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July 24, 2024
Join Andy Blechman and Ashley Colpaart as they delve into the world of shared kitchens for food entrepreneurs. Ashley, the founder of The Food Corridor and
Andy Blechman: Good morning, Ashley.
Ashley Colpaart: It's noon.
Andy Blechman: It's noon? I thought you were two hours behind us.
Ashley Colpaart: I'm in central time.
Andy Blechman: Oh, my head. You were mountain.
Ashley Colpaart: I was mountain. I'm in central now. That's the life of an entrepreneur that can work remotely.
Andy Blechman: Well, let me kick it off with a little bit of an intro. We got introduced through Camilla from Nimbus, who works with one of our chefs on our platform. And you are what I would call the world's foremost expert in shared kitchens. You seem to know everything and everyone about shared kitchens, which is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I actually had a meal prep company about a decade ago, and finding a kitchen was an absolute disaster. This was before shared kitchens were really a thing. I remember begging and pleading with restaurant owners. Eventually I found a small shop on the West side of Atlanta that had a test kitchen they weren't using. I negotiated with them to use the kitchen when they weren't in use.
The world has really evolved in the last ten to twelve years. Shared kitchens are now beyond just a thing. I'm really excited to have you on to hear about your background, talk about shared kitchens, what you've done with The Food Corridor, and the tools you've built for finding shared kitchens. Our goal today is to be super helpful for our audience and be a resource for meal prep owners who are thinking about scaling up, moving to a new shared kitchen, or potentially creating their own space and becoming a shared kitchen operator. Lots of use cases.
Since it's a coffee chat and it's one o'clock for me on the East coast and noon for you, I don't know if you've had your coffee yet.
Ashley Colpaart: I'm plugging Mo News.
Andy Blechman: Are you a news anchor?
Ashley Colpaart: No, Mo News is someone I started following during COVID because it was really hard to find quality news. He used to be a CBS anchor and started this thing on Instagram where he just posts headlines. It was the best way to get information during COVID. He launched a premium membership and he's very unbiased, just delivers the headlines. I'm a premium member now.
Andy Blechman: Does he have a Substack or something?
Ashley Colpaart: He just does everything through Instagram right now.
Andy Blechman: Cool. How do you pay for the membership? Is it Patreon?
Ashley Colpaart: I think it was through a native site that he built. I can't actually remember how I paid for it.
Andy Blechman: A lot of our software is membership based, so we've gone pretty deep on the subscription side of things.
Ashley Colpaart: Ours is also a membership model with some subscriptions.
Andy Blechman: What are you drinking?
Ashley Colpaart: This is coffee.
Andy Blechman: Are you particular about your coffee?
Ashley Colpaart: I am. I do one cup of coffee every morning with organic cream. I like it milky.
Andy Blechman: Any specific beans? Are we a Folgers house?
Ashley Colpaart: No, not a Folgers house. I've tried this new company lately that delivers it fresh.
Andy Blechman: Have you tried their coffee? I have them in my fridge.
Ashley Colpaart: It's such good coffee.
Andy Blechman: Yeah, it's really good. Anyway, enough about coffee. I drink this thing called Mud/WTR or other alternative coffees. Ironically, this is The Bottle coffee chat, but I quit coffee three or four years ago.
Ashley Colpaart: It's becoming a thing. Quitting coffee and quitting alcohol are just how people are moving these days.
Andy Blechman: Both at the same time. It was great for me.
Andy Blechman: With all that said, it'd be really awesome to hear about your background and how you developed this passion for shared kitchens, which is a pretty niche thing.
Ashley Colpaart: First of all, Andy, thanks for having me. It was really nice that Camilla introduced us, and as software and community builders, we obviously have so much to talk about. I appreciate you inviting me on to chat about my story.
I came from academia originally and I was interested in food my whole life. My mom was a food entrepreneur growing up. She started a hot sauce company in Austin, Texas before there was a thousand SKUs of hot sauce on the shelves. She's always ahead of the trend. Right now she has a cottage foods business with infused honeys. I was just at the fancy food show and I couldn't tell you how many infused honeys there were. She's always right ahead of the curve on trends.
She used to make her hot sauce in our home kitchen. I remember it was habanero sauce and we had to wear swim goggles because the peppers were so spicy. You had to wear swim goggles around the house when she was making it. She made it in our home kitchen and would sanitize the bottles in the dishwasher. Then we'd get up really early in the mornings and sell at the farmers market. So that's in my DNA.
