When Incubator Kitchen Collective’s founder, Rachel DesRochers, created the membership-based community and commercial kitchen, she planned to confront a shared problem by forging a shared solution.
Incubator Kitchen Collective gives food-focused startups and small businesses a commercial-grade and health-code-certified facility to produce their goods.
The idea sprouted because DesRochers felt the need for the resource herself. She had a thriving vegan graham cracker brand called Grateful Grahams, but limited kitchen space kept her from ramping up production – she wasn’t the only one.
“We were doing so many farmers markets that we were surrounded by entrepreneurs who were in the same position, and so this idea of what if I could find a space and then open the doors and start inviting people in…that’s really how we got started,” said DesRochers.
Many people who launch a food entrepreneurship start as a cottage industry, said DesRochers. Kentucky allows people to produce food for sale in their home kitchen, but restrictions on equipment, food types and annual sales place a ceiling on growth. Home-based processors can sell up to $60,000 worth of products per year, and the use of commercial kitchen equipment within a residence is prohibited.
Incubator Kitchen Collective launched in 2013 and hosts about 40 food companies a month, said DesRochers.
In addition to providing a kitchen space, Incubator Kitchen Collective gives entrepreneurs access to coaching and networks that set them on a path to a sustainable business. “Making things is the easy part, selling things is the hard part,” said Matt Spaulding, director of operations at Incubator Kitchen Collective.
Initiatives like Good n’ Local, which connects local food producers with wholesale buyers, or the Kroger Food Artisan Grant, which awards food entrepreneurs with memberships at Incubator Kitchen Collective, are examples of how the incubator encourages its ecosystem of food entrepreneurs.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 23.2% of private-sector businesses that started in 2022 shuttered by 2023. DesRochers said that about 90% of Incubator Kitchen Collective’s members remain in business after their first year.
DesRochers said that while many of the kitchen’s members join with their venture representing a secondary income, they often capitalize on the opportunity to expand their business with the incubator. “Maybe they started it as a side hustle, but it’s grown really quickly because they’re in a space, they’re in a commercial setting, and they see the possibility of growth that you can’t see when you’re in your house,” she said.
Soul Juici
Fawn Hayes, founder of Soul Juici, won a Kroger Food Artisan Grant in last year’s round of disbursements and hopes that access to the facility will help transform Soul Juici into her full-time job.
Soul Juici is a juice brand that uses fresh and organic produce in its beverages. Hayes said she’s been a cook since she was a child, but the idea of being a juicer came to her in the thick of the COVID pandemic. She said her eating habits worsened during the lockdown because she was working remotely and spending more time at home, and with the constant fear of illness being spread, she wanted to make healthier choices.
She had a juicing machine gifted to her years prior that she had never taken out of its package, so she gave it a try.
Hayes began devising and writing down juice recipes, and she was astounded by how they were turning out. “The taste was so good, I decided to keep doing it,” she said.
The months wore on, and she was still making juices, so she shared them with her family and friends. The drinks were met with a praising reception. One of her friends said she should sell them. So she did.
Hayes created social media accounts to build a brand and a customer base. She also started taking juice orders through social media and meeting up with people to sell them. That grew into outings at farmers’ markets and pop-up shops, catering orders, and eventually, the formation of an online store.
As Soul Juici grew, Hayes took on the challenge of making the business her full-time job. She resigned from her day job as a customer service representative and went all in. “I started to get bored with my job, my nine to five, and I started to think more about Soul Juici more than ever,” she said.
At this point, she was relying on two of her friends’ commercial kitchens to make her juices.
One day, she was meeting at Wyoming Community Coffee with someone who had been mentoring her as she worked to grow her venture. Her mentor encouraged her to speak with the shop’s owners to strike up a retail partnership. Despite her nerves, she approached the manager, set up a meeting with the owners and prepared a presentation touting the benefits of her products.
“I began to make juices for this coffee shop weekly and deliver them to their coffee shop, and they would sell out every week,” said Hayes.
But along came a bump in the road. Food and Drug Administration regulations require fresh juices to be treated with a sterilization method – like pasteurization – to be sold through a retail outlet, which Hayes wasn’t doing. Since the partnership she had with Wyoming Community Coffee was on a wholesale basis rather than directly from producer to buyer, the partnership came to a halt.
“I don’t have the resources or the money to be able to support that. So toward the end of the summer of 2023 I was discouraged and completely shut down. I went back to a nine to five,” said Hayes.
After a couple month hiatus from Soul Juici, Hayes applied and won the grant to have her membership to Incubator Kitchen Collective paid for. The news motivated her to crank her business into overdrive.
Haye’s access to the kitchen started in February this year. She still won’t be pasteurizing her juice for the time being, but she said she is eager to take advantage of the opportunity to increase production in the facility.
“It ignited my fire again, you know, to not give up on my business,” said Hayes.
She plans to focus on catering, online and farmers markets channels while she stabilizes and grows her business at the incubator.
Hot Llamas Hot Sauce
Derrick Kisabeth is another Kroger Food Artisan Grant recipient who gained access to the facility this month. His beginnings as a hot sauce maker follow a familiar pattern. He was never fond of hot sauce, explaining that he thinks many are excessively hot at the expense of flavor.
But he loves to cook and experiment with imaginative flavors. Knowing this about him, a friend challenged Kisabeth to use his good flavor judgment to make hot sauces.
He lived in Florida when he started casually making hot sauce, and when he moved to Northern Kentucky, his newfound girlfriend inspired him to continue making his sauces.
“When I finally moved up here before COVID really hit, I kind of had put it on the backburner just because I had moved to a new place. I wasn’t really doing it much anymore. And then I started dating my current girlfriend, and I was like, ‘you know, I’m gonna make some hot sauces because she says she can never really find one that she likes,’” said Kisabeth.
She was impressed with his culinary creations and urged him to sell them. He spent a period of time making his hot sauces at Incubator Kitchen Collective in 2022 but put his side hustle on pause for some time for personal reasons, he said. He picked it back up after a six-month pause, making use of a friend’s commercial kitchen to house his production. When he learned of the grant at Incubator Kitchen Collective, he applied.
He hopes to double his sales over last year in the new space, he said.
“The first year, I sold roughly, I think, 2,000 bottles of hot sauce. Last year, I came closer to 5,000, and my hope is that I would like to do more than double again this year. So I’d like to get into like the 10,000 realm,” said Kisabeth.
He said he plans to support this growth by appearing at as many pop-up markets as possible and getting his sauces onto shelves at retail stores. While selling at pop-up markets is an effective way to build a base of loyal customers, he said the seasonal nature of that vending setting limits what he can do as a one-man team.
“One of the things I love about doing the markets myself is that I recognize people,” said Kisabeth. “It’s always really nice to see people come up like, oh, we went through your bottle in like a week.”
Kisabeth works a full-time job at Constant Contact designing training programs, he said. While he loves making his sauces, he’s amenable to expanding it into a full-time career. What it boils down to, he said, is the financial feasibility and creative opportunities of the move.
“That would be phenomenal to have a business that’s sustaining me as its own, but to keep me I think intellectually interested, I have to keep growing, whether it be coming up with new sauces, coming up with new ideas or anything like that,” said Kisabeth.
His love of making hot sauce derives from the process of concocting and refining the flavors. With the resources and coaching of Incubator Kitchen Collective, he hopes to formulate a business plan that would eventually allow him to allocate the tedious work of bottling and selling the sauces so he can focus on the part that drives him: making it.
