CommonWealth Kitchen promotes inclusive entrepreneurship in the food industry

When Jen Faigel, co-founder and executive director of CommonWealth Kitchen, describes the nonprofit food incubator and contract manufacturer’s shared kitchen model, she tries to make it as simple as possible.

“It’s like a gym membership for your food business,” Faigel says. “Because you’re just renting the kitchen by the hour.”

Based in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, the nonprofit focuses on inclusive entrepreneurship aimed at growing small businesses in the food industry, including bakeries, food trucks, CPG companies and more. A shared kitchen offers six to seven stations within 14,000 square feet, including a big, multi-station kitchen, aimed at large-scale production. It has an oven the size of a walk-in closet, with two double racks that fit 44 sheet pans; an isolation room with a dehumidifier; a dough sheeter and small kettles; and a room for cold-chain manufacturing and packaging.

“The concept was aimed at helping women, immigrants, people of color and low-income people start a food business as an economic development strategy—as a means to build their own wealth,” Faigel says about CommonWealth Kitchen, which was originally called Crop Circle Kitchen. The nonprofit, which is housed in an old hot dog factory, also offers warehousing, custom label printing and co-manufacturing, including recipe development and scaling, for products that don’t contain meat or seafood. Currently, it works with 52 small businesses and about 20 farms—and about 85% are owned by women and people of color, she says.

“The idea was we could take down the barriers for people to start their side hustle and make money,” Faigel says. “The biggest challenge for anybody starting a food business is the cost of a kitchen.”

Unique model, tailored support

When it launched in 2010, CommonWealth Kitchen was one of the first organizations of its kind, according to American Communities Trust.

“We were ahead of the ghost kitchens and everybody else doing this,” Faigel says. “What we saw pretty quickly is that [the] kitchen is the easiest part because lots of people know how to cook, how to make food.” What isn’t easy for a lot of entrepreneurs is understanding how to get the right permit, license or insurance, or knowing how to calculate costs, scale a recipe, create labels, determine the shelf life of a product or procure packaging.

As for business support, plenty of places share tips on how to read a profit-and-loss statement or balance sheet, Faigel says, but not enough is offered around food-industry specifics.

That prompted CommonWealth Kitchen, which now has 20 full-time employees, to create educational training around topics like market segmentation and industry-specific contract negotiation for catering, pricing and value proposition. The programming includes an online 12-week “mini MBA” class for small food businesses via Babson College, Faigel says. Currently, the class is open only to businesses in the Northeast, Miami, Florida, and Dallas, Texas.

Even with the extra training, many startups struggle to gain market traction and can’t afford marketing, Faigel says. That’s a tough proposition if you’re a startup making a new product that is unfamiliar to a broad audience.

“The food industry is an industry where you don’t need fancy degrees,” Faigel says. “English doesn’t have to be your first language, and you can have a criminal record—all the things that are barriers for an awful lot of people to do any sort of wealth creation in their lives,” she explains. Since the largest employers in Boston are colleges and hospitals, CommonWealth Kitchen found a solution by connecting its small business owners via partnerships with buyers and distributors, including food-service programs at colleges and hospitals. This includes CommonWealth Kitchen Launchpad, a food court at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology student center.

“College students care about food,” Faigel says. “And they love these stories about business owners.” That has helped brands like Hapi African Gourmet, a sunflower and peanut sauce company run by Paulette Ngachoko, a political refugee from Cameroon whose products have been on the menus at Harvard University, University of Massachusetts and Boston College.

“It’s about building strategic partnerships,” Faigel says.

Paulette Ngachoko, a political refugee from Cameroon, started the brand Hapi African Gourmet, a sunflower and peanut sauce company.

Support for farmers, emerging CPG brands

That’s helped by CommonWealth Kitchen’s ability to do co-packing on demand. “That means we get to do a lot of random things, including a ton of work with farmers,” Faigel says. The minimum is a one-day production run for refrigerated items like pickles, as well as frozen and shelf-stable products that are packed in bulk for food service, or in glass and pouches for retail. While a production run depends on the product: For sauces, it’s about 150 to 200 gallons, Faigel says.

“We hear all the time from people in the CPG world that they get stuck in this place where they can’t scale up to be at a larger co-packer,” Faigel says. “We’re filling this gap between [artisan] and traditional co-packer.”

CommonWealth Kitchen’s ability to be nimble has helped when farmers have a surplus of crops, such as tomatoes.

“They are so delicious, but there are so many,” Faigel says. “Even food banks can’t take them because they are going to go bad.” To avoid the waste, CommonWealth Kitchen developed several simple recipes to make shelf-stable marinara. “We went to the farmers and said, ‘If you send us your extra tomatoes, we can turn it into marinara,’” Faigel says. “‘We’ll put your farm label on it, and you can sell it at your farmstand to make some extra money.’”

Creating a more holistic, 360-degree approach helps not only the farmers, Faigel says, but also CommonWealth Kitchen’s network of small businesses, buyers and distributors, including big food-service accounts that care about buying locally and sustainably.

“We are going to be processing 50 tons of local tomatoes that are surplus that are going to Springfield Public Schools,” she says. “Now they are going to get a great local tomato sauce on their pizza.” The tomatoes will also be used at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, on the patient menu and in the cafeteria, as well as at Harvard and MIT.

“We are creating markets for things that would otherwise end up in the compost bin at best and the landfill at worst,” Faigel says. “We are just connecting the dots.”

Edward Jerez founded Magic Empanadas, which offers Colombian empanadas at farmers markets and community events.

Seeding new opportunities

One of CommonWealth Kitchen’s latest projects is working with Aurora Mills and Farm in Linneus, Maine, and Clover Hill Farm in Gilbertville, Massachusetts, to grow yellow field peas as a cover crop.

“We got asked to help develop some products as a way to incentivize farmers to grow it and turn this cover crop into a cash crop,” Faigel says. The move benefits the kitchen, farmers and the earth. Not only do yellow peas put nitrogen back into the ground, which helps with greenhouse gas sequestration and improves soil health, planting them also helps farmers save money because they don’t need to put as many chemicals into the ground, Faigel says.

The yellow field peas are being used to make a falafel-like fritter that’s being sold to multiple colleges and hospitals, Faigel adds. They will also be sold to Boston and Maine public schools this fall.

“I don't know anybody who is doing this kind of vertical integration in the way that we're doing it,” Faigel says. “We have a tremendous amount of people interested in the model who are trying to replicate it.”