My dad was actually a hardware engineer in Silicon Valley. He immigrated here in the seventies and early eighties from the Netherlands and landed right in the middle of Silicon Valley, building some of the first microprocessor chips for home computers. Food and technology are in my DNA in a very intimate way. It's ironic at this point that I own a food tech company.
My journey was like most young kids. I went to college experimenting with vegetarianism, community gardens, cooperatives, and alternative styles of living. A lot of them centered around food. We started a food potluck club in college and talked about food-related topics. I studied food and nutrition in my undergrad and became a registered dietitian. My first job as a career dietitian was as a nutrition service coordinator at Meals on Wheels, helping develop meals for school-age kids.
I was struck by how access to healthy food varied so much. I started studying agriculture policy and why we subsidize corn and sugars, how they show up in manufactured foods, and how low-income populations can access those foods because they're shelf stable but have higher rates of obesity and diabetes.
So I ended up going to Tufts University to study food policy to understand how policy can impact communities. I studied sustainable food systems and agriculture policy and became fascinated with local and regional food systems. During COVID, we saw what happens to populations when we have disruptions to our local food systems. How are we going to feed ourselves?
I ended up at Colorado State doing a PhD under Dawn Thilmany McFadden in the ag econ department. I chose to work under Dawn because she was looking at local food through an economic lens. What's viable and what's not. A lot of nonprofit organizations doing meaningful work are dependent on large grants. When the money runs out, the programs run out. It's not sustainable. You're constantly chasing the next grant. You're changing your programs to fit those funds, which may or may not be there depending on the administration.
Dawn was looking at local and regionalized food systems from a sustainable economic lens. So I worked under her.
Andy Blechman: My understanding is that shared kitchens was your focus during your PhD. How did that happen?
Ashley Colpaart: I gave that background because it tells the journey that led to my aha moment, which happened during my program. I got invited out to the USDA to be on a panel for community food systems grants. These are three hundred to four hundred thousand dollar grants that the USDA gives to communities to help localize and regionalize food systems. My job was to evaluate projects, score them, and advocate for them on a panel to see which projects get funding.
I read all these applications and noticed so many wanted to build infrastructure. They wanted to build processing and distribution centers for local produce, aggregation and distribution centers. That same trip, I took my first Uber and stayed in an Airbnb for the first time. I'm reading these applications where they want to build infrastructure, and I'm having this moment where a car I don't own pulls up in front of me, I get in it, I use it, I get what I need out of it, and the person that owns it is making money on their asset.
Andy Blechman: Taking your first Uber was one of the coolest experiences of tech. I remember the first time sitting in New York in my apartment in 2013, just watching the car show up. I didn't have to hail a taxi. I'm like, I'm going to get in this car and it's going to drive me somewhere. This is amazing.
Ashley Colpaart: Especially after we've been told our whole lives not to get in a car with strangers.
Andy Blechman: It's wild. And not having to pull out a payment method at the end either.
Ashley Colpaart: That was probably the best part. For me, that experience was where I had my aha moment for The Food Corridor. I was evaluating these projects and realized that access to infrastructure is becoming more valuable than ownership in some ways. If I borrow your resource or use your resource, I get what I need out of it, but I don't have to take off all the risk. I started thinking about where we could apply this in food systems. How can we make the invisible visible? I started thinking about cold storage, trucking, all the areas in the food system. I landed on the shared kitchen.
I came back from that trip and asked Dawn if I could completely change my dissertation to focus on this idea of the sharing economy in the food system. I basically built a whole research program around linking underutilized commercial kitchen space in northern Colorado with food entrepreneurs that needed access. I built a form on a website that was a low-fi version of The Food Corridor where I was manually matching assets with entrepreneurs. I took intake forms and followed them for a certain amount of time and wrote case studies on each of them. I had a church kitchen, an underutilized bakery, a school district kitchen with a marshmallow company, a church kitchen, and a traditional commissary. I wrote up case studies on all of these matches, making the invisible visible to entrepreneurs.
Andy Blechman: When you were doing these early days of testing, were you going out and finding the church that had capacity? Or were they listing that they have capacity? How did you find those spaces? I think that'll be interesting for entrepreneurs thinking about moving from one phase to another. Maybe there's an intermediary that can help you find a space that's not a commercial kitchen because it might be cheaper.
Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, those kinds of spaces exist in an underground economy, right? If you own a restaurant kitchen or bakery, you might not use it all the time as your business grows. You have this underutilized capacity. I went and found it by just talking to people. I would ask people at the farmer's market where they produce. I would go to restaurants. I didn't really hit the ground running with a formal approach. I just went out to individual places trying to find where those spaces were.
Andy Blechman: That's actually a good nugget. If you're just starting out, the easiest approach would be to go to your local market. I actually did this in Colorado. We were at the farmer's market with my three young kids. My kids were basically stealing juice from a vendor, and I started talking to her about where she's producing. She said they produce out of a church kitchen in Hayden, Colorado, about forty miles south of Steamboat. I started asking every vendor there. Four days later, that same woman walks into the yoga class I was taking, which was hilarious in a small town.
Ashley Colpaart: Juice and yoga go together.
Andy Blechman: Exactly. But I think there's a nugget here. If I were starting my meal prep company today, I would likely search shared kitchens on The Kitchen Door, but there's also a step in between. If I'm a chef or plugged into a community, going to the farmer's market and asking around might be a way to meet a need that's more affordable as a starting point.
Ashley Colpaart: That's exactly right. Talking to people at the market and asking where they produce is probably one of the best ways to find it. The resource we built, The Kitchen Door, makes the invisible visible. The underground economy exists, and some listings are just underutilized kitchens. There are church kitchens, VFWs sometimes have commercial kitchens, community centers often have commercial kitchens, fairgrounds often have commercial kitchens. Depending on whether you're rural or urban, licensed commercial kitchens are everywhere. They're ubiquitous because we need them for ready-to-go meals.
Andy Blechman: You mentioned licensing. What kind of licensing should I look for?
Ashley Colpaart: Each community is a little different and each state is regulated differently. Many states are trying to make it easier for people to start food businesses. Some states have home food laws allowing for micro home kitchens to sell direct to consumer. Those only exist in a couple of states right now—California is one. Even at that level, the law is passed at the state level but implemented at the local level. The local health department has the authority to decide whether to implement those laws. Not every community in California has started regulating home kitchens. LA is supposed to start in a couple of months and a couple areas of San Diego allow it. You need to check your local health department to find out what you need.
You need a business license. You need an LLC or sole proprietorship to separate your business from your personal assets.
Andy Blechman: I think that's a really important point that our vendors should know. You really do need a separate LLC, and you probably want insurance too. You're dealing with food, and you just never know.
Ashley Colpaart: Yeah.
Andy Blechman: I'm curious about the licensing for a shared kitchen or church, or underground kitchens. What types of licensing or questions around regulation should a vendor ask when going into a shared kitchen to make sure everything's above board? Because it feels like that could be a gotcha—an inspector comes in and all of a sudden you're not in a kitchen that supports food production.
Ashley Colpaart: The kitchen owner, administrator, or operator needs to have a licensed commercial kitchen, meaning it's licensed by the local health department for food production. The business will have to have its own food liability insurance. The kitchen needs to have its own business operating insurance, facilities insurance to cover the actual facility, and their own liability insurance as well.
Andy Blechman: Those are really good questions to ask. If I was going to a kitchen, I would definitely ask for sure about the things I didn't know.
Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, if you're moving into a commercial kitchen, you're doing it because you're trying to legitimize and grow your business. You want to make sure you're following those steps so you don't end up putting yourself or your business at risk based on not having those things and facing damages later on.
Andy Blechman: I'm curious about the macro level. Where are shared kitchens today? Travis Kalanick has cloud kitchens, mainly for on-demand folks. What's the space like today and how does that fit into sustainable local food systems? Most of the vendors on our platform are local.
Ashley Colpaart: I did my dissertation nine years ago on shared kitchens. You mentioned I might be the expert on shared kitchens. That's probably true. I haven't found anyone else who wrote their dissertation on shared kitchens. I wrote the book. I've also written a toolkit on how to own and operate shared kitchens, and I'm actually updating it. We're reviewing the insurance chapter, so I'm glad I'm doing that.
The industry has been really interesting. A lot of it was informal economy and underground. Many communities have commissary kitchens where food trucks and caterers use facilities. Some have what are called incubator kitchens. The difference is they haven't only rented out space. They also have ecosystem services or programming attached to the kitchen. You're not only renting space but also getting business development expertise, introductions to advisors in the community, discounts on insurance, those types of things. There are wraparound services that support businesses coming through.
