Kitchen Incubators Get Food Businesses Cooking
Many aspiring entrepreneurs dream of turning their grandmother’s cookie recipe into the next Mrs. Fields. Yet because stringent food-safety regulations make it illegal to sell many types of food products from home, starting a food business legally typically requires working out of a fully licensed commercial kitchen. Enter the kitchen incubator.
The culinary translation of the traditional business incubator, kitchen incubators offer shared workspace, equipment, and business advice for small catering companies, pushcart vendors, bakers, and specialty-food makers.
Many of the latter are recent immigrants, struggling farmers, or low-income workers who can’t afford to invest a large amount of startup capital. At a kitchen incubator, entrepreneurs pay only for the kitchen time they need, typically at below-market-rate prices of about $10 to $40 per hour, plus storage fees.
The kitchen incubator is a still relatively new concept, but it has proved to be a seductive idea for dozens of municipalities, universities, and not-for-profit and for-profit companies.
The Association for Enterprise Opportunity, estimates there were about 20 incubators in operation in 2001. Spokeswoman Sara Ignas says AEO estimates there are closer to 150 today and expects that number to continue to grow.
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Photo by BusinessWeek.
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