Out of the Pandemic, a New Marketplace for Native Ingredients

The owners of Tocabe Indigenous Marketplace aim to build one of the most comprehensive shops of its kind.

At the two locations of Tocabe, a Denver-area American Indian restaurant, customers have long asked the owners Matt Chandra and Ben Jacobs where to buy the Native and Indigenous ingredients used in the kitchen, like the wild rice in the grain bowls, or the bison for the glazed ribs with berry barbecue sauce. Last May, the pair realized they could become the source for those ingredients, leveraging their existing relationships with suppliers to build “an economy that can keep money within Indian country,” said Mr. Jacobs, a member of the Osage Nation of Northeast Oklahoma. As restaurateurs embraced new business models to stave off the coronavirus’s devastation of their industry, the Tocabe owners set another goal for themselves: to create a robust ecosystem for Native and Indigenous food traditions to thrive.