From an economic development lens, the incubation food model has become very popular because starting a food business is one of the more accessible types of businesses. People who immigrate from other countries may not have language barriers, but they know how to cook something unique and special. They're tangible businesses for folks like that. Everyone, or a lot of people, have a family member that makes the best salsa or tamales. A lot of people are encouraged to make it a business. That's probably the genesis story for a lot of people listening right now.
From an economic development standpoint, a lot of EDAs, community development organizations, and folks focused on economic development and job creation have thought about food as a vehicle for creating economic development. So incubator kitchens are popping up more and more in cities and rural areas all over the US.
Andy Blechman: If I were starting today, an incubator could be quite powerful. From the idea of business development support but also from procurement and having access to ingredients at prices that make sense. We hosted a small roundtable in Nashville maybe four months ago. I kid you not, we had a ten-minute conversation about chicken at Costco because during the pandemic there was a massive increase in chicken prices and you could really only get affordable chicken at Costco. I think what's super interesting is managing quality and cost of ingredients is really challenging. The advantages of getting access to suppliers delivering to an incubator feel really strong.
Ashley Colpaart: Most major cities have at least 20 different listings of types of kitchens on The Kitchen Door, though not all are incubators. San Francisco has La Cocina, which is a really famous incubator and a sponsor of our event. They're speaking at our shared kitchen summit this November. Rhode Island has Hope, which is a really amazing incubator. Maine is another one that's doing great work. New York City has Hot Bread Kitchen, focused on bakers, probably one of the most forward-thinking, specialized kitchens for bakers.
Andy Blechman: I worked with them a little bit in business school through the SBDC in Harlem.
Ashley Colpaart: Their branding is beautiful. La Cocina also does a really good job of telling the stories of their makers. They focus on immigrant women populations and tell beautiful stories. They actually had a cookbook they put out. Very cool organization.
Andy Blechman: Not every community has an incubator, but by default, most shared kitchens become somewhat of an incubator because when you have a food business person showing up at the door saying they have this product and want to start a business, the kitchen looks at them and asks about a business plan, hours needed, production amounts, and where they're selling. All of a sudden the kitchen realizes they need to ask about business licenses, liability insurance, and talking to the health department. It's like all of a sudden there's a reckoning where you realize if you want to start a business, you actually have to start a business, not just cook salsa.
By default, many kitchens become incubators if they want this person to use their service. They have to help them get over that hump and become what we call shared kitchen ready. We've built onboarding flows and tools in our software to help that relationship happen faster. The faster the food business can start running from the kitchen, the faster the kitchen starts getting revenue, and the faster that person can start their business.
Andy Blechman: That makes sense. I'm curious about optimizing production operationally. Many of our vendors only produce two to four days a week at most, so they don't need their own kitchen space. What are some things to think about from a cost perspective when looking for a shared kitchen?
Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, just like with anything, you get what you pay for. One place that's going to look cheap might not be the most pleasant place to work, or you might not have the most pleasant operator. In a shared space, you want the vibe to be good. If it seems too good to be true, it might be. I would say measuring for culture might be high on your list, even if you're not budgeting for it explicitly. You want to know what your budget is going in.
Often these kitchens charge an application fee for their time to get you onboarded. Then they ask for a deposit. Think of it like a gym membership. They have risk in this business with equipment that requires maintenance, pest control, energy, soap, towels, and all the things that come along with the shared kitchen. The kitchen is taking on that risk, and you're not having to pay for yourself. You want to make sure you're thinking about all the things you're offloading to the kitchen that you won't have to pay for.
There are two different models. Many have moved to a prepay model where you're prepaying for a set amount of hours and scheduling time on the calendar as that month goes. You want to have an idea of how many hours per month you're going to use so you can pick the right package. The kitchen administrator often gives discounts on committing to a certain number of hours. Some also offer a more flexible pay-as-you-go model where you book here and there and pay the day you use the kitchen. For seasonal workers, this might work better.
Knowing what your costs and your COGS are and your production is really important. A lot of the time you're using the kitchen to start dialing those things in. Having a really flexible plan in the beginning so you can learn how you're going to scale, how you're going to work in the kitchen, and how much time you're going to need is important. When you're moving from a home kitchen to a larger space, you can start filling more demand and scaling up recipes, but you have to give it time to adjust.
