Hoboken Farms Nets $4 Million in Fresh Funding

Summary

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Bloomberg Businessweek

Episode: Hoboken Farms Nets $4 Million in Fresh Funding

Date: February 17, 2026
Hosts: Carol Massar & Tim Stenovec
Guest: Brad Finkel, CEO of Hoboken Farms

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Episode Overview

This episode spotlights Hoboken Farms, a family-owned company that started at local farmers markets and grew into a shelf staple for pasta sauces across the U.S. and beyond. Host Carol Massar, joined by Tim Stenovec, talks with CEO Brad Finkel about the evolution of the business, the changing landscape for small businesses and consumers, and the company’s recent $4 million Series A funding round. The discussion offers candid insights into consumer behavior, supply chain challenges, and the pivotal role of community in business growth.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Consumer Sentiment and Behavior

• Current Mood: Finkel describes consumers as “scared” and “confused,” with uncertainty dominating their planning and purchasing (03:24).
  • “I think the consumer is scared. I think the consumer is confused. I think the consumer is trying to grab onto some form of an idea of what they can plan for and they can't find it.”
    — Brad Finkel [03:24]
• Shift to Home Cooking: Due to rising restaurant costs and fees, more people are eating and cooking at home, searching for quality and value in their purchases.
  • “In my exact world, I find consumers are not going out to eat to restaurants as much. They are cooking at home. So they're coming to us.”
    — Brad Finkel [03:41]

2. Comparisons to Previous Economic Moments

• Finkel draws parallels between today’s uncertainty and the periods around 9/11 and the Great Recession, stating this moment has both “confusion” and “fear” (04:24).
  • “In 2001, we were there during 9/11. Then during the recession, we went through that. This feels kind of like a combination of both, not just confusion, but fear.”
    — Brad Finkel [04:24]
• Contrasts with larger company execs who remain upbeat, highlighting a unique small-business perspective.

3. Small Business Challenges: Stability Over Policy

• Finkel credits the ability to “plan” as the most crucial element for small business—more important than political shifts or macro headlines.
  • “What matters to me is stability. If I'm going to plan for next month, next year, I have to be able to have an understanding of what it is I'm planning for.”
    — Brad Finkel [05:38]
• Tariffs and cost of goods increases can dramatically impact operations.

4. Origin Story: From Deliveries to Farmers Markets

• Finkel recounts starting out delivering mozzarella and bread to ex-Hoboken residents in the suburbs (07:02).
• Transitioned to attending farmers markets after an invitation from Peter Baronio—then grew into making and selling marinara sauce.
  • “It kind of started as a side hustle. I made a marinara sauce, and that marinara sauce really took off. ...A very important buyer from Whole Foods saw that line of people, tried our sauce, and called me up...and that started my journey from farm market to supermarkets across America.”
    — Brad Finkel [08:49]

5. Delivering Consistency at Scale

• As Hoboken Farms has grown, maintaining product quality remains paramount. Finkel personally attends production runs for taste, color, and consistency; anything subpar is donated.
  • “We go to every run. We are there. So we're tasting tests. We're tasting color. We're tasting viscosity. ...If it does not meet those expectations, it gets donated to the community food bank.”
    — Brad Finkel [09:44]

6. Community: The Ecosystem and Incubator

• The origin of Hoboken Farms’ sauce came from fellow farmers and direct customer requests.
  • “A farm market is both an ecosystem and an incubator. ...I need tomatoes and basil, and there's tomatoes and basil [right next to me at the market].”
    — Brad Finkel [11:21]
• Most ingredients are sourced locally when possible, except for olive oil.

7. Growth, Funding, and the Role of Customers

• The company’s recent $4 million Series A funding happened organically—customers, including experienced CPG investors, expressed interest before a formal capital raise process began.
  • “It became obvious that the opportunities that were coming our way meant that I needed a bigger boat. ...When word got out to our customers...some very savvy investors said, wait, we want to be part of this.”
    — Brad Finkel [11:42]
• The raise positions Hoboken Farms for broader distribution and operational excellence.

