Becoming a Shared Kitchen Expert With The Kitchen Door

Episode Transcript

[00:00:08] Andy Blechman: Cool. Good morning, Ashley.

[00:00:10] Ashley Colpaart: It's noon.

[00:00:13] Andy Blechman: It's noon? I thought you were two hours behind us.

[00:00:15] Ashley Colpaart: I'm in central.

[00:00:16] Andy Blechman: Oh, my head. You were mountain.

[00:00:19] Ashley Colpaart: I was mountain. I'm in central now. The life of a, entrepreneur that can work remotely.

[00:00:27] Andy Blechman: well, So I'll kick it off with a little bit of an intro. I, we got introduced from through Camilla from Nimbus, who works with one of our chefs on our platform. And you are what I would call like a shared kitchen, probably the, maybe the world's most foremost expert in shared kitchens, but you seem 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 like before. Shared kitchens were really a thing. And so I remember begging and pleading with restaurant owners. And eventually I found a small shop like this really cool shop on the West side of Atlanta that had a test kitchen and that they weren't using.

And so I negotiated with them to use the kitchen when they weren't using it. Yeah. The world has really evolved in the last, I'd say, 10 to 12 years and shared kitchens are beyond just a thing. And so really excited to have you on hear about your background, talk about shared kitchens, talk about what you've done with The Food Corridor, some of the tools you've built for finding shared kitchens.

And really the goal today is just to be super helpful for our audience. And for this to be a resource for meal prep owners who are thinking about I've tested this I've. Made some meals in my kitchen. Now I want to expand or the person is in a shared kitchen and is thinking about moving to a new shared kitchen or the person who's saying, maybe it's time for me to have my own space and even become potentially become a shared kitchen.

So lots of use cases. But maybe since this is the coffee chat it is one o'clock for me on the East coast and it's noon for you. So I don't know if you've had your coffee, but there you go.

[00:02:12] Ashley Colpaart: I'm plugging Mo News

[00:02:13] Andy Blechman: are you a news anchor?

[00:02:15] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, no, Mo News he, I started following him actually during COVID because it was really hard to find like really quality news.

And he had a he used to be a CBS anchor and he started this thing on Instagram where he would just post like headlines and it was the best way to get like information during COVID. And then after that, he just launched, people kept following him and following him. He's very, it's very unbiased. He just here's the headlines.

I'm a premium member now. So he does chats like this with members and he's just one of the best ways to get news. So anyway,

[00:02:48] Andy Blechman: side

[00:02:48] Ashley Colpaart: conversation,

[00:02:49] Andy Blechman: does he have a sub stack or is it, he

[00:02:51] Ashley Colpaart: doesn't, he just does everything right now through Instagram.

[00:02:54] Andy Blechman: Super cool. And then is, how do you pay for the membership? Is it Patreon or is it something else?

[00:02:58] Ashley Colpaart: I think it was like a native site that he had. I feel, I can't remember how I paid for it actually.

[00:03:04] Andy Blechman: So a lot of our software is like membership based. So we do a lot of subscriptions and so we've gone pretty deep on, on the membership side of things. It's a

[00:03:13] Ashley Colpaart: good model.

Ours is also a membership model. So there's some subscriptions.

[00:03:17] Andy Blechman: What what are you drinking? If I don't,

[00:03:20] Ashley Colpaart: This is a coffee.

[00:03:22] Andy Blechman: Okay. Any, are you particular about your coffee or are we talking?

[00:03:25] Ashley Colpaart: I am. I do one cup of coffee every morning and I use some organic cream. I like a little milky.

[00:03:32] Andy Blechman: There you go.

And is there, are there any specific beans? Are we like a Folger's house or

[00:03:38] Ashley Colpaart: no, not a Folger's house. So I actually have tried this new company. Lately, gosh, I'm not going to remember the name of it. They deliver it like not for you.

[00:03:47] Andy Blechman: Yeah.

[00:03:48] Ashley Colpaart: Have you tried their coffee?

[00:03:51] Andy Blechman: I have them in my fridge.

[00:03:53] Ashley Colpaart: Oh my gosh. It's. Such good coffee.

[00:03:56] Andy Blechman: Yeah. It's really good. And it's cool. Cause it's it's different different vendors anyway, enough about coffee. I drink this thing called mud/wtr, or I drink all sorts of like alternative coffees. I quit coffee. Ironically, this is the Bottle coffee chat, but I quit coffee three or four years ago.