One of the nice things about a shared kitchen is that you can get storage at the facility. A lot of people moving from a home kitchen are excited about storage because they finally get all their stuff out of their home and into a space. For meal kits, you probably use a lot of to-go materials that take up space. Some kitchens also allow a pickup location so you can make your business look more formal.
Andy Blechman: Most of our folks are prepping meals and putting them in containers. They're probably keeping raw ingredients and making food the same day.
Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, there's a lot to think about. Price-wise on our site, The Kitchen Door, we try to make sure listings have all that information so the food business isn't spending a lot of time calling and getting information. That information is front and center. Similarly, for the kitchen administrator, they get so many leads that we've created extensive intake forms that check off all the information so the match is made right. If you're not a good fit, you're not a good fit, but I'm able to filter out who would be a good fit based on these questions.
Andy Blechman: This might be a newbie question, but do shared kitchens typically have all the equipment you need? Or do you have to buy equipment and store it there? Do you come in with a big box of pans and different things you might need?
Ashley Colpaart: That's a really great question. Every shared kitchen is different. Most are going to have common things you would need—a hood, stoves, ovens, sometimes a fryer. Though a lot of shared kitchens avoid fryers because they require grease traps, which are high maintenance and dirty. There's also a higher risk of food contamination and cross-contamination with gluten, so many have moved away from having fryers specifically.
But they'll have the main equipment that you're paying for—commercially-graded equipment that allows you to scale up. Some will have specialty equipment like blast chillers and tilt skillets that help people scale recipes significantly. Even more, some kitchens have co-manufacturing style operations with bottling lines, canning lines, and packing lines to really scale up food businesses. This is actually a trend we've seen a lot in the last couple of years—kitchens are moving into co-manufacturing as a service, providing labor as an added service to food businesses.
Andy Blechman: That's really cool. We had Eric Stein from Mama Meals, which is a postpartum meal delivery business. They're all shipping, but one interesting takeaway for local vendors is that you could develop a bunch of recipes, find shared kitchens around the country, and have people produce your recipes on your behalf. That's a way to extend beyond the local maximum of how much you can scale. You could have wider distribution without shipping from your main kitchen. You might go to a kitchen in another region and have them produce and see if you can scale outside but keep it local, maybe even franchise the operations.
Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, that's a really cool idea for scaling that type of business—opening up in a different city.
Ashley Colpaart: I did have one more comment on equipment though, because you mentioned whether you can bring your own. If you have really specified equipment like chocolate companies with rendering machines or barbecue pits, sometimes people have specialty pieces of equipment. Oftentimes the kitchen admin will let you store that at the kitchen, but you're just paying for the space rental for that equipment being there.
Andy Blechman: Yeah, I've heard specifically around chocolate manufacturers needing really specific equipment. A friend of mine started a coffee company called Wandering Bear and when he was in a shared kitchen, they needed all this crazy equipment. Same with bread—big mixers or specific sizes.
Ashley Colpaart: That's actually an interesting thing. The shared kitchen is often a mirror of the local food economy. In the Northwest or agricultural areas, you'll see more value-added products producing—season extension, canning and bottling lines. In Florida and on the coast, kitchens are more geared towards catering and food trucks because there's so much season-long work. Some kitchens are specific to a type of food business. Bakery equipment is so different than what you'd need in a typical commissary kitchen. You'll see shared kitchens focused on bakeries with big proofers, dough sheeters, everything geared toward that type of production.
Andy Blechman: Maybe we need some meal prep shared kitchens.
Ashley Colpaart: That'd be cool.
Andy Blechman: I can imagine all the needs of packing and prepping and there's real table needs especially once you start to scale up.
Ashley Colpaart: That's actually interesting you say that because in our kitchens, people can set up calendars for different spaces and different spaces cost different things. If you're in the bake shop, it might be forty dollars an hour because you're accessing the dough sheeter and the proofer and high-end equipment. But if you're just packing, maybe there's a packing room at fifteen or twenty dollars an hour. People can rent the type of infrastructure they need, and that price is scaled based on the type of access they're getting. It's something to talk about with the shared kitchen owner about what they need during specific types of production.
