Why I Did It.

After living for over 10 years in NYC and LA, my wife Rori and I decided to move back to the town where we both grew up. We were expecting our second child, and city life was starting to feel too hectic and too removed from our families. Initially, we bought a house in Hagerstown but kept our apartment in NYC to travel back and forth. We spent weekends in Hagerstown and weekdays in NYC, allowing me to stay on top of my business.

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It didn't take long for us to feel the strong contrast between small-town and big-city life. We began to hate the traffic and crowds in NYC and love the slower pace and familiar faces in Hagerstown. We soon realized that almost everything about life with young kids was better in Hagerstown, except for the lack of healthy, fast food options. In the city, we were accustomed to grabbing a BYO salad or a smoothie on the run or enjoying a healthy snack like peanut butter and honey toast from our favorite little takeout cafe.

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Fully committed to life in Hagerstown, we tried hard to make the food we loved at home but often found ourselves resorting to drive-thru fast food restaurants regularly. Eventually, Rori began talking about her dream to open a fast, healthy cafe that would be convenient for families and people on the go. At first, it seemed far-fetched, but the idea became more tangible the more we talked about it and lived with the problem of fast food paralysis. One day, we drove by the old McDonald's, a place we had both frequented with our grandmothers, and noticed a "for sale" sign. Despite my initial reservations about such a big project, I eventually made the call, and we took the plunge, devoting much of the next three years to opening the restaurant and navigating it through a pandemic. With Rori and her mom at the helm of operations, we executed our vision to bring healthy, delicious food to families in Hagerstown.

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What We Make.

​The main premise behind the Free Range menu is “healthy + fast,” but we knew it was crucial that the food was delicious as well. We contracted a few chefs we knew and respected, and Rori worked with them to create combinations that were wholesome, healthy, and surprisingly delicious. We knew that most people would be reluctant to spend money on bland, boring health food, so we set out to surprise people with how flavorful and delicious our options were. We experimented with different menu concepts, from smoothie shops to lunch spots to coffee shops. In the end, we decided our item mix would be unique and wouldn't fit into any specific category. Instead, we created a balanced menu featuring everything we loved, including salads, wraps, smoothie bowls, juice, avocado toast, and great coffee. Over the first 1-2 years, we tested various items and discovered that most customers liked what we liked. We refined our menu based on customer feedback, adding more variations of popular items and slowly building a following of regular customers who wanted the same things we did: fast, healthy, delicious food for the whole family.

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Where We Innovated.

Before opening, we studied many restaurants with similar concepts. Most of them existed in bigger markets and focused on a smaller category of products, like cold-pressed juice or smoothie bowls or salads only. We knew this made more sense logistically and helped keep food costs down, but we felt our market needed a larger, more diverse menu. We weren't confident that a smoothie shop alone could survive in a small market, and we didn't want to drink smoothies every day. The problem was that a restaurant combining smoothie shop, specialty lunch entrees, avocado toast, and a full-service coffee bar didn't exist for us to study and emulate.

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Someone close to me once told me that we shouldn't pursue this idea because if it wasn't already out there, it probably didn't work. I thought that was the dumbest theory I'd ever heard. Many of the greatest brands in the world, which I'd studied, had built their empires by drawing outside the established lines. The notion that something like this didn't exist fueled my belief in the concept. We worked hard to develop a workflow and inventory system that accounted for a wide variety of items, from cases of frozen fruit to loads of fresh vegetables. With a little creative design of our space, we solved the puzzle and found ways to have everything we wanted on the menu while minimizing food loss and operational inefficiencies.

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After solving the menu design, we continued to innovate to fulfill our promise of healthy food. We learned early on that food distributors designed food to make it easier for restaurants, but in doing so, they wreaked havoc on the health integrity of foods. For example, precut sweet potatoes, which would have made our chefs' lives easier and our prep times faster, were coated with preservatives. Almost every item on the menu was the same story: conveniently prepped items loaded with preservatives. We discovered these preservatives were major culprits in unhealthy gut biomes and other health issues and were shocked to learn that almost everything we ate at almost every restaurant, fast food or not, was laced with them. We pressed our sales reps for answers and found out the only way to avoid preservatives was to buy fresh, whole food. This posed a huge challenge since it meant much more manual prep and a much shorter shelf life. Nonetheless, we knew this was the food our kids would eat every day, and we couldn't compromise on the integrity of what we called “healthy and fast.” We developed a model where all staff helped prep and cut veggies during downtime, which helped our chef immensely. Through trial and error and refinement, we built a model that produces truly healthy, clean food quickly and efficiently.

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What I Learned.

It’s hard to list all the lessons we’ve learned during our five years of Free Range, but the most obvious one is the power of following your instincts and solving the problem you see. We knew there was a lack of healthy food in Hagerstown because we experienced it firsthand every day. Likewise, we knew that healthy, delicious food was possible because we had lived with it in New York and Los Angeles for so many years. Our assumption was that other people in Hagerstown would want these options as much as we did if only they could experience them. When someone told us it wouldn't work because it didn't exist, I thought about Steve Jobs and the digital keyboard on iPhones. At the time, Blackberry was the market leader with real keyed letters and numbers. When Jobs introduced Apple’s digital keyboard, people insisted no one would conform to something so foreign and new. Jobs, having experienced the digital keyboard through years of prototypes, knew firsthand how easy and intuitive it would be and that everyone would feel the same way after experiencing it. Just a few years later, traditional keypads on smartphones were nearly extinct.

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In 2022, we partnered with our good friend and coffee supplier to expand our operations, particularly our coffee selection. This was a textbook strategic partnership, with Craig bringing operational and business experience while we continued to focus on creative and marketing tasks for the restaurant. We have learned so much about structuring a partnership and operating with multiple minds and personalities.

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Overall, the Free Range experience has been one of the hardest and most fulfilling of my life and also one of the craziest things I’ve done. We opened an independent restaurant with no restaurant experience right before COVID, but five years later, we’re still kicking and growing every month. Most importantly, we’re fulfilling our original mission to provide healthy fast food to our community in Hagerstown, MD.