Yeah. And

[00:04:14] Ashley Colpaart: it's becoming a thing. It's like quitting coffee and quitting alcohol are just like, How people are moving these days,

[00:04:21] Andy Blechman: both at the same time, and it was great

[00:04:23] Ashley Colpaart: for you.

[00:04:24] Andy Blechman: Yeah. With all that said it'd be really awesome just to hear a little bit about your background and really, like, how did you develop this passion for what is like a pretty niche thing and shared kitchens?

[00:04:36] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah first of all, Andy, thanks for having me. It was really nice that Camilla introduced us and both being kind of software and community builders. We obviously, every time we get on these calls, we have so much to talk about. So I appreciate you inviting me on to chat about my story. Yeah, I came from academia originally, and I was really interested in food my whole life.

So my mom Was a food entrepreneur growing up. She started a hot sauce company in Austin, Texas. Before there was like a thousand skews of hot sauce on, on the shelves. So she's always like really ahead of the trend. Right now she has a cottage foods business where she does infused honeys. And I was just at like fancy food show and I couldn't tell you how many like infused style honeys.

So she's always just like right ahead of the curve on trends. But yeah, she used to make her hot sauce in our home kitchen. And I remember. It was habanero sauce and we used to have to wear like swim goggles because the peppers were so spicy. And so you had to wear your swim goggles around the house when she was making it, but she made him in our home kitchen and she would sanitize the bottles in the dishwasher.

And then we get up in the really early in the mornings and sell at the farmers market. So I kind of had that in my DNA. And then my dad was actually a hardware engineer in Silicon Valley. So he immigrated here in the 70s, early 80s from the Netherlands and was an engineer and landed right in the middle of Silicon Valley, part of uh, some of the 1st startups that were, building the microprocessor chips for the home computer.

Food technology is in my DNA in a very intimate way. So it's ironic at this point that I own a food tech company. But yeah, my journey was really, like most young kids, I go to college. I was experimenting with vegetarianism and community gardens and cooperatives and, just really alternative styles to living.

And a lot of them centered around food. We started like a food potluck club in college and we'd talk about. food related topics. So I just got really interested in food. I studied food and nutrition in my undergrad and became a registered dietitian. And then I worked at Meals on Wheels.

Actually, I was working in community dietetics. So my first job as a, career dietitian was as a nutrition service coordinator. And meals on wheels, and I was helping to develop meals for school age kids. So they did have the meals for the elderly population, but sorry, my

[00:07:01] Andy Blechman: camera

[00:07:03] Ashley Colpaart: keeps breaking down on me.

But yeah, so I was working with under underserved populations. And I was struck by how people that had access or that didn't have access to healthy food. And I was like, why is that? And then I started studying more about agriculture policy and why we have certain policies that subsidize, us to produce, corn sugars and how they show up in all these manufactured foods and then how low income populations can access those foods.

Because they're shelf stable but then they have higher rates of obesity and diabetes. And I'm just this is also interesting to me. So I ended up going in to Tufts University out in Boston and studying food policy to really understand how the pol at a policy level can impact at a community level.

So I studied sustainable food systems in the environment and learn more about agriculture policy and was just really struck. And at that time I really became fascinated with local and regional food systems. If and when we have big impacts on the, on our, local food system, which we actually saw during COVID what happens to populations?

How are we going to feed ourselves? And I became very interested in that. And so I started looking at food systems. And I ended up at Colorado State. In the under my advisor. So I went on to do a PhD after my master's at Tufts and I studied under Dawn Thilmany McFadden. She's in the ag econ department there.

And I picked working under Dawn because she was really looking at local food through an economic lens. Meaning that it was what's viable and what's not. So a lot of nonprofit organizations that are doing really meaningful work are dependent largely on large grants and had having worked for nonprofit organizations, when the money runs out the programs run out.

And so it's just really not sustainable. And you're constantly chasing the next thing Funds and changing your programs to fit those grant funds. And it's, serving the community. Yes. But it's always at the expense of being able to access these funds, which may or may not be there, depending on the administration.

That's there. And just, the sustainability of that. The sustainable food programming to me was just difficult to wrap my head around. And so Dawn was really looking at local and regionalized food systems from the sustainable economic lens. And so I went to work under her so that brings me to like, why Food Corridor?

