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Business & Tech

A Little Slice of Hoboken at the Morris Plains Farmers' Market

Hoboken Farms is not what you think and so much more.

Hoboken Farms may have neither produce nor farmland, but it is a veteran of the farmers market scene, including the Saturday farmers' market in Morris Plains.

Playing with irony, owner Brad Finkel combined the name of his hometown, where most of his products come from, with “farm” for the markets where he sold them, and he had a name for his business, which he started nearly 20 years ago in another ironic circumstance.

Finkel was working as a gourmet foods distributor back then when one of his customers asked him to join a farmers market. Although Finkel didn’t know what a farmers market was, he agreed anyway. Now, two decades later he has cornered the farmers market market, working 30 a year.

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Hoboken Farms sells fresh mozzarella, artisan bread, and aged beef, as well as fish and chicken entrees. They also boast a marinara sauce selected by The Wall Street Journal as the "best sauce." Hoboken Farms Big Red Marinara Sauce can now be found on the shelves in Whole Foods.

But it is the mozzarella for which Hoboken Farms is best known. After all, the "mutz" is what started all this.

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Finkel reminisced about his first market, where he brought bread and 50 lbs. of the fresh cheese. He sold out in an hour.

“The next day we brought 100 lbs., and we sold out in a half hour.” He quickly found that what was common for him growing up in a “one-square-mile oasis is very special elsewhere.”

Now he sells about a ton of fresh mozzarella a week.

“Our mozzarella is made fresh every single morning,” Finkel stressed. Patrons can see it being made in the window of Finkel’s new sandwich shop in Summit. Anything they don’t sell that day at the market, Finkel noted, gets donated to a local food bank.

The addition of Hoboken Farms Sandwich Shop, which opened earlier this year, was a natural progression for Finkel. He came to the conclusion this way: “People love our bread. People love our cheese. And that’s 50% of a sandwich. Let’s open a sandwich shop.”

For both the new shop and the farmers markets, Finkel uses some of the same vendors he frequented as a kid with his grandparents. Growing up he patronized Maria’s Bakery, and although it's now gone, the head baker for Hoboken Farms started out at Maria’s before opening his own bakery. Finkel's family would also visit Anthony (Sacci) the Butcher, and today Anthony’s brother, Martin, who took over the business, supplies Hoboken Farms with their meat.

“It’s all interconnected,” Finkel noted. “Our mission is local, local, local.” He added, “We like to keep things as mom and pop as we can.”

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