Jul 18, 2023
By Rick McNary
In the late 1940s, Dorothy Lynch and her husband ran a restaurant in St. Paul, Neb. She created her own tomato-based salad dressing, which became so popular patrons would bring empty bottles for her to fill with Dorothy Lynch Home Style Dressing. Her famous dressing is now produced in a 64,000-square-foot space in St. Paul, population 351.
How many Dorothy Lynches are there in rural America that have to-die-for family recipes, but can’t produce it in their home kitchens? I firmly believe access to commercial kitchens are the key.
Once a grower has access to a commercial kitchen, they suddenly have the capacity to expand their business from seasonal to annual, from local to even national because they can create a value-added product that is shelf stable. For example, if you grow tomatoes, you have a limited, local, seasonal window to sell them quickly from your garden or urban farm. But if you can take those tomatoes and create a value-added product such as salsa, spaghetti sauce or any other kind of product, you have the potential for a year-round business with a national market.
For many small-scale growers who want to expand their food business, the heavy lift of the cost of their own commercial kitchen is too daunting. All businesses calculate their return-on-investments (ROI), and for many small-scale growers, the ROI would take too long.
However, if those same growers had access to lease a commercial kitchen on an hourly basis, they could grow their business without the risk of capital outlay for their own kitchen.
Therefore, a commercial kitchen that can be accessed 24/7 and leased for specific periods of time are great business opportunities for an entrepreneur or an economic-development opportunity for a community.
While there are some commercial kitchens that can be leased like this, some of them are only open during the regular office hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. However, most growers have jobs during that same period and need access to the kitchen during evenings, nights and weekends.
Enter the keyless, traceable entry system.
Before any food business can use a commercial kitchen, they must get their own licenses and file a food safety plan known as a HACCP plan (pronounced “hassup”) with the state of Kansas. The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) is an internationally recognized method of identifying and managing food safety related risk and, when central to an active food safety program, can provide your customers, the public and regulatory agencies assurance that a food safety program is well managed.
That means the onus of food safety, and proper use of the facility, is on the person with the business leasing the kitchen for a period, not the entity who owns the kitchen.
If you have read any of our work regarding building local food systems, which breaks a system down into production, processing and distribution, these commercial kitchens fit into the processing component.
In Kansas, the season for growing fruits and vegetables and getting them sold to a local market is relatively short. That’s why farmers markets generally run from May to October. But for those local growers who want to extend their business through colder months, a commercial kitchen is the key.
Incidentally, some type of cold storage should accompany that commercial kitchen since it provides an even longer time to work with produce that will expire quickly in normal temperatures.
Since Shop Kansas Farms began, one of the fastest growing business segments has been the ability for growers to create value-added products.
We believe this is an important part of accessing locally grown food as well as creating business opportunities in rural areas by providing the processing component of a local food system.
If you are interested in any part of this conversation, please reach out to us. If you are an entrepreneur seeking a business opportunity by constructing one, or a community seeking new ways to create economic development, or a local grower/food entrepreneur who wants to grow your own business with the aid of a commercial kitchen, let’s talk. We can connect you with the right people and the right resources.
If you have a commercial kitchen ready to lease, please list it, for free, on our Shop Kansas Farms website.