Andy Blechman: I know it's flown by and we're almost out of time. I do want to allow for questions. But I want to turn the table. We have a number of vendors who have scaled up and gotten to the point where they have their own kitchen space. On the flip side, I'm curious how can I take a space that I now either lease, or maybe I own the building, and how can I create a new income stream? Most of our vendors aren't seven days a week. They certainly aren't overnight. I imagine there are opportunities for revenue that people aren't thinking about.
Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, the passive revenue is great, but it's also how so many shared kitchens have emerged. Oftentimes the story is someone started a catering company twenty years ago, bought a facility, got tired of catering, and decided to rent out the space and became a shared kitchen.
The things you want to think about: talk to your health department and make sure you're legally licensed to bring in another tenant. You can do it as a sub-tenant sort of relationship. Post your kitchen space on ThekitchendDoor.com and we'll send you leads. You don't want to spend your time scheduling, booking, doing compliance management, and billing because you're running your own business. Use The Food Corridor software to do all of that for you. You get your passive revenue and everything's taken care of.
You want to find the right renters. Do an intake application form and make sure the person's a good culture fit. Let them know the rules of the kitchen. We have operations manuals on our website and different types of materials on our blog for folks getting into this. The biggest thing is knowing what time is available—what days of the week and times. How they're going to access the building. Make sure they have liability insurance and you have building insurance to cover that in case something goes wrong. You want to be very specific and intentional about formalizing it as much as you can.
Andy Blechman: What do you see for revenue opportunity? We didn't talk about this, but what are typical pricing ranges—either monthly packages or hourly rates?
Ashley Colpaart: National rates run between twenty-five dollars an hour and forty dollars an hour, depending on all the things—equipment, location density, whether it's urban or rural. That's a pretty wide range. Monthly plans can range depending on how much time you're committing to, from four hundred dollars a month up to two thousand dollars a month, depending on the amount of time you need in the kitchen.
Andy Blechman: Those are big ranges, but I think I would personally only sell a monthly package if I was starting to share a kitchen. It's just easier. On the flip side, it might be harder for the vendor at first, but it could force you to make a hard decision and think through what you need. That could be advantageous.
Andy Blechman: We have Hannah, who is one of our customers in a shared kitchen space and has been kind enough to refer people to us. She's growing and her question is when do you decide to leave a shared kitchen and find your own space? And I'll add—commercial space can be hard to find. How do you find it? Maybe you can walk through the considerations. We talked about turning your own space into a shared kitchen, but what are the mechanics of finding your own commercial space?
Ashley Colpaart: It's a really interesting question because by default, the goal of a shared kitchen operator is to have somebody scale out of their space. It's not a normal business model where that's the case. It's my goal to get this person to leave. A friction point comes when a company in a shared kitchen is doing really well and needs more and more time, storage, and they're becoming what we call an anchor tenant—the primary user. That's probably when you need to start thinking about finding your own space. Unless you have a different relationship with the operator and they prefer you stay and maybe you even take over the whole space. That would be operationally an option.
The other option would be finding a real estate broker to help you find spaces coming available—restaurants closing down are sadly really good options for moving into because you don't have to go through the infrastructure budget of needing a hood and plumbing. You might be able to use your sales to finance something like that. I would definitely talk to a lender because that might help you secure financing if you need to finance your own building. Also look on listing sites, Craigslist still has tons of facilities, Reddit often has people post available spaces coming up, and real estate sites have commercial real estate listings. But circling back to the beginning, just talking to people and getting out in the community to find out what might be coming available at a commercial level would be a good strategy.
Andy Blechman: Do you have a sense of what lease prices are? I know we talked about shared kitchens, but if I'm ready to move, maybe I'm paying two thousand a month, what should my expectation be? Do you have a per-square-foot idea?
Ashley Colpaart: It's a little out of my domain, and the industry is so strange right now. Downtown prices are crazy, which is why restaurants are closing down. They can't afford the lease. This happened in Des Moines where one of my favorite restaurants closed because their lease was going up. They just shuttered two locations.
With your clients, you don't necessarily need to be in a downtown location. You can find a space in a more industrial park or industrial area that's going to be more reasonable for rent. I don't think I could come up with a range, but I'm guessing something like three thousand five hundred dollars would be a great price.
Andy Blechman: That might depend on the city. I'm probably biased to Atlanta. But there's like a pure spreadsheet exercise here, Hannah, that you have to do. What's the advantage of moving? What do you have to buy? What's the build-out look like? Is it already built out? What equipment do you really need? Think through every line item of what the cost is going to be. What's the advantage of going to a new space? Can you increase production? Do you have demand to increase production? What are the reasons for moving? It's like buying a house, except you can actually do a true ROI calculation.