8. Future Plans and Product Expansion

• Geo-Expansion: Growing distribution footprint down the East Coast, to the Midwest, and further into California and Texas. Online/direct-to-consumer is also a focus.
  • “We are building our business straight down 95 down south to the Midwest. ...We are growing our distribution certainly also online as well, you know, direct to consumer.”
    — Brad Finkel [12:32]
• Product Line: New pizza sauce is forthcoming, with further products in the pipeline, leveraging a “small but mighty group of experts” (13:00).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Consumer Mood:

  • “I think the consumer is scared... trying to grab onto some form of an idea of what they can plan for and they can't find it.”
    — Brad Finkel [03:24]

• Business Philosophy:

  • “What matters to me is stability. If I'm going to plan for next month, next year, I have to be able to have an understanding of what it is I'm planning for.”
    — Brad Finkel [05:38]

• Startup Story:

  • “This kept on happening. And I said to my grandmother, do they not have bread and cheese where they live?”
    — Brad Finkel [07:32]

• Community’s Role:

  • “A farm market is both an ecosystem and an incubator.”
    — Brad Finkel [11:21]

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Important Timestamps

• [03:24] – Brad describes current consumer mindset
• [04:24] – Comparison to 9/11 and 2008 Recession
• [05:38] – What matters most for small business: planning & stability
• [07:02] – Finkel’s early delivery business and first exposure to farmers markets
• [08:49] – Being discovered by Whole Foods; leap to supermarkets
• [09:44] – Maintaining ingredient and product consistency
• [11:21] – Farmers markets as an “ecosystem and incubator”
• [11:42] – Organic capital raise story
• [12:32] – Distribution growth plans
• [13:00] – New products in the pipeline

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Summary Flow

The episode gives a personal, candid look at running a small food business in today’s volatile climate. Brad Finkel’s story—growing Hoboken Farms from a quirky delivery service on an old answering machine to a national brand—underscores adaptability, relentless quality control, and deep community ties. The conversation balances the practical (how to scale, secure funding, and expand into new markets) with the personal (stories of early hustle, maintaining community involvement, and responding to real-time customer needs). Underpinning it all is a sense of optimism and humility, even in the face of macroeconomic challenges.

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For listeners:
If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, consumer trends, or the realities of growing a brand from market stall to supermarket shelves, this is a must-listen episode—full of grounded insights, humor, and business wisdom from the frontline.

Transcript

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[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio news.

[Co-Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Massar and Tim Stanovec on Bloomberg Radio.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

According to the U.S. small Business Administration, the U.S. has more than 36 million small businesses and those businesses provide close to 46% of employment in the private Sector. And our next guest knows a lot about. He is someone I have known for a long time. Brad Finkel is CEO of Hoboken Farms. It's a family owned company, started out in local farmers markets and has grown into a business that sells pasta and sauces all over the country. And it's taken you. First of all, welcome.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Thank you.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

It's great to have you here.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Happy birthday.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

Oh, thank you.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

But I have known you a long time and I want to get into how you've gone from farmer's markets to so much more. But I want to also ask you because you guys, I've been to your, you know, bought from your different stands.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

And Hamilton Park, Jersey City.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

I have, I have, I have. And so you guys have people out in front talking with consumers all the time. How would you say the consumer's doing right now?

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

I think the consumer is scared. I think the consumer is confused. I think the consumer is trying to grab onto some form of an idea of what they can plan for and they can't find it.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

So being more discretionary in spending, do you see that?

