NEW ORLEANS — The city of New Orleans isn’t backing down from its stance on coming soon “crack downs” and “sweeps” to bring a stop to unauthorized pop-up vendors throughout the city.
Someone else who isn’t backing down, a young food entrepreneur named Sinnidra Taylor who’s business model is based on helping people start and operate their own community pop-ups.
For over 3 years Taylor has been serving up waffles at pop up events all around the city of New Orleans.
Taylor says it's, “because I never get used to the smiles and the orders of course, never get used to that.”
A recent event was a pop-up flea market on Loyola’s campus for students to get this firsthand market selling experience.
Something Taylor says she loves to see, “I see creativity. I see opportunity and potential. I see the future.”
A future that might not exist for these students in the way that it has for Taylor.
The waffle business took off during the pandemic, which would give birth to Codey’s NOLA.
She soon realized she wasn’t alone. There were many other food entrepreneurs that needed a leg up. But now, with this new pop-up regulation going out, Taylor says she feels like all of her work is at risk.
“My entrepreneurs were immediately shocked because for a lot of them it’s their bread and butter.”
Taylor says her vision for Codey’s NOLA is to give mainly those who suffer from mental health disorders and opportunity to run their food businesses and be able to cook in a state certified industrial kitchen with a popular trend known as a ghost kitchen.
Taylor explains that a ghost is, “a kitchen service where delivery drivers will come up and retrieve food and it won’t be a customer to business interaction directly. It’s mostly online services.”
This past summer Taylor says she had a meeting with city officials to discuss future food entrepreneurs operating out of Codey’s.
Saying with confusion, “when we were at the meeting, no one brought up the fact that an ordinance was coming. I also warned them, had something like this come up, how it would impact businesses. So, I never thought that this would happen.”
Taylor says many of the people she is looking to bring into Codey’s are people who have worked most of their careers in the hospitality industry, never getting a leg up in life.
She says, “we are tired of working in the kitchens of these big named restaurants building their generational wealth we want it for ourselves.
If she can’t make it work here in the city, Taylor exclaimed, “nothing can stop me. If I have to find a larger ecosystem outside of New Orleans to get it done, I will.”