On a balmy, overcast Tuesday in July, Scott Goodfriend prepares to take a group of five on his Iconic Foods of the Lower East Side tour in New York. They stand at the entrance of a large food market in the downtown Manhattan neighborhood.
This was “the immigrant center of New York,” Goodfriend tells the group. And wherever immigrants came from, they brought their food with them. The tour includes eateries such as Italian dessert hub Ferrara, local bagel spot Baz Bagel, and others, with a sprinkling of historical facts along the way.
The first stop is the Doughnut Plant, a 30-year-old, industrial-looking shop with concrete floors and platters of doughnuts behind a steel counter. Goodfriend explains that the founder, Mark Isreal, discovered his grandfather’s doughnut recipe and used it to open the business in 1994.
He brings out three different doughnuts for the group to try: Tres leches, Brooklyn Blackout and blueberry.
“Oh, yeah,” says a seventh grader on the tour. “These are good.”
Goodfriend, 39, officially started selling food tours in 2019 while working in communications. In 2023, after getting let go from his job at Meta, he decided to take his company, Ultimate Food Tours, full-time. Between May 2023 and May 2024, he brought in more than $145,000.
Here’s how he built his budding business.
Ethnic food was a constant in Goodfriend’s life
Goodfriend grew up in the Calabasas neighborhood of Los Angeles, the oldest of two kids. His dad was a mortgage broker and his mom worked at the UCLA medical center. Food was a constant. “My parents would always love to take us out to different ethnic foods in L.A.,” he says. “My dad really likes Persian food. My mom always really likes sushi and Japanese food.”
Learning about the past was a constant as well, he says — he’d often watch the History Channel with his dad.
Goodfriend with a couple of people on his tour.
Tasia Jensen | Marisa Forziati | CNBC Make It
Goodfriend attended the University of Colorado Boulder and graduated in 2007 with a degree in journalism. He then went to work in reality TV, first in LA, then, in 2011, in New York. “I liked reality TV because I felt like I could jump from project to project a lot quicker,” he says.
In 2016, he nabbed a job at major PR company Edelman. Throughout his six years at the company, he led projects in Web3 and virtual reality. Then, in July 2022, he got offered a job at Meta in their augmented reality wing.
“I felt like I finally made it,” he says. The job paid about $200,000 per year.
Friends sent ‘little goals to challenge me’ to make tours
When Goodfriend first moved to New York, “I would pick different neighborhoods to kind of explore,” he says, including various eateries in the area. Seeking out Bosnian food took him to Astoria, Queens, for example. Curiosity about its Russian population took him to Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
Eventually, friends found out about the tours he was taking himself on and demanded he do the same for them. “They were sending me little goals to challenge me to make these food tours,” he says. He’d take them to Brooklyn neighborhoods like Borough Park with its Hasidic population and Sunset Park with its Chinese community.
Goodfriend gave these kinds of tours for about eight years but resisted monetizing them, both because he enjoyed giving them to friends and because he didn’t want the hassle of building a business and website. Then a friend let him know about Airbnb experiences, or opportunities to sell local tours through the site. In the fall of 2019, he decided to post one.
“The first dollar I made from my Chinatown Food Tour was in October of 2019,” he says.
‘I made the decision to cut the safety net’
By 2021, he’d added his Iconic Food tour and given his business its name: Ultimate Food Tours. “I was like, how do I have something that sounds big and fun?” he says. In December 2021, he built his website, and began adding more and more tours to his repertoire there.
Goodfriend did all of this while working full time, giving tours over the weekend. Between “2021 to 2022 I was probably putting in about 10 hours a week for two tours a week,” he says. The side hustle brought in more than $30,000 in 2022 alone.
Eight months after getting hired at Meta, in February 2023, Goodfriend was let go from his job.
Goodfriend’s “Origin Stories” series.
Scott Goodfriend
Despite getting a full-time job offer at a startup soon after, he felt a pull toward his hustle. “So I made the decision to cut the safety net in early 2023,” he says, “to run Ultimate Food Tours full time and leave the corporate world.”
‘I probably work 80 hours a week’
These days, Ultimate Food Tours gives six different food tours throughout the week at $90 per person, including food. They average six to eight people each, Goodfriend says. The company features options like Broadway Bites and Famous Sites and Famous Jewish Foods. Goodfriend, who designed each tour himself, personally gives about two to three of these and has five other freelance tour guides give the rest.
UFT recently partnered with local restaurants and added private cooking classes as well, mostly for corporate clients looking for a unique experience. Those go for $150 per person. He also sells merch on the website.
Going forward, Goodfriend is working to make the company global, helping guides build similar tours in San Diego and Japan. When those go live, UFT will “take a small percentage,” he says.
Goodfriend also posts content throughout the company’s various social media accounts, including a series called Origin Stories, which takes viewers through the history of some of New York’s famous foods. The series is “currently in development for a long form streaming show,” he says, which he’s very excited about.
As the company’s only full-time employee, “I probably work 80 hours a week,” he says. He also makes significantly less than he did at Meta. But he loves it.
“This is absolutely my dream job,” he says.
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