguin, 25, who is behind the campaign to overturn the Downtown Area Plan, which allows for taller buildings, more housing density, more open space and which imposes green building requirements, said he is “cautiously optimistic” his group has enough signatures to go forward.

via Berkeley Voice/Inside Bay Area.

Architecture, Business, Downtown, Politics

Chocolatier Blue, the Berkeley-based gourmet chocolate maker, is opening a second store on Fourth St. in the location formerly occupied by Sketch.  A call to Chocolatier Blue confirmed they are planning to open the new shop in September, though an exact date was not available.

Owner Chris Blue was chocolatier for Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago before opening the first Chocolatier Blue at 1964 University Ave., and spent his childhood summers on a self-sustaining family farm in Nebraska, which is where he learned about organic agriculture and how important it is to support local farms.  His hand-made confections use Amedei chocolate, which is considered by many to be the best chocolate in the world. Fresh organic cream is shipped directly from a Nebraska farm, raw butter is from the 5-Star Butter Co. in California, pistachios are from Sicily and raw produce is from local markets.

Business, Food, Retail, West Berkeley

The operators of Slim’s and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco plan to open a 1,500-seat concert venue in downtown Berkeley.

The application for the project in the old UC Theater building on University Avenue near Shattuck Avenue goes before the city’s Zoning and Adjustments board Thursday night. City staff is recommending the board approve the project. The project was approved by the city’s planning commission in May.

The project comes on the heels of the Aug. 27 opening of the new Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse just a block away on Addison Street. That venue, which will showcase folk and traditional American Music, will seat 440 people.

via Inside Bay Area.

8/14/09 UPDATE: Last night the Zoning and Adjustments board in Berkeley approved the zoning change that will allow this project to move forward. According to the San Francisco Business Times, the project still needs several more approvals and permits before it can start construction. The opening is targeted for fall of 2010

Arts, Business, Downtown, Government, Music, Politics, Property

There are 47 veterinarians in Berkeley, 59 landscape architects, but only 1 funeral parlor. There are 3 medical marijuana dispensaries, 85 places with liquor licenses, 10 private schools, and 9 garment manufacturers. Last year, there were 995 car thefts.

In Oakland, there are 80 veterinarians, 72 landscape architects, and 19 funeral parlors. There are 5 medical marijuana dispensaries, 327 places with liquor licenses, 38 private schools, and 41 garment manufacturers.  Last year, there were 9,968 car thefts in Oakland.

These statistics come out of a fabulous new initiative called CityLab put together by the UC Berkeley Journalism School. Professor Susan Rasky, web designer Josh Williams,  and graduate student Kim Geiger created an easy-to-read, easy-to-use database that lets people see demographic, political and lifestyle data on 65 Northern California cities. All of the statistics are sourced. CityLab also makes it easy compare one city to another.

Rasky is hoping that journalism outlets use the data to write interesting news stories, according to an announcement she posted on the site. There is already one story up at the site about property taxes in Antioch, and others may soon follow.

There is also a “Did You Know?” box on the site with rotating data, such as the news that San Leandro has 2 gun ranges, Berkeley has the highest poverty rate in the Bay Area, and 53% of Daly City’s population is foreign-born. Did you know that?

Business, Crime, Internet, UC Berkeley

Book lovers rejoice!

Books, Inc. an independent bookstore chain with roots stretching back to the Gold Rush, is going to open a new store in Berkeley’s Fourth Street shopping district.

The new store, the chain’s twelfth outlet, will open in mid- October, according to a press release issued by CEO Michael Tucker, who grew up in Berkeley. It will be a general interest bookstore with a large collection of cookbooks and children’s titles as well. The store will also host author events.

Tucker credited the “right location, the right lease and the right landlord for allowing expansion in this challenging economic climate.”

It will be interesting to see if Books, Inc can be successful on a street that was not profitable for the venerable Cody’s Books, which shuttered its Fourth Street outlet in early 2008. The press release did not state where Books, Inc would open, but at 4,000 square feet it will be smaller (and with much lower rent) than Cody’s massive store. Tucker did say Books, Inc. will hire 12 new employees.

The bookstore landscape in Berkeley has changed in the past year. Black Oak Books on Shattuck closed down, removing one of the best venues for authors to speak. Mrs. Dalloway’s on College Avenue is expanding and a café will open next door, which will create a leisurely ambiance conducive to browsing. Moe’s celebrated its 50^th birthday in July.

Melissa Mytinger, the former events coordinator at Cody’s, started Berkeley Arts & Letters, which showcases premier authors in venues around town. Some of the authors coming to their fall series include Mary Karr, Sherman Alexie, Rebecca Solnit, Deepak Chopra, Diane Ackerman and Po Bronson.

