Detroit Shipping Company is a food hall in Midtown Detroit built from 21 repurposed shipping containers — six to seven food vendors, two bars, an art gallery, and a 10,000-square-foot backyard beer garden, all sharing one roof since it opened in 2018. Co-founder Jonathan Hartzell didn't set out to run a food hall — he and a group of childhood friends pledged a "soft yes" to investing in Detroit at a bachelor party, lost their first site when a property deal fell through, and ended up in Midtown because a local business alderman personally recruited them to cluster with other small vendors already investing in the block. Eight years later, that unplanned start has become one of the city's most-cited food halls — and one of its most instructive case studies in the operational problem every multi-vendor venue eventually runs into: how do you stay open late without losing money on it?
What makes late night so hard to run profitably in a food hall?
A single restaurant can pare its menu down to a skeleton crew for the late-night crowd — one cook, one register, a fraction of the normal labor cost. A food hall can't do that, because each vendor is its own kitchen. "It's hard to get late night in a food hall," Hartzell said. "If you were just a regular kitchen, you can keep one guy on staff who can pare your menu down. He can run the late night crowd because they're going to pare down, eat maybe 10% of what your normal menu is. Food hall — that means for every stall you need one person to stay, and that's a lot of labor for the pared-down sales volume."
That math is why so many food halls quietly go dark after dinner, even when there's foot traffic outside their doors. "We always had a hard time handling late night, and we'd love to be open later," Hartzell said. "People come because it's a food hall — they come like, oh, the food's closed, and they just turn around."
How did Detroit Shipping Company solve its late-night problem without adding staff?
By collapsing every vendor's flavor identity into one shared, single-station product instead of asking each stall to stay open. "Recently our bar launched a little hot dog stand, and we partnered with every food vendor — how do I make it a sushi dog? How do I make it the motor burger dog, and how do I partner with you?" Hartzell said. "They all brought their flavor profiles, and all the chefs came out. We had an awesome afternoon of just eating hot dogs and trying all these flavor profiles. I could throw a hot dog out and I can get it eight different ways from these people — that it was an amazing experience."
It's a genuinely reusable idea for any food hall, FEC, or multi-vendor venue wrestling with the same late-night math: instead of staffing every kitchen for a fraction of its daytime volume, build one late-night product that lets every vendor contribute without opening their full line. One bar, one station, eight flavor profiles — the labor cost of one stall instead of seven.
How do you get independent food vendors to collaborate instead of compete?
By treating them as partners with a standing forum, not tenants who happen to share a building. Detroit Shipping Company runs a weekly half-hour touchpoint with every vendor owner — a habit that's outlasted plenty of turnover elsewhere in the industry. "It's not just ours — we share it with eight small business owners," Hartzell said. Some vendors have been there since the 2018 opening; others have moved on to become investors in the company's newer projects. "We do a weekly half an hour touchpoint with all owners," he said. "Some of the long-standing people just send in their AI robot to listen and they listen to it later. The newer people are very engaged — they want to ask questions about why we choose to market somewhere, why we choose to have an event like we did, how can we adjust next time."
That cadence is also what made the hot-dog collaboration possible in the first place — it's hard to get several competing kitchens to hand over their flavor profiles for a shared product without a standing relationship built on something other than a lease.
What does a food hall actually need from its point-of-sale to make this work?
It needs to treat each vendor as its own business inside one shared system — separate menus, separate payouts, one guest-facing tab. Multi-vendor venues run on fundamentally different math than a single-concept restaurant: every stall needs its own accounting, its own reporting, and its own share of every order that touches it, without asking the guest to open eight separate tabs to try eight vendors' food. The Golden Mill in Golden, Colorado — another multi-vendor food hall — runs 3,000 to 4,000 nightly tabs through exactly this kind of system, with automated per-vendor payouts and roaming tabs that let a guest order across every stall on one check while each vendor still gets paid out separately, tips and taxes included. That's the infrastructure question underneath Hartzell's story: a shared late-night product, or a shared tab across several kitchens, only works if the payment system was built for multiple vendors from the ground up — not adapted from a single-concept POS after the fact, the way we've compared elsewhere.
Who does this operational approach fit best?
This is built for food halls, markets, FECs, and any venue where multiple independent vendors share one roof, one guest base, and one set of late-night economics. It fits operators who are comfortable ceding some control to build a genuine vendor community — a standing weekly touchpoint, shared decision-making about programming and events — rather than running every stall as a top-down tenant relationship. Hartzell is candid that this only works with the right partners: "If they don't respect the space — because it's not just ours — then we've kind of moved on from those programs," he said of promoters and vendors who didn't fit. It's not a model for an operator who wants a single controlled brand experience; it's a model for one who wants several businesses succeeding together under one name.
FAQ
Why is late night unprofitable for most food halls?
Because every vendor is its own kitchen. A single restaurant can pare its menu to one cook for the late-night crowd; a food hall needs one staffer per stall to serve a fraction of daytime volume, which makes the labor cost disproportionate to the sales.
How can a food hall stay open later without adding labor cost?
By building one shared, single-station product that lets every vendor contribute a flavor or variation without opening their full kitchen — collapsing the labor of several stalls into one.
How do you get competing food vendors to collaborate on a shared product?
Through an ongoing, standing relationship — not a one-time ask. A regular cadence of vendor check-ins builds the trust needed for vendors to hand over their recipes and flavor profiles for something shared.
What should a multi-vendor food hall look for in a point-of-sale system?
A system built for multiple vendors from the ground up — automated per-vendor payouts, per-vendor reporting, and the ability to let guests order across every stall on one tab while each vendor is still paid out separately.
