Culinary incubator eyes food-truck business

RENDERING COURTESY GREG SPIESS ARCHITECTURE
CHEF’S SPECIAL: A 2011 rendering of the Hope & Main culinary incubator in Warren, which is looking to help small food-industry businesses get off the ground.
RENDERING COURTESY GREG SPIESS ARCHITECTURE CHEF’S SPECIAL: A 2011 rendering of the Hope & Main culinary incubator in Warren, which is looking to help small food-industry businesses get off the ground.

Where do all the food trucks go when they’re not serving customers from the curb?
By law, even the most intrepid truck needs a home base, a place to park and, most crucially, prepare and store their ingredients before heading out to cook.
Finding an affordable and commercially licensed commissary, as the stationary prep-kitchens for food trucks are known, is one of the biggest challenges for aspiring food-truck chefs. Along with local restrictions to protect restaurants, it is one of the things that prevent even more trucks from hitting the streets.
And it’s one of the reasons the founders of the Hope & Main culinary incubator in Warren see strong demand for the new facility they broke ground on this summer in an old Main Street elementary school.
With a planned 6,000 square feet of health-code-compliant rental kitchen space, Hope & Main is designed to make it easier for local, small, food-industry businesses of all types to get off the ground.
“We took the risk so entrepreneurs don’t have to,” said Lisa Raiola, founder and executive director of Hope & Main. “You can’t legally cook commercially out of your own house, so unless you could find a church or restaurant kitchen that was underused, it’s difficult to start. In this environment where it’s difficult to find investment, this can lower that bar to entry.”
In addition to truck chefs, Raiola sees Hope & Main renting to bakers, caterers and anyone looking to break into small packaged or processed food products.
And while the commercial kitchens are the heart of Hope & Main, the nonprofit promises a range of community benefits that not all culinary incubators provide.
They include a market space, demonstration kitchen, classrooms and a 2,000-square-foot event hall. The location of the incubator, within downtown Warren, may be the clearest sign of Hope & Main’s community mission.
Building commercial kitchens and commissaries in an industrial park would be cheaper, but Raiola said it was important for Hope & Main to be in a walkable village setting where residents will visit it.
Hope & Main has been in development for the last two years, but took a huge step at the end of June when its purchase of the former Main Street school from the town closed.
The sale price of $125,000 is a small but critical part of the $3.2 million estimated cost of the incubator project.
The bulk of the financing for Hope & Main is coming from a $3 million federal loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Community Facilities program. Hope & Main is posting the school property as collateral for the 3.5 percent, 40-year loan.
A major piece of the construction project will be the addition of an elevator in the 1915 school building. Kitchens and work space will go on the second floor and public spaces, including event hall and demonstration space, will be on the first floor.
Hope & Main has hired TRAC Builders of Johnston as the contractor for the project.
In a sign that Warren residents like the idea of Rhode Island’s first culinary incubator in their town, 400 showed up to approve the sale at a special Financial Town Meeting last fall.
Traditional business incubators have sprung up in recent years but Hope & Main will be Rhode Island’s first full-time, dedicated culinary incubator.
In the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, CropCircle Kitchen provides a kitchen incubator space and has recently opened a commissary in the Dorchester neighborhood. But in the Ocean State, Raiola said kitchen spaces like the one at the Sandywoods Farm development in Tiverton are about the closest thing to a culinary incubator.
For the resident with some cooking skills and an idea for a food business, the barriers to getting in the game remain high.
Raiola said the list of licensed restaurants or caterers willing to rent out their kitchen and storage space is small and building your own code-compliant facility is costly. The current lending climate makes getting a loan to invest in such facilities often unrealistic.
For entrepreneurs looking to develop retail food product like, say, their own chowder or salsa recipe, food manufacturing companies require proof of sales before they will enter a “co-packer” agreement to make and package the recipe.
In addition to kitchen, refrigerator and dry storage space, Hope & Main, like traditional business incubators, will provide mentoring and technical assistance to food startups.
Right now, Hope & Main intends to lease about 50 slots in the incubator to companies at a minimum of $300 for 12 hours of kitchen time.
Raoila said Hope & Main has already received informal interest from approximately 200 people, so she anticipates competition for the available slots. Hope & Main plans to begin accepting formal applications in September.
“We only want people who are serious about starting a business,” Raoila said. “We want to create jobs through the food economy while strengthening our local food system. Even though it is located in Warren, it is a resource for the whole state.” •

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