The good news about Books, Inc comes on the heels of the bad news that Christopher Lee, the owner of Eccolo, will be shuttering his Fourth Street restaurant on August 22.

Books, Business, General Fourth Street

For Caroline and Renee Thomas  Jacobs, the family dinner has always been one of the most important parts of the day, the one place where they and their two young sons could sit down together around the table to share food and conversation, and just reconnect and enjoy each other’s company. But as two busy professionals – Caroline working in operations at Apple and Renee working for a high-end kitchen supply retailer – they were finding these dinners were becoming harder and harder to do. Then, about three years ago, they realized that pretty soon they were never going to be able to have their family dinners at all, and that this was not the kind life they wanted. They decided they needed a change, and so Caroline left her job to become an at-home mother.

Caroline and Renee had also always wanted to start their own business together, but again, with two crazy jobs they had talked about it, but never really had the time to do anything. Once Caroline was home, however, they started thinking about what they wanted to do and what their passions were, and decided they wanted to find a way to make it easier for busy couples like themselves to have the family dinners they had struggled to maintain.

The result is ReneeGourmet™, a small, family-run business managed from their home in El Cerrito, practically in the shadow of FatApple’s restaurant, and just a stone’s throw from Berkeley’s infamous gourmet ghetto. As their web site states: We seek to “feed family time” with wholesome, ready-to-bake meals proven to bring the family to the table.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Caroline around their kitchen table and talk about their new four-month-old business. I also got to sample some of their homemade pizzas.

“Renee’s always been the chef in the family, and she’s a big foodie and all that, and she came upon the idea of family dinners,” Caroline explained. “Technology has also played a major role in allowing us to do this with me at home, our web site, email, a Facebook page and a mobile phone. Without all this technology, it would have taken a lot more capital to get this off the ground.”

For now, the 12-inch homemade pizza is ReneeGourmet’s flagship dish, and they offer several interesting varieties as well as custom combinations. I tasted both the pepperoni pizza and the Mediterranean Madness, which includes sun-dried tomatoes, Kalamata olives, feta cheese, red onion, fresh basil and pine nuts, and both were delicious and truly looked homemade. The pizzas can be ordered with either regular or whole wheat crusts, and Renee also offers a unique gluten-free crust. Renee is also looking to expand their offering, and is testing new recipes for lasagna and macaroni and cheese, but these are not yet generally available to all customers.

A basic 12-inch cheese pizza – called Sonny’s – costs $14, while the combination pizzas will set you back $16, and discounts are available if you order more than 5 or 10 at a time. A wide variety of toppings, fresh herbs and cheeses are available for you to make your own custom pizzas, too. Or, you can join the Pizza Club and Renee will design a unique pizza just for you each month based on seasonal ingredients, your order history and stated likes and dislikes. They’ll even accommodate food allergies. Orders can be placed by email or phone, and Caroline recommends ordering all pizzas at least two days in advance (custom pizzas require it).

Read more…

Business, Food, General, People Pizza

In a major coup, the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting has hired Lance Williams, the San Francisco Chronicle’s top investigative journalist, to join its new California Watch Project.
Williams, who has been a reporter for 34 years and who attended UC Berkeley, will be covering money and politics for the new initiative, which is backed by $2.4 million in grants from major foundations. He will join Louis Freedberg, the director of California Watch and a former editorial writer for the Chronicle and Mark Katches, a California native who previously worked the Orange County Register and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
California Watch is a multimedia investigative project started in May to fill the reporting gaps left as the state’s major newspapers cut deeply into their staffs. California Watch is a joint project of CIR and the California Media Collective based out of the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.
“California is a state facing immense challenges,” said Katches. “It has never been more important for a strong watchdog team to hold those in power accountable and to shine a light on important issues facing citizens of the state.
Williams won numerous awards at the Chronicle for uncovering the BALCO steroid scandal of major league baseball.  He and Mark Fainaru-Wada wrote Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports, and the book prompted major league baseball to open a formal investigation into doping.
The Center for Investigative Reporting, founded in 1977, is the nation’s oldest non-profit investigative reporting news organization. Its staff reporters and associated freelancers have produced stories on a range of topics, which have aired on many of the major networks and appeared in many of the nation’s top newspapers or magazines.

The Center  is located near Ashby and Shattuck Avenues.

Business, Education, Environment, Politics Journalism

The Berkeley Downtown Area Plan was passed by the Berkeley City Council on a 7–2 vote on July 14, 2009. As expected, opponents of that plan have already initiated a petition drive seeking a referendum to cancel the plan.  According to the Berkeley Daily Planet, if at least 5,558 valid signatures of registered Berkeley voters are collected and turned in to city officials by Aug. 20, the City Council has the option of either invalidating the Downtown Area Plan itself or putting a referendum on the November 2010 ballot for voters to decide if they want the plan implemented.

