Main Street Mavericks Business Spotlight: Common Fields

Our first stop on day three of Main Street Mavericks took us to Corvallis and the Common Fields Food Truck Pod.

Owned by Jacob Oliver, the space is located at 545 SW 3rd St and encompasses four restaurants with local beers and board games, too. A newer addition to the downtown Corvallis scene, Oliver wants to make sure that the locals know he’s there for all weather and for all events to bring you a curated drink and dining experience you can’t find anywhere else.

Meet the owner of Common Fields.

Q&A With Common Fields Food Truck Pod

Can you tell us about yourself and your small business?

Hi, my name is Jacob. I am the owner of Common Fields here in Corvallis. We own a small taproom and food truck pod. We’ve been open for about three and a half years. We just had our three-year anniversary this year. Yeah, it’s a neat little spot. We focus on local and sustainable food and drinks. We make all the nonalcoholic drinks here in-house. We make our own root beers, lemonades, and all kinds of sodas.

We partner with different local companies for tea and coffee. All of the beer that we purchase is independently owned from Oregon. So, everything has to be self-distributed and can’t be done through a big company. And it’s fun finding super local beers that nobody’s heard of and supporting them.

Before this, I was actually working for a small independent brewery running sales distribution, but I’ve worked a lot in sales departments and also in food and beverage — so bartending, working in kitchens — and Common Fields is a culmination of all my hobbies. I really love food and drink, so we focused on a place we would want to go and hang out.

And it’s also owned by my wife, Cherish. We like board games; we’re very family-friendly. We are one of the only restaurants that I know of that actually allows dogs inside. So dogs are welcome anywhere on the property. That was a fun hurdle to get over, but we’re really excited to have everybody’s furry friends here.

Yeah, and that’s a little bit about me.

And tell us a little bit more about this place!

At Common Fields, our mottos is: beer, food, family. And that’s really what we want to lean into. We wanted to create a place where we, with our kids, would feel welcome, but it didn’t feel like a kid’s playground.

So, really, everybody from all walks of life feels welcome here. We try to have a diverse list of activities and things going on, a place where kids can be. And it doesn’t feel like a jungle gym. We have a little kids’ play area and a couple of kids, little play areas. We have sidewalk chalk people can buy and draw anywhere.

And they’re just a lot of little nooks, but we want to feel welcome by all people. College students love to be here. We have free wifi and study places. We deal with music, trivia, comedy, and drag shows. Just about anything you can think of, we do here. Yeah. And then focusing on the food.

Tell us more about the food here at Common Fields.

So we wanted to have high-quality food. We looked for food that wasn’t present in Corvallis. We have all the food trucks we own ourselves, which is unique. So, people think of a food truck pod as a bunch of different food trucks. But we own them all, which is part of why, when you’re here, you actually order all the food here at the bar.

All the food and drinks are ordered at the bar, and then you go to the food trucks to pick up the food.

And again, really focusing on local, all the food we get is from local purveyors or local farms. We don’t use any big companies like Food Service America or any of that Cisco stuff. And then the same with beers. We focus on really local beer, wine, and cider. Everything has to be self-distributed or independently owned for us to carry them.

We actually drive to a lot of the breweries and pick up beer, or they’ll drive to us directly. So it’s a fun way to meet new people and get excited about really small local beer that nobody’s heard of. The other thing that’s cool is we try to keep our prices as inexpensive as possible.

All of our alcohol is line-priced, so it’s seven dollars across the board for everything. And so we get a lot of beers that are really hard to get, so you might see it in some other bigger cities for 12 for a little six-ounce pour or small pours. We’re able to keep it all line-priced, and we adjust the pour sizes accordingly.

What’s one challenge you are facing, and how can the community help?

I think the biggest challenge is that we’re primarily an outside venue. In the winter months, people generally don’t think of outside venues as places where they can come and hang out.

We have heated benches that we designed ourselves. A lot of the benches, you can turn them on and flip a switch, and then they’ll warm up. So it keeps people nice and warm in the winter. I think we should make people aware that we are still a really cool place to hang out in the winter.

Just cause it’s not sunny and bright outside. It’s still a cool spot. We have lots of covered spaces where we keep all of our activities going year-round. It’s not just a summer spot. I think that’s probably one of the bigger hurdles is just getting people aware that we’re not just an outside venue that’s only good in the summer.

What is the best part of being a small business owner?

I’ve always been probably a workaholic, so it’s nice to be a workaholic for yourself as opposed to somebody else, even though you generally make less money when you’re working for yourself, but you can just do a little more. It’s more rewarding, I’d say.

What is your top piece of advice for small business owners just starting out?

Just keep at it. It’s a lot of work. It takes a special kind of crazy to start your own business. So, if you’ve already started your own business, you hopefully fit into that category. And yeah, just keep working hard, and it’ll pay off eventually.

But it takes a little while. So don’t expect it to be easy off the bat or make a bunch of money.

Tell us more about how your food pod is a unique model.

We basically run this like a restaurant and a kitchen. So, instead of having one kitchen in the back, we have four kitchens separated out. And so they’re all different concepts, and then we have one, the fourth kitchen.

But really, I’m just splitting it up into different areas and having that feel of a food truck pod. But the nice thing about this is we have complete control of all the cuisine. It’s all of our staff. So we can make sure our business hours are always the same. One thing that always frustrates me when going to the food truck pod is that you never know what carts are open at certain hours.

When people come here, we don’t have as many cuisines. We only have five trucks and four cuisines, but they’re always going to be open. And so that’s nice. It also gives us the flexibility to really pick the cuisine that we want to have here and make sure they’re all very different.

