The joy was on the face of Robbie Cape.
And the Mt. Joy was in the mouths and bellies of those who attended the special preview of a food truck tied to Cape’s new fast casual food chain on Wednesday in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Cape, the tech leader and entrepreneur who previously headed up telehealth company 98point6, has arrived at the official launch of his new startup, a chicken sandwich joint that he believes can change the world with practices that are better for farmers, animals, customers, employees and the planet.
Starting with a colorful food truck that opens Thursday in the parking lot of a former Starbucks location on East Olive Way, Mt. Joy will also soon have a brick-and-mortar restaurant blocks away at East Pine Street and 11th Avenue. From there, the hope is to grow like a happy, free-range chicken.
For Cape, who spent 11 years at Microsoft and is now on his third startup, Mt. Joy checks all the startup boxes.
“We’re creating where there is nothing,” Cape said. “We’re creating a brand from nothing, we are creating a dialogue. Every time I talk to someone new, we’re answering new questions, and I’m creating new narrative. That to me is the definition of a startup.”
Mt. Joy’s focus is on sustainable farming practices and locally sourced ingredients to disrupt the agriculture and food industries from start to finish. Regenerative agriculture is part of the mantra because of its potential to combat climate change by improving the organic makeup of soil and removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Cape teamed up a year ago with a number of key players, including Seattle restaurateur Ethan Stowell, who is a co-founder.
“We have to get people to know that when they buy a Mt. Joy chicken sandwich that it’s actually doing something good,” Stowell said last year.
On Wednesday, as I unwrapped a spicy chicken sandwich from the Mt. Joy food truck, I asked Cape what he hoped people will think as they eat his startup’s food.
“I want you to think, ‘Wow, this is the best chicken sandwich I’ve ever had,'” he said.
As someone who has eaten his share of chicken sandwiches, I’d rank Mt. Joy’s among the tastiest. The thick white meat was juicy on the inside and crispy on the outside. The honey habanero spread hit with just the right amount of spice. It felt like some real thought had gone into the taste for a sandwich that was ready in six minutes.
Washing it down with a vanilla bean milkshake felt like the ultimate food truck / fast food experience on a summer night in Seattle.
Chef Dionne Himmelfarb is the mastermind behind a menu that includes a variety of fried chicken sandwiches ($13 to $15), a fried portobello mushroom sandwich ($13), french fries ($4), milkshakes ($6) and more.
Himmelfarb has worked for Stowell and at the Seattle restaurants Canlis and Poppy, and is also a Mt. Joy co-founder.
The tech startup mentality, and thinking about everything from the beginning, is very different from her career working in well-established restaurants. And it’s different than just relying on her own taste as a longtime chef.
“What I love about working with Robbie, everything is about data,” Himmelfarb said. “We have to make sure we do our research on why people like one thing versus the other thing.”
Cape attracted former 98point6 software engineer Justin Kaufman to the team as co-founder and chief technology officer. Kaufman said he’s always had a lot of ideas for restaurants and he urged Cape to bring him on.
“What excited me about the restaurant business, as somebody who’s into technology, is that it’s just one of those industries where there’s a lot of opportunity,” Kaufman said.
He wants to use technology to make the restaurant experience feel more personal and welcoming, whether it’s through a more conversational interface in the app used to order food, or via the quirky poems printed out on the receipts stuck to orders.
“I have this vision of not just welcoming people back but also engaging with them to minimize the cognitive workload of the order process,” Kaufman said.
Grant Jones, a fourth generation farmer from Shelton, Wash., is a co-founder and Mt. Joy’s chief agricultural officer.
Jones said Mt. Joy chickens are special because they’re pasture raised from three weeks of age. The so-called Freedom Ranger breed is slower growing and healthier than birds that are bred to grow more rapidly.
Opening a restaurant chain focused on a number of sustainability issues has taken a lot of work behind the scenes.
“The supply chain that we’re trying to source from does not exist yet,” Jones said. “So a lot of my time has been spent working with farms that are currently raising chickens to see if they want to raise more, and how they want to grow with us.”
Cape, who employs about 15 at Mt. Joy so far, is clearly a people person. He said it’s the one thing he misses about 98point6. Not just the people he worked with, but the people who the startup was helping with a new health care option, and the energy he would get from stories about those people.
Cape was forced out of 98point6 by the company’s board in 2021 in a surprising departure. That gave him another opportunity to revisit his desire to work on something good for the planet.
“I would love people to say that Robbie loves building things that have the ability to repair the world. I want people to say that Robbie takes on big, audacious, hard goals,” he said.
“If people say that Robbie’s the chicken guy, that’s great. No problem.”
The Mt. Joy food truck is located at 1600 E. Olive Way, and is open daily 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