In Berkeley recently received an email message from Berkeley resident and New York Times bestselling author Ayelet Waldman endorsing a letter she received from Liveable Berkeley Executive Director Erin Rhoades which asks people not to sign the petition now being circulated in opposition to the Berkeley plan.  With their permission, we are reprinting Ms. Rhoades’ letter and Ms. Waldman’s introduction here.

Glory, have we had bad weather and good food here in Maine. Ribs from local pigs. Ice cream and milk from local cows (my kids think the milk tastes like milkshakes – we’re in heaven unless we all get E Coli and die). Vegetables from friends’ gardens. Honestly, it’s a culinary wonderland. And let’s not forget the fried clams and lobster rolls.

But I’m not writing to make you feel bad. If you don’t live in Berkeley, just delete. Seriously, this won’t interest you. But if you do, and you agree that downtown Berkeley is a monstrous blot on our city, that’s is a sinkhole desperate for some decent urban planning, then please read the attached email. It was written by someone who knows more than you and I do, and forwarded by an architect whom I trust.

I’m telling you, I love our town, but I am so goddamn sick of the myopic vision of some of its more vocal (and colorfully-dressed) citizens.

Here’s the letter:

Dear Friend,

I’m writing to ask your help to revitalize Downtown Berkeley.

It’s an easy request. You don’t have to contribute any money, join any group or attend any meeting.

All you have to do is NOT sign the petition now being circulated to cancel our new Downtown Area Plan. And tell your friends to also “just say no.”

After four years of community-wide effort, seven of our nine Berkeley council-members (Anderson, Bates, Capitelli, Maio, Moore, Wengraf, Wozniak) voted to approve a new plan for Downtown Berkeley which would help turn around a downtown stuck in failure.

Our new Downtown Area Plan will revitalize Downtown Berkeley. It encourages more Downtown residents and more affordable housing, supports a pedestrian plaza on Center Street, enforces new green building standards and provides for much-needed street-level amenities to make the Downtown more enjoyable. It’s also essential to Berkeley’s Climate Action Plan because it supports more residents living downtown near transit and daily-needs shopping — essential to our environmental leadership role as a “climate smart” city.

In Downtown Berkeley today, commercial vacancy rates have topped 16%, almost all retail businesses continue to struggle, and only one new affordable apartment building has been completed in years. We need to do better, and the new Downtown Plan will help big-time.

For many years the people now opposed to our new Downtown Area Plan have also opposed all previous attempts to accommodate more people in Berkeley — even though that’s just what we need to BUILD an equitable, diverse and environmentally responsible future for our city.

This time their scare tactic is “Manhattanization:” the specter of “greedy corporate developers” crowding our Downtown with a forest of “huge skyscrapers”.

What’s actually in the new Downtown Plan is something different. It limits “tall” additions over the next 20 years to a maximum of one or two buildings for conference-oriented hotels or housing, plus no more than 6 other medium-height buildings — 2 of which could be office buildings and at least 4 residential. It asks for significant returns from developers for public amenities, including public open spaces in the Downtown. This potential growth over twenty years is constrained to a district that takes up less than FOUR PERCENT of Berkeley’s land – existing zoning limits would still apply everywhere else.

The conclusion the City Council reached is clear: the only way we can turn around Downtown is if we can house more residents and workers in new green buildings to support LOCAL-oriented shopping and services. Given that commitment, when is doing nothing the “better and greener solution” for Downtown, as the petitioners claim?

If the referendum succeeds, four years of hard community planning work would be thrown away and improvements for Downtown would be put on hold again. How would that help make Downtown more successful?

Please join the Council majority, Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, environmental and labor groups and many of your own neighbors in opposing this unfortunate and short-sighted attempt to freeze Downtown Berkeley in failure mode. Say NO to the petition — and say YES to a better and greener Berkeley in years to come.

Please help further by forwarding this message to your Berkeley friends and neighbors. And, let me know if you have a little time you could contribute in the next 3 weeks to help defeat this petition.

Best,

Erin Rhoades

P.S. If the petition gains enough signatures, the required election could cost the city more than $200,000 — money needed for many more important things in these tough economic times.

Yours,

Ayelet Waldman

You can read more about the referendum campaign here. Kriss Worthington, who represents District 7 on Berkeley’s City Council, voices his Top Ten Super-Sized Flaws of the Downtown Area Plan.

Business, Downtown, Government, Issues, Politics