In addition to serving breakfast and brunch in its Milford dining room, The Corner Restaurant, the subject of yesterday’s story, does a brisk takeout business. For years, co-owner Michelle Lebel had assembled “brunch boxes” for Mother’s Day and other gift-ready occasions. And when COVID closed dining rooms across the country in 2020, The Corner adapted by broadening its brunch box selection. “One of them came with a couple orders of crab cake benedict and then it had a different French toast. And then it had a couple quesadillas. Potatoes. Syrup. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. And flowers. So it would come with enough for, like, a family,” Lebel recalls. Meanwhile, a brunch box for kids was sugary and playful, with pancakes or French toast and sprinkles and marshmallows for decorating, plus toys and stickers. “The idea was to put people in a good mood. Try to get people happier. Everyone was struggling.”
The primary legacy of The Corner’s takeout year is the takeout box itself. When supply chains effectively shut down, the Lebels—Michelle and co-owner/head cook/husband, Amer—couldn’t get takeout boxes fast enough, so they decided to manufacture their own. It was an entrepreneurial moment born from COVID-era necessity but also COVID-era liberty. “We never had time at home before COVID,” Michelle says. “But then, all of a sudden, we were like, ‘Oh my God, we have more time to try different things.’” They called their box-making venture Kraftgreen, after a brainstorming session on their back porch.
Now, when The Corner closes for the day, Amer turns off the griddle, doffs his apron, drives to the Kraftgreen factory in West Haven, dons his safety vest and turns on a machine the size of a small car.
He offers me a tour of the machine while it rhythmically turns paper sheets into waterproof, grease-resistant boxes, clacking at a rate of 50 boxes per minute. “You feed the paper here.” Amer shows me a metal-frame hopper on one end. Inside it, a stack of brown craft paper sheets is gradually shortening, like pancakes consumed from the bottom up. Amer then follows the machine’s conveyer to its halfway point, and gestures inside. “This is the gluing machine here. It glues the boxes.” I watch steel discs spin over the conveyer, leaving evenly spaced smudges of glue on the passing sheets. “The glue dries right away. And paper comes out here,” he says pointing to the other end. The conveyer takes a downward turn, dropping the sheets into the path of a mold that is the precise dimensions of an industry-standard #1 takeout box. The mold is essentially a foot that simultaneously knocks the craft sheet into a box and kicks the box into the receiving basket. From the basket, Amer’s assistant Jose Mota retrieves a stack of 50 nested boxes, which are soon themselves to be boxed for delivery. Amer smiles. “Very impressive, isn’t it?”
The boxed boxes are then delivered, not just to The Corner but to anywhere from 25 to 30 area restaurants in a given week. Amer’s other assistant Doug Blackwood often does the deliveries. “I come in, load up, and head out to wherever,” Blackwood says. “Yesterday I was in Derby, Shelton, Bridgeport, Wallingford and New Haven. Then this morning, I delivered six or seven cases to The Salad Shop in New Haven.”
The Salad Shop, with locations on Whitney Avenue and High Street, happened to be Kraftgreen’s first outside customer, in 2021. “I used to drive by the Salad Shop every day and see people with those takeout boxes in their hand,” Michelle says. “So I contacted the owner. I’m always on the lookout.” But the business also grows by word of mouth. “Just a couple weeks ago,” Blackwood says, “I did a delivery in New Haven at one pizza shop over here, and three doors down, [another pizza shop] owner came running over and he was like, ‘Hey, can you deliver to me too?’” (This story perhaps says as much about the prevalence of pizzaiolos in New Haven as it does the demand for takeout boxes.)
Amer adds that Kraftgreen has also garnered interest from a restaurant group consisting of 15 restaurants. He welcomes the growth, having realized, after their first machine was plugged in with plenty of room to spare, that there would be no limits to the scalability of the box-making business. Whereas, by comparison, the number of filled seats in The Corner dining room limits the space on his griddle, and vice versa. “When we started Kraftgreen,” he laughs, “we had an order from a national retailer for 60,000 cases of #3, 10,000 cases of #1. I’m like, ‘We can’t do that! We have only one machine!’”
The one machine also had to be painstakingly recalibrated for every size of box it was asked to produce—in Kraftgreen’s case, five. The #8 box, for instance, is wide and flat for restaurants that serve a lot of appetizers. The #4 is wide and deep for restaurants that serve tall burgers with fries. The mold in the machine had to be manually replaced to make each size; the metal basket that receives the finished boxes had to be manually resized; the spinning glue discs had to be repositioned and their glue pads reoriented to leave a smudge of glue in the correct spots. Amer estimates the resulting downtime between those box runs to have been between four and five hours.
So as business expanded, the Lebels simply added more machines, one for every box size. The original machine, imported from China, is now dedicated to the much-in-demand #1 box. Amer likes the machine’s speed for that purpose. At the console, he presses a button to make it go faster. “Now I’m at 54 [boxes per minute]. It’s still making the boxes.” The clacking drumbeat of the machine increases tempo. “I can go to 58.” Paper sheets are now darting from the hopper on one end to the mold on the other. “I can put it up to 70 or 80 if I want to. But, like they say, speed kills, you know.” A paper jam at 80 boxes per minute would beget more paper jams, sending the machine’s minders into Buster Keaton hysterics. “So,” Amer concludes, “the happy medium is 50.”
The neighboring machines are of a different design—also Chinese—but slower and sturdier. The mold touches down on the passing sheet from a hoist that looks like an oil derrick. The mold is also hot—over 400 degrees Fahrenheit—so it punches the sheet into a box and heat-seals it at the same time, melting the paper’s polyethylene coating just enough that it becomes its own adhesive.
The boxes are then marched into—and out of—area restaurants nearing a machine’s pace. This is especially true of the holiday season, when Amer is set to work longer hours. “A lot of people are going to be ordering a lot more boxes,” he says, “for holidays, parties… Christmas, and then before Christmas, then after Christmas.”
And the local party or restaurant guests who value the leftovers those containers carry, sometimes as much as or more than the original meal, need only check the branding on the bottom to see if they’ve got something else to appreciate: a box that’s as locally prepared as the food it contains.
Written and photographed by David Zukowski.