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

I.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Well, in my exact world, I find consumers are not going out to eat to restaurants as much. They are cooking at home. So they're coming to us. But they certainly want unbelievably high quality and they also want value for their money.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

You know, I see that too. People aren't ordering food as much here in New York City. They're not getting delivery as much.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

We're definitely not doing that.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

I've talked to some folks about this for a couple of reasons. One, the prices have, with all the fees added on have become incredibly high. So, yeah, I think people are cooking more at home. Is this a different, how is this moment different from other moments that you've sort of experienced being in this space? I know that your business has grown a lot in recent years, but you've had a good eye on the consumer for quite a long time.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

You know, we, I started my business in 1992. We participate in up to 800 farm markets a year. That's outdoors, underneath tents, on the street, face to face with our consumers. In 2001, we were there during 9, 11. Then during the recession, we went through that. This feels kind of like a combination of both, not just confusion, but fear.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

This is such a different message than we're getting from the executives of big companies.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

Yeah. Who seem to be still upbeat about a lot of things.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Well, I mean, if you're an investor, that's great, but if you're Trying to feed your family. And you're not going to restaurants anymore and you're going to supermarkets. And if not supermarkets, farm markets.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

Brad, you know, it's so interesting because I think about some of the things that we spend headlines talking about and today's the day where we talked a lot about the Federal Reserve. I'm not going to ask for your view on that, but it's just one of the Kevins.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

Nice.

[Public Investing Sponsor]

Well done, well done.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

But this is why I've loved talking to you over the years. You've also been a real estate investor. You've seen sold businesses. But it's what really matters when it comes to small businesses. Is it changes in the administration? Is it any of that stuff?

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Far be it for me to be able to say what matters, but what matters to me is stability. If I'm going to plan for next month, next year, I have to be able to have an understanding of what it is I'm planning for. I mean, for instance, our pasta sauce is popping up on shelves across the supermarkets of America. Tariffs hit our ingredients, Our cogs go up. What do you do about that? So as a small business, it is something that hits our pocketbook. Last night I just read a posting from a really well known restaurant that is closing its doors and it was really like, I cannot do this anymore. It is just a, a horrendous place in the country to be able to do.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

You know, we saw that during COVID We were shocked by how many even like very well known chefs and restaurateurs who were struggling and we thought they would be good. We want to get to your story because Farmer's Market is where you began. You have tons of farmers markets and you're doing it in crazy weather and even this weekend in the cold. How do you get to where you've got multiple not brands, but jars of sauces, different things. And you've become a much bigger business. You're in a ton of stores around the country. And tell me if I'm wrong, because my daughter said, I think I bought them in London.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

We do have a couple of places in London that you can buy it at. Smaller, independent. In fact, we just got an order from Ireland today and the tariffs affected. Now all of a sudden there's a lot more hoops that we have to jump through. So I was a teenager living in Hoboken, New Jersey, playing bass in a band in a van, touring from Hoboken to Maine down to Virginia to Memphis to Nashville into Austin, Texas. And as you could imagine, that Is not a great plan for financial stability. So I was going to Ramapo College in Mahwa, New Jersey, up Route 17, and I would meet these nice kids who aren't from Hoboken, and they would say, would you like to come over from my house? And I said, yes. And then I would get a phone call. Hey, my mother wants to know, could you bring some mozzarella? Sure. My father wants to know, could you bring a baguette? Some baguettes from dom's Bakery at 6 and Grand? Absolutely. And this kept on happening. And I said to my grandmother, do they not have bread and cheese where they live? But what it was in my sociology class that I heard about was the gentrification at hoboken had started. These were ex Hobokenites who had moved to the suburbs. And I started a home delivery service. Literally, if you called me and left a message on my old cassette answering machine on Monday, I delivered to you on Tuesday. If you called on Thursday, I delivered to you on Friday. And I ended up with a couple of hundred customers. One of those customers was a gentleman named Peter Baronio. Peter baronio became the economic development director for Englewood, New Jersey, called me up and said, we're having a farm market. Would you like to come? I said, what's a farm market? And he said, I don't know, but we're having one.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

Is that crazy? Because they're everywhere now.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Well, now they are, but kind of started as a side hustle. I made a marinara sauce, and that marinara sauce really took off. Now, that's kind of the short story. People would stand online and buy it by the case. A very important buyer from whole foods saw that line of people, tried our sauce, and called me up on a cell phone and said, we'd love to have you in our stores. And I said, which one? They said, all of them across the northeast. So that started my journey from farm market to supermarkets across America.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

We're speaking to Brad finkel, founder and CEO of Hoboken farms here in the studio. You brought a selection of what you do offer, includes pasta and sauces. How have you been able to keep the taste and the ingredients consistent as you've scaled and gotten bigger?

