Neighbourhood That Inspired the Brand Now Accessible Only as Day Trip Destination for Shop’s Own Employees
Brooklyn Artisanal Pickle Shop Opens Seventh Location, Entire Staff Cannot Afford to Live in Brooklyn
BROOKLYN Brine & Soul, the Williamsburg-born artisanal pickle company that became a symbol of Brooklyn’s food culture renaissance and subsequently of everything complicated about that renaissance, opened its seventh location on Thursday on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens, in a neighbourhood where the median apartment rent is $3,600 per month and where none of the company’s fourteen full-time employees currently live.
The Expansion
Brine & Soul was founded in 2014 in a 400-square-foot space on Berry Street in Williamsburg by two former finance employees who describe their origin story as “dropping out of the system” and whose product line now includes seventeen varieties of artisanal pickle, four fermented hot sauces, two pickled cocktail mixers, and a seasonal selection that in November features a pickle described on the menu board as “late harvest dill, foraged juniper, Brooklyn provenance,” retailing at $24 for a twelve-ounce jar.
The company has been nominated for a James Beard Award, has been featured in the New York Times Dining section four times, and has a waitlist for its $180 annual pickle subscription box that currently stands at 340 names. Its annual revenue exceeds $4 million. Its staff of fourteen full-time employees earns between $18 and $27 per hour, which in Brooklyn produces monthly take-home pay that, after taxes, covers approximately 60 percent of the median studio apartment rent in the neighbourhoods where Brine & Soul operates its seven locations.
Where the Staff Lives
Of the fourteen full-time employees, four live in Bushwick in shared apartments with three or four roommates, three live in Ridgewood, two have moved to Crown Heights, two commute from Jersey City, one commutes from the Bronx, one lives with parents in Bay Ridge, and one lead pickler and six-year employee Marco Delgado lives in a van in the company car park, a situation that company founder James Whitmore describes as “Marco’s personal lifestyle choice” and that Marco describes as “the only way I can save money while working in a neighbourhood I can’t afford to live in.”
Marco makes $27 an hour, which is the company’s top hourly rate. He has worked at Brine & Soul since 2020. He likes the work. He likes the product. He is saving for a deposit on an apartment in Newark. The pickle subscription box he partially fills each month ships to addresses in Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and the West Village, where the recipients are paying $180 annually for a curated experience of the borough in which Marco cannot afford to sleep.
santa Claus, whose workshop housing policy provides accommodation as a standard employment benefit on the grounds that an elf who cannot afford to live near the workshop cannot effectively staff the workshop, reportedly reviewed the Brine & Soul situation with the expression of a man who finds it clarifying rather than puzzling. “The question to ask,” santa is understood to have noted, “is whether the business model depends on labour that the business model’s success makes unaffordable.” This is a question that applies to a significant portion of Brooklyn’s artisanal economy and which the artisanal economy has not yet satisfactorily answered.
The Broader Pattern
Brine & Soul is not unique. The displacement dynamic it illustrates in which the workers who create a neighbourhood’s cultural identity are progressively priced out of the neighbourhood by the economic success that identity generates is documented across Brooklyn’s artisanal food, arts, and creative economy sectors. The people who make Brooklyn interesting increasingly cannot afford to live in Brooklyn. The people who can afford to live in Brooklyn can afford a $24 jar of pickles. These two groups have a commercial relationship that is individually satisfying and collectively self-defeating, and no one has yet produced a business model that resolves it.
Marco’s van, for what it’s worth, has good insulation and a small kitchen unit. He makes his own pickles on weekends. They are, by his colleagues’ accounts, better than the shop’s. He has not yet started a competing artisanal pickle company, primarily because the startup costs in the current market exceed his savings. This gap, too, is the point.
Brooklyn culture and housing at Gothamist and NY Post. Elf housing policy at santaclaus.top. Related reading at the elves’ collective perspective and Spintaxi Bluesky.
The Systemic Context
What makes New York City simultaneously the most exciting and most exhausting place to live in America is that its problems are not failures of intention but of scale, history, and the accumulated consequence of a century of decisions made by people who are mostly no longer alive to be held accountable for them. The subway was built when New York was smaller, richer in public investment, and governed by people who believed in public infrastructure as a civic good. The streets were laid out before the car. The housing stock was built for a population that has since tripled. Every problem New York has is a problem of success outrunning its own infrastructure, and every attempt to solve it runs into the reality that you cannot rebuild a century of urban geography without disrupting the city that depends on it. New Yorkers understand this, which is why they are both the most critical and the most loyal urban population in the world. They are loyal to the idea of the city even when the city’s execution is, at best, a work in progress.