[00:09:29] Andy Blechman: Because my understanding is that. Share kitchens was your focus during your PhD and then Food Corridor happened or was it the other way around?

[00:09:36] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, so I, I gave the background on this food system stuff, because I think it tells you about my journey, which kind of leads to the aha moment, which happened during my program, which is I got invited out to USDA to be on a panel for what are called community food systems grants.

There are 300 to 400, 000 dollar grants that the USDA gives to communities to help localize and regionalized food systems. And so my job as a. On being on the panel was to evaluate these projects, score them, and then advocate them on a panel to see which projects we get funding. And I read all of these applications and I just noticed.

So many of the projects wanted to build infrastructure. They wanted to build processing and distribution centers for local produce. They wanted to build aggregation distribution centers for local produce. And I started That same trip, I took Uber, I took my first Uber for the first time. And I also stayed in an Airbnb on that.

And so I'm like reading these things where they want to build infrastructure. And I'm having this moment where, you know, a car that 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 value, making money on their asset.

[00:10:52] Andy Blechman: Like taking your first Uber. Is was one of the coolest experiences of iPhone tech. I remember the first time sitting in New York in my apartment. This is, again, dating me, but 2013. Impressing. Yeah, I hear

[00:11:04] Ashley Colpaart: you.

[00:11:04] Andy Blechman: Watching the f---ing car show up. And I'm like, the car's there. And I didn't have to hail a taxi.

I'm like, I'm gonna get in this car and it's gonna drive me somewhere. This is amazing. Yeah,

[00:11:12] Ashley Colpaart: especially after we've been told our whole lives not to get in a car with strangers.

[00:11:15] Andy Blechman: It's wild.

[00:11:16] Ashley Colpaart: And then not having to pull out a payment method at the end either.

[00:11:20] Andy Blechman: That was like, probably the best part.

[00:11:22] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, this is again that to me, that experience was where I had my aha moment for Food Corridor, where it was like, all right, I'm evaluating these projects and what I'm realizing is access to infrastructure is becoming more right. Valuable than ownership in some ways, or can be. So 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.

And so I was thinking, where can we apply this in food systems? How can we make the invisible visible? And so I started thinking about, like, where in the food system cold storage, trucking, I'm thinking about all the areas. And I landed on the shared kitchen as a. A method that existed, so commissary kitchens did exist, not in the way that they do so much today, but there was sharing economy happening.

And so I came back from that trip and I asked Dawn, my advisor, if I can completely change my dissertation to focus on this idea of the sharing economy in the food system. And I basically built a whole research program around linking up. Underutilized commercial kitchen space in northern Colorado with food entrepreneurs that needed access and I built a form on a website that was just a low 5 version of Food Corridor where I was manually matching up.

The assets with the entrepreneurs taking an intake forms and then I followed them for a certain amount of time and wrote case studies on each of them. So I had a church kitchen. I had an underutilized bakery. I had a school kitchen, like a district school kitchen that I had a marshmallow company that was making food.

Marshmallows in the school kitchen. I think I had a church kitchen and then I had a traditional commissary as well. And so I wrote up case studies on all of matching these folks up, making the invisible visible to all of these entrepreneurs, when you

[00:13:16] Andy Blechman: were doing these early days, testing, were you going and finding the church that had the capacity or do you just not like.

Or were they listing like we have capacity or how are you finding that because I think that'll be interesting for some of our entrepreneurs who are thinking like your mom, like, how do I go from A to B, then maybe C, maybe there's an intermediary here. That's actually go find a space. That's not a commercial kitchen because it might be cheaper.

So I'm curious, like, how did you find those spaces and

[00:13:43] Ashley Colpaart: yeah. As you probably know that kind of exist in an underground economy, right? It's if you do own a restaurant kitchen or a bakery, you buy your, you were talking about, the phases of a business as you might end up needing a kitchen.

More of the time, so you invest in your own kitchen, but you're not using it all the time. So you have this underutilized capacity. So there's a lot of this underutilized slack in the system. I went and found it. I just started talking to people. I would ask people at the farmer's market. Where do you produce?

I would go, to restaurants and, I didn't really. Hit the ground running or literally going to, to individual places, trying to find where those places, I think

[00:14:22] Andy Blechman: that's actually like an awesome little nugget here is that if you're just starting out and you are like, I know what I did actually you just go to, I think the easiest one would be go to your local market.