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Oh, wow. We go.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

Were you able to do that?

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Well, we go, yes. We go to every run. We are there. So we're tasting tests. We're tasting color. We're tasting viscosity. We have sugar content. So if it does not meet those expectations, it gets donated to the community food bank of New Jersey.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

But I Want to go back? Because I know this. You had mentioned to me that one of the reasons you got into sauce is your customers started asking for it because you. I bought your ravioli, and people were like, can I get some sauce?

[Co-Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

Right.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

So all day, every day, we sell now hundreds of thousands of loaves of bread and tons of mozzarella and burrata, countless coolers of ravioli. And people would come to us and say, do you have any sauce to go with that ravioli? Nope. Do you have any sauce to go with the pasta? I do not. Finally, a guy, a very Jersey guy, came over and said, hey, dummy, who are you standing next to? And I looked to my right, and it was Kurt Halstead from Alstead Farm. There was Dale from Stony Hill Farms. It was Matt from Cherry Grove Farms. It was Doug from Race Farms. Fellas got to get some tomatoes and some basil, and we started making some sauce.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

But you also mentioned that you have to get some ingredients from outside of the U.S. well, olive oil.

[My Policy Advocate Announcer]

Yeah.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

I mean, okay. Yeah.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

So is that it? Is that everything else is from. From Jersey?

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

We do our very best. You know, our original ingredients came directly from the farm markets. We are. We have to make sure that we have the best tomatoes, the best basil, the best onions.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

What I think is.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

So there's a lot of sauce.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

Now, what is so cool is, though, it's like you listen to the community or the community says, do this, and then when you go to make sauce, you look around you and you embrace the community to do it.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Well, a farm market is both an ecosystem and an incubator. Right. So it's an ecosystem.

[Public Investing Sponsor]

Right.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

You know, I need tomatoes and basil, and there's tomatoes and basil.

[Chase Business Sponsor]

Okay.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

Now, I want to go to the community because there's a point where you're growing the business and you got to think about financing and capital and raising capital. And again, I feel like the community kind of came to you.

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Yeah. So we kind of have a one in a million raise story. It became obvious that the opportunities that were coming our way meant that I needed a bigger boat. So I was ready to kind of start going to institutional investors and, you know, the banks of America and telling my story. When word got out to our customers, kind of through the grapevine that we were contemplating this, some very savvy, real. Some very savvy investors said, wait, we want to be part of this. They've invested in CPG products before, and I didn't have to do any of that.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

I got it. We've only got about a minute left here, unfortunately.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

And you've raised $4 million in Series A funding?

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

We have.

[Interviewer/Co-Host]

Okay.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

So where do you go with this ipo? Sell it.

[Chase Business Sponsor]

What do you want to do?

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

No, no, no, no. We are building our business straight down 95 down south to the Midwest. We have Pavilions and Lassens in California. We have Jewel and Tony's and Pete's in Midwest Central Market in Texas. We are growing our distribution certainly also online as well, you know, direct to consumer.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

Do you plan to expand the products?

[Brad Finkel - CEO Hoboken Farms]

Yeah, we have pizza sauce coming. We have. We have a couple of other things, but we are a small but mighty group of experts. So I was able to get those economics to bring on expertise and better execution, and that's allowing us to scale across America.

[Host - Bloomberg Businessweek]

That's why we like talking. It is the backbone of the U.S. economy. Brad Finkel, thank you so much.

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