CommonWealth Kitchen Inc.

CWK's goal is to create a model for vertically-integrated small business incubator/accelerator that seamlessly a works with aspiring entrepreneurs from inception to start-up and proof of concept, and on through graduation into their own facilities, with an emphasis on minority and women-owned businesses. We work in partnership with our members to create a widely recognized family of brands that share a deep mission to community economic development, social justice, asset building and wealth creation. We provide integrated technical support and partner with a range of community partners to build strong businesses and use our food manufacturing social enterprise to help companies efficiently scale, aggregate multiple part-time jobs into full-time work, and provide small-batch processing services to strengthen our regional food economy such that no one is left hungry and everyone has access to fresh, healthy food. Over time, we want to build on the success of each of our member businesses by creating an investment fund, wherein incubator companies invest alongside community members, accredited investors, and others, to create a capital resource and mentoring network for the next generation of companies. We want to graduate 4-6 businesses each year into their own facilities, and create a robust pipeline of restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and wholesale businesses to anchor neighborhoods across Boston and the region, creating strong, resilient communities, with active, safe streets, and plentiful local jobs. We want our graduating businesses to leave with the tools, skills, connections, and resources needed to thrive, creating a multiplier effect in creating jobs and investing in the local community. We want to create 100's of new jobs, with low barriers to entry, and meaningful career ladders, each year, so that local residents have access and opportunity to permanent, sustainable employment. We want to use the skills, knowledge, and equipment available in our kitchens to improve access to fresh, healthy food for low-income families by supporting the work of partners like Fresh Truck and their mobile grocery operation. And finally, we want to build our commissary operation to run multiple shifts, 7 days/week, providing small-batch contract manufacturing services to local farmers to maximize local produce consumed throughout the year.

Through continuous assessment and evaluation, we are working to build a robust, integrated model of business incubation and technical support services to build strong, profitable local food companies. We are constantly looking for ways to leverage our skills and infrastructure and forge strategic partnerships that can maximize impacts. For example, we identified that many of the entrepreneurs that most closely meet our mission goals of supporting women, immigrants, and people of color, were also the businesses that most struggled to get started and build a strong following. We had offered generalized classes to help with understanding business finance, cash flow, employment tax, social media, and the like, but found that this approach was too often a mismatch for the individual businesses. To address this, we launched a new 9-week food business 101 class this year to offer a very focused training for new companies to give them the foundation they need to start out with strong business fundamentals. We now also offer coaching and mentoring so that we can provide our members with more customized support. For example, we were able to recruit a senior food scientist from Welch's as a volunteer, and he has worked direclty with 3 of our companies on recipe development. We recruited the owner of a successful packaged food company and the publisher of an online food magazine each to provide office hours so that members can meet to get 1-on-1 advice on marketing and branding issues. More recently, we have turned some of our focus on building our own organizational brand and reputation as a way to drive interest for our members and their services. We now have a formal partnership with Amazon through their Amazon Fresh program, and are in active discussions with retailers like Whole Foods, Target, and Eataly on formal collaborations with CWK and our member companies.

As we continue to build our organization to meet our goals, we are always looking to strategically add capacity to provide a breadth of knowledge, experience, and connections. Our management staff have extensive experience in non-profit management, finance, communications, restaurant management and operations, food trucks, and catering. Our Board leadership includes professionals with deep experience in economic development, food law and policy, non-profit management, human resources, wealth management, private philanthropy, and food business operations. Over the next 12 months, we hope to add an Advisory Board to help expand our connections and reach. We are focused on recruiting professionals with business operations experience, equity and impact investing backgrounds, marketing and branding expertise, political connections and relationships, food and small business policy experience, and legal and finance backgrounds. These efforts are all aimed at strategically positioning our work at the nexus of food innovation and access, and economic development. Our aspiration is to create a uniquely integrated food business and innovation model with real options for scaling and replication regionally and nationally.

We have been experiencing exponential organizational growth over the past 2+ years, more than doubling the businesses working, adding multiple new programs such as our food business 101 class, and launching our new food manufacturing social enterprise. With each improvement and refinement of program and focus, we have seen strong indications of progress and impact, including the tripling of our annual earned income to over $700,000 in 2016, and interest from major new corporate partners, including Amazon, Target, Whole Foods and Eataly. We have helped open a new cafe space inside a community health center, bringing healthy food options to one of the lowest-income neighborhoods of Boston. We have processed well over 60,000 lbs. of mostly surplus produce into shelf stable products like tomato sauce, pickles, and jam for local farms, restaurants and wholesalers-- or more than 30 tons of raw product. We have invested in a range of mid-size automation equipment to help build in more efficiency in our operations and improve bottom line margins for our members and contract manufacturing customers. Through all of this, we have continuously worked to streamline our operations, leverage our kitchen infrastructure, and maximize impacts through strategic partnerships. At each step, we have attempted to learn and adjust as we continue to build our operation. For example, some early contracts we took on that involved significant amounts of hand processing proved to be a mismatch. Because we charge by the hour, and pay staff hourly rates that are higher than minimum wage, we found that we could not be competitive when completing detailed work, like hand peeling shallots and carrots. Where we can be competitive, and take on projects that work for the customer and fully cover our costs are projects where we can use some mechanical equipment to complete portions of the work and process in bulk quantities, such as producing 100 gallons of marinara or BBQ sauce at a time. These lessons inform how we move forward in marketing our services and recruiting partners and members. In less than 1 year of operating our contract services, we already have more than 25 regular contracts with 2-3 new inquiries/week with limited marketing. This organic demand for our services is a sure confirmation of the market demand for this type of small-batch, local source food manufacturing.