Ashley Colpaart: And there's that short-term versus long-term question. If the benefit of moving into your own space means you can achieve the growth you're trying to achieve, it might be the right decision. If you can get financing based on the business you've built, I think that's great. That's how to scale. Congratulations on being at that point where you're asking this question.
Andy Blechman: We're at the hour, but we have time for one more thought. I want to think about community. We've been talking a lot about this and it's been exciting for us at Bottle. Our number one goal this year is to build community, mostly virtually through things like this, newsletters, and eventually a Facebook group. I'm curious if you're seeing community building in the shared kitchens. Is there an opportunity there?
Ashley Colpaart: Oh, you mean community at the shared kitchen level? I thought you might be asking about the network we facilitate. We have a community called the Network for Incubator and Commissary Kitchens, which is a community of shared kitchen owners and operators. We facilitate events, like the shared kitchen summit, and try to build community around that. But yes, in actual shared kitchens, some operators are very intentional about building community. They get people to work together on things like joint purchasing agreements where people go in together on jars or other items to bring down costs. With food trucks or caterers, they'll have lists of available caterers they can recommend for events in the city, promoting those food businesses in a lot of ways.
A lot of them do community building intentionally because you're working so closely. We see people doing pop-ups and partnering—different chefs will partner and highlight each other's products.
Andy Blechman: The partnership angle is really cool. If I were in a shared kitchen, I'd be thinking about who's the coolest vendor here and how can I do a partnership. We had a vendor who used to do these awesome partnerships in New York and her Instagram would just explode because of these wild partnerships. I wonder if there's more of an opportunity for people to financially tie themselves to someone else and cross-promote audiences. That seems like a key advantage.
Ashley Colpaart: I think highlighting somebody's product with your product and doing like a little collaboration—like "this salsa company in this kitchen, I'm going to use it in my chicken meal"—I think those types of collabs are exactly the special value of being in a shared kitchen. Leveraging that opportunity is a huge creative opportunity.
Andy Blechman: An anonymous question came in asking how to search online and use techniques or tips to find shared kitchen listings. You've mentioned it a few times, but I'll do the plug. You have a directory that I think is the foremost directory for as many shared kitchens as you could possibly imagine in the US at least, and Canada. It's called The Kitchen Door.
Ashley Colpaart: ThekitchendDoor.com.
Andy Blechman: It's an awesome site. It shows pictures. I'd describe it as the Yelp of shared kitchens. Highly recommend checking that out. If you end up renting out some of your own space, you can post there for free and get leads. It works for both kitchen owners renting out and businesses looking for kitchens.
Ashley Colpaart: I'm going to put a couple other resources in the chat. There's the shared kitchen toolkit, and a new one is coming out in a couple weeks. There's also "8 Questions to Answer to Get Shared Kitchen Ready" on our blog, which I think might be helpful for folks.
So The Food Corridor is essentially the back-office operations management platform for a shared kitchen. We're getting people out of the office and back in the kitchen. We handle the scheduling and booking of a multi-tenant situation with different areas of the kitchen that can be individually rented out, plus pieces of equipment that can be added. We manage all the hours and billing plans on behalf of the kitchen. We handle compliance with a document management system that manages business licenses, insurance, and food handler cards, sending notifications when those are set to expire. Billing is included in that. The kitchen administrator can just set it and forget it. It runs automatically. The food business doesn't have to worry about it. They can schedule time on the calendar and change their schedule without going through a person. It saves time and money and energy for both the food business and the commercial kitchen operator. Think of it as Mindbody for the food industry.
Andy Blechman: Very cool. I love that. Thank you so much, Ashley. This was so much fun and really informative. You've lived up to being the foremost expert in shared kitchens.
Ashley Colpaart: If anyone wants to read my dissertation, it's really fun to read.
Andy Blechman: Yeah. PhD dissertations are not exactly beach reading, but thank you so much. This was awesome. One last thing—Ashley hosts an incredible conference in New Orleans in the fall. There may be a partnership between us on that front as well. So if anyone's looking for an excuse to go to New Orleans and hang out with the Bottle team, we may be there. Thank you again. This was great.
Ashley Colpaart: Thanks everybody.
Andy Blechman: Bye.