Local Roots

Reimagining the Food System One Bao Bun at a Time

Wen-Jay Yang has big goals. Emblazoned across pens, coffee cup sleeves, and stickers for her business Local Roots is the phrase “food can change the world.” Wearing a cozy hooded sweatshirt, a focused aura surrounded her as she worked on her laptop at Local Roots Market and Cafe on a recent Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn. 

Wen-Jay sees food as a tool for change. She sees that how we eat has an immediate impact on our environment, bodies, and communities, and that harnessing this power has the potential to catalyze major positive impact.

I stopped by Local Roots Market and Cafe for lunch from their Chinese-inspired, farm-to-table menu, and to pick up a few grocery items from the shelves full of local produce, baked goods, condiments, and bulk goods. I enjoyed a nourishing meal of silken tofu bao buns with microgreens, a perfectly-chewy scallion pancake with spicy chili oil, and a beet pickled egg — all the while soaking in the spring sunlight in the space’s charming backyard. 

With a goal as lofty as changing the way the world eats, you’ve got to be driven, powerful, smart, and kind — and from my conversation with Wen-Jay, I learned she is certainly all of those things and more. Local Roots Cafe is bright, modern, colorful and welcoming; oozing with vibes that cannot help but make you excited about the future of food. Her brick-and-mortar shop opened in 2021, but Wen-Jay has been deep in the local food movement for over 11 years — she started Local Roots as an aggregate CSA, sourcing produce and other local goods from regional producers and offering shares as a subscription service.  

Wen-Jay moved to NY to pursue a career in fashion, but was quickly disillusioned by the industry. What inspired her instead was the community she built through playing music, and the power to make things happen through that. “I took that energy, and started my business.” She became focused on food access through a realization of the power and reach of food on a community level throughout the city. Following this interest, Wen-Jay spent a year volunteering as an Americorps member for the non-profit Just Food, which led her to found Local Roots. “My mom pretty much told me, why don’t you just start your own business? I thought she was crazy because I didn’t have any business experience, I was super young, about 25.” 

The original Local Roots CSA model still remains today, though now called “Harvest Club.” The Harvest Club is inspired by a traditional CSA, (the direct to consumer seasonal subscription service many small farms use to sell produce) but with increased flexibility and product diversity. Harvest Club is hyper-local, meaning that all products included are sourced from farms 500 miles or less from NYC, and a share can be individually purchased each week. As the seasons rotate so the the bounty of the boxes- autumn brings crisp apples, colorful radishes and salad greens, while local roots members look forward to the juicy heirloom tomatoes and fragrant strawberries of the summer months. Members can order add-ons like eggs, meat, mushrooms, baked goods, and other local products to their base share of vegetables, and in order to make this program as accessible as possible, delivery and pickup are available in locations across Brooklyn. Local Roots works directly with farmers who grow produce specifically for this program. A passion of Wen-Jay’s is access to culturally-diverse vegetables, and she is able to have a direct impact on the availability of this produce through her work with growers. “We really want local food and good food to feel like it’s approachable for everyone.” It is these personal relationships with farmers, as well as community members, that are foundational to a business trying to change the way we eat and think about food. 

Accessibility is also at the forefront of the cafe, which serves as a space for events like pop-up dinners hosted by chefs from across the city, classes, parties, as well as the Harvest Club pickup location. The cafe menu uses 90% locally sourced ingredients; it was important to Wen Jay to make this percentage about the menu specific: “A lot of people say they’re farm-to-table, but they’re not actually. There’s not a lot of clarity around that. For me transparency is really important, and that’s why I did the calculation of how many ingredients we actually source locally.” 

With a keen eye for detail, a finger on the pulse of what is trending, and a passion for quality and accessibility, Wen-Jay Yang might truly be on her way to changing the world.

The market and cafe are open Wednesday through Sunday, 8am-7pm, at 398 Court St., in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.