Meet the Maker: Nomad Kitchen Co. Knows Cargo Cuisine
The company has the recipe for a cook system for the open road.
Image Caption: Photo Credit: Nomad Kitchen Co.
Sam Gross never really set out to start a company. In the summer of 2017, he was just doing what so many had done before him: Driving around the western United States in his Subaru, visiting national parks, car camping along the way. The trip was nothing hardcore (he describes himself as a “soft-roader”). Over two weeks, he visited Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Glacier and Waterton Lakes in Alberta. When he returned to California, he started tinkering.
A food lover and a civil engineer by training, Gross realized mobile kitchens often lack structure. “You go on enough road trips, you get unorganized. You’re just filtering through buckets or bins,” he says. “There was nothing [on the market] that really felt like what I needed to properly prep, cook and clean without having too big of an impact on your vehicle.”
Photo Credit: Nomad Kitchen Co.
When he set about designing what would become the original Nomad Kitchen Co. slide-out kitchen and stove system, he was doing it for himself. “The whole idea was a single narrow unit that would take up half the trunk and no more,” he says. Of course, as origin stories often go, the thing he built for himself turned into a second prototype, and then a third. And so on. “You go from rudimentary to nicer materials and you start to realize, wait, do other people want this thing?”
Other people did. In 2020, after months of market research, Gross launched an Indiegogo campaign hoping to secure funding to build 200 units. He surpassed the goal in three hours. The next day, pandemic lockdowns began. Over the next five years, though, Gross kept his team small and built a lean business. (Aside from a small production team, he’s the only full-time employee on the business side.)
Photo Credit: Nomad Kitchen Co.
These days, Nomad Kitchen Co. offers a range of products, including the original kitchen series, drawers of various sizes, packing cubes and other organizers that make cooking on the road easier. And Gross, who moved to Seattle earlier this year, recently opened a showroom on Lake Union, where he encourages potential customers, or anyone else, to swing by no matter how hardcore they are. “It’s awesome for tailgating. It’s great for your kid’s soccer game,” he says. “This is not an overlanding product. It’s a travel adventure product.”
This article originally appeared in Wildsam magazine. For more Wildsam content, sign up for our newsletter.