Corvallis, being a small town, we don’t have as many food options. So we wanted to do stuff that you didn’t have. And so we have a German truck that’s really fun. We have a poke truck, we have a Mediterranean kind of fusion truck. And we have a pizzeria and tamales.

I think what draws us apart from everybody else is we tried to look at everything that we thought Corvallis needed more of and put that all into one.

When you show up here, no matter what you’re into, you’re gonna find something you like, and you’re gonna be excited about the space.

What’s next for Common Fields?

Just to continue doing what we like to do. I love creating food, and I’ve been really into the beer and alcohol community. So yeah, just slowly growing what Common Fields is and coming up with new ideas. It’s just what we’re already doing, but continuing to do it.

And we’re still waiting for the success part. We’re still new, but it’s cool to see how busy we are.

We opened during the pandemic, which was very challenging, and had a lot of struggles itself. We had a lot of open, close, open, close for about a year trying to figure out how we were going to operate during the pandemic and how we were going to make our business work. And I think after we had closed for a couple of months, we had to figure a lot of stuff out, redo some stuff here, open back up, and see the place fill up instantly and never stop being just full of people.

And we’re like, Oh wow, people really get what we’re doing and seem to appreciate it.

So, you might have a really cool idea, and nobody else gets it, so you don’t do well. So that’s always the risk of starting your own business.

Do you have a favorite food truck to eat at?

It’s all mine, so it’s hard to pick favorites. But our newest one is the poke one, and I really like that. And people seem to really get the poke. We’re doing it, and it’s very different. Whenever you do something like a brand new product and put it out there, you’re always like, oh, what do people think? Especially because everything we do isn’t traditional.

We try to take some of those traditional flavors but then make it our own and use local ingredients and stuff. You’re always a little nervous about how people might be receptive to that, but people have been really excited.

We sell out most days, so that’s really cool.

But I think Kalamata Bistro is probably still my favorite. Might be my favorite just because that’s what we started with before we started this place. We always had Kalamata Bistro, which was like a little food truck that we took around.

Part of opening this place, too, was looking for a place to put our food truck. And there wasn’t really anything in Corvallis. So we’re like, I guess we’ll just open our own place to put it. From there, it grew into what it is now, owning all of the food trucks and the business, too.

We had Kalamata Bistro for about 14 years. It started at a farmer’s market as a little tiny pop-up. We drove around in our little Prius, and yeah, we would just make a little homemade hummus and baklava for people. And then it grew from there over 14 years to a full menu.

I think we had gone through about 300 items over those 14 years that we tested through our different festivals and farmers’ markets. And then we eventually built a food truck. And then, a couple of years after that, we looked for a place to start it. That was where we stumbled upon an old gas station that was for sale. And now we’ve got Common Fields.

Tell us about the small business community in Corvallis.

You know, in any small town, it can be hard to get a lot of support from the government, but in small towns, when it comes to small businesses, we’re all really good friends. A lot of us know each other, and we share a lot of stuff.

So say if I run out of this, hey, I’m out of gas or toilet paper isn’t delivered, they’ll come and, “Hey, I’ll bring you that!” Or a place is out of CO2, and we’re like, I’ll give you one of my extra tanks to use. So we all work together a lot. We’ve actually formed a small group here in town that we all kind of support each other.

It’s really focusing on small restaurants specifically. So that’s been nice. We meet monthly and just talk about stuff. And if somebody’s 86-ed from a bar, we’ll share that, and we have a group text chain. It’s been really nice having that support. I feel like there’s a transition, and there always is in most places of the new businesses, all the new younger businesses starting where older ones are selling off and or closing.

So with that, I feel like all these new businesses changed to where we all have this camaraderie. Where before, it was like everybody was against each other, and we were trying to do better than the other place. But here we’re all trying to help each other. If we’re all successful, Corvallis is going to be successful, and we want to bring more people here.

It’s like there are two burger places, and they might hate each other. I was like, you should maybe learn from each other. Small town, and even in a big town, it shouldn’t be a competition.

The competition shouldn’t be other small businesses; it should be the big fast food chains or the big corporations that are actively doing things to make sure small businesses don’t succeed and they’re not trying to help each other out. So, if we all try to help each other out, we can be bigger than the big chains.

Any other small business tips?

If you want to be successful, you need to really work hard and grind. I also think what’s important is when you’re building a food truck or starting these new things, really making sure you research all the codes and reach out to the fire department, to the city, to the health department in advance before you start building or start your business because a pretty common mistake and a very costly mistake is a lot of people will do all that and then after they are ready to open, they reach out and they find out that everything they did was wrong and they spend tons of money fixing it.

That’s definitely can be a very costly mistake that new business owners make.

Do you have any current plans to expand?

No, we’ve been expanding this place since we opened it. We’ve already been expanding a lot. When we first opened, it was just one food truck and a couple of picnic tables. And now it’s just everything out here. So we’re almost trying to put the brakes a little bit and trying to just operate and catch up, business and start paying off all of the debt that we took on doing all this expansion and build out.

We’re trying to dial things in and slow down the expansion. But I think that we probably won’t ever expand this place. I think it’s already a lot. I think our mass capacity is like 600 people. At a certain point, you can only get so many people to the bar.

Vendor Round-Up

And which of our vendors and partners are assisting Common Fields on their small business journey?

What POS do you use? Toast

What do you use for accounting software? Quickbooks software, but we do all our accounting and bookkeeping.