FOOD & DRINK

Healthy and Sustainable Offerings

Loco Coco brings superfood bowls and smoothies to Venice

By Oliver Grynberg

Loco Coco, a New York City staple that sells superfood-focused bowls and smoothies, has arrived in Venice. The bright pink solar-powered house with a quaint garden lining Abbot Kinney matches trendy flair with the utmost attention to quality in its vegan offerings. “I couldn’t find anything that met my needs,” said Max Alcobi, founder and owner of Loco Coco. With extensive dietary restrictions and a decade-long interest in superfoods, he set out to create a product he would want to purchase daily, and New Yorkers were quick to bite. Between the colorful bowls, intricate matchas and slew of energizing smoothies, there is something for everyone at Loco Coco. The tiny location on the Upper East Side was soon “doing numbers on a per square foot basis that retailers like Chanel could only imagine doing,” Alcobi said. “New York really needed the product we provided.” “LA claims to be one of the epicenters of health and wellness in the U.S., but a lot of the establishments here are not up to par with my personal standards,” Alcobi said. Loco Coco brings a degree of transparency that is unique to restaurants of its kind, while also providing customers with the information needed to understand the supplements and products they sell. It might seem trivial, but “a big differentiator for us is that we don’t use ice in any one of our products,” Alcobi said. This way, smoothies and bowls never separate. There is an obsession with actuality when it comes to ingredients, so that everything involved in

Loco Coco is a new sustainable vegan, superfood-based bowl and smoothie restaurant on Abbot Kinney in Venice.

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Loco Coco’s products is listed on the menu. Honesty with customers hinges on knowing where one’s food is coming from, and Loco Coco is built around relationships with distributors. “Right now I'm at my friend's warehouse picking up our essential oils and herbs, they are literally the farmers,” Alcobi said. Coconut shell bowls and spoons, which are completely biodegradable, come from a sustainable farm partner in Taiwan that Alcobi was communicating with two years before his first location opened. Loco Coco’s passion for detail and relationships like these pairs with an equally vibrant community-centric location in Venice. The hot pink house, colorful logos, creative names for menu items and upbeat music infuse the store with energy. Paintings by local artists are for sale just above the garden, a space which Alcobi wants to be public. “We don’t require you to be a customer to sit in the garden,” he said. “We want to be able to give back and have this be a cultural center for Venice.” Whether it is creating a platform for local creatives or partnering with organizations like LA Urban Farms, Loco Coco is committed to establishing itself as an integral and beneficial part of Venice’s ecosystem. “It is not just about the physical body and what you put in it, but about the mind and soul as well,” Alcobi said. Every element of Loco Coco’s well-rounded approach comes back to the earth. Sustainability is an unquestionable tenet of Alcobi’s philosophy for one simple reason. “We are literally using products of the earth,” Alcobi said. “If we don’t take care of our planet, how can we continue doing that?” By producing their own power with solar panels on the roof and with packaging and cutlery that is almost entirely biodegradable, Loco Coco recognizes their debt to the planet. Anything less, Alcobi believes, would be hypocritical. Loco Coco’s ethical approach and accessibility to healthy eaters of all kinds makes it a likely success on Abbott Kinney. But Alcobi already has big plans for expansion. “We're always thinking about the next store, and the next three or four stores after that,” he said. “Covid changed the way Americans think about what they are putting into their bodies.” Understanding how to strengthen one’s body through food is more relevant now, perhaps, than ever before. If you don’t know much and want to get started, the knowledgeable staff at Loco Coco are trained to point you in the right direction. It is all about helping the customer, and as Alcobi assured, “We have the tools, ingredients, products and supplements to do that for you.”

Loco Coco

1202 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Venice 323-218-9970 loco-coco.com Inspired by pitaya (aka dragon fruit), Loco Coco’s menu is filled with potent, vegan, raw ingredients such as acai, jackfruit, aloe, spirulina and locally sourced fresh food.