I actually did this in Colorado. There was, this is a very funny story. Not funny, but interesting. We're at the farmer's market. I have three young kids. My kids are like basically stealing this juice from a vendor still like stealing the juice from the vendor. And I'm talking to her and she's just, she's starting up.

I'm like, where are you producing? She's Oh, we produce out of a church kitchen and hate in Hayden, Colorado, which about 40 miles South of Steamboat where we were. And. To me, it was so interesting. I started asking every vendor there and I think, that's just like my natural curiosity and knowing that we were gonna have this chat.

Turns out four days later, that same woman walks in. She teaches the yoga class I was taking, which was hilarious, and I guess small town.

[00:15:11] Ashley Colpaart: Oh, hey you again.

[00:15:12] Andy Blechman: I didn't put it together till after the fact. Actually,

[00:15:14] Ashley Colpaart: juice and yoga, I mean, those go together.

[00:15:16] Andy Blechman: Makes sense. But I do think there's like a nugget here of I think if I were starting my meal prep company today.

I would likely just search shared kitchens, maybe on the tool that you've built, but there's also maybe a step in between where if I'm a chef or I'm plugged into a community, or I might just go to the farmer's market and ask around, it might be a way to meet a need that might be more affordable as a starting point might work well.

[00:15:40] Ashley Colpaart: That's exactly right. Yeah. Talking to where, yeah, going to the market and asking people where they produce, I think is probably one of the best ways to find it. And yeah, the resource that we built, The Kitchen Door. My purpose in building that was to make the invisible visible and make, there is the underground economy and some of the listings on there are just underutilized kitchens.

They're church kitchens. The, the VFW sometimes have commercial kitchens community centers sometimes have commercial kitchens. Fairgrounds often have commercial kitchens. So there's all these, depending, you could be rural or urban, depending where you are, but there's, yeah, they're licensed commercial kitchens are everywhere.

They're ubiquitous because, we need them

[00:16:21] Andy Blechman: ready to go meals. I'm curious. You mentioned licensing. What is the licensing? What kind of licensing should I look for? What kind of do you have a sense? What kind of licensing? In general,

[00:16:30] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, so each community is a little different.

Each state is regulated a little different, but and many states are trying to move towards making it easier for people to start food. In some states, they have home food laws that are allowing for micro. Home kitchens to be able to sell direct to consumer. Those only exist in a couple of states right now.

So those only exist in California. And even at that level, the law is passed at the state level, but it's implemented at the local level. So the local health department has the authority to whether to implement those laws or not. So not every community in California has started regulating those home kitchens.

I think LA is supposed to start doing it in a couple of months. And there's a couple. Areas of San Diego that allow it. So you need to check your local license. Check the local health department to find out what you need. As far as a license. You need a business license. You need an LLC or a sole proprietorship just, for your own, own business, but obviously to separate out your business from your personal assets.

It's a safe, protect yourself.

[00:17:31] Andy Blechman: I think that's actually a really important point. That our vendors should all know is that like you actually do need like it's very important and this is something I learned you need to have that separate LLC and you probably want some insurance.

[00:17:44] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah,

[00:17:45] Andy Blechman: you're dealing with food.

You just never know. And so there's also the insurance piece. And then I'm curious on the licensing for a shared kitchen, what, or like a church or an underground what types of licensing or types of questions around regulation should maybe a vendor ask when they go into a shared kitchen just to make sure everything's above board?

Because it feels like that could also be a gotcha you got a, you got an inspector come in, and all of a sudden you're not, you're producing in a kitchen that doesn't support. The kind of making,

[00:18:13] Ashley Colpaart: right? So the kitchen owner or administrator or, operator, we call them different things depending on who they are.

But it needs to be a licensed commercial kitchen, meaning it's licensed by the local health department for production for food production. So that's basically what you're asking for there. And then the business will have to have its own, food liability insurance. And the kitchen needs to have its own either business operating insurance.

Oftentimes it needs to have a facilities insurance to cover the actual facility. And then their own liability insurance as well.

[00:18:47] Andy Blechman: Yeah. I think those are really good questions to ask too. Like I would be sure if I was going to a kitchen, the things I didn't know, I would ask for sure.

[00:18:54] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, if you're, I think if you're moving into a commercial kitchen you're doing it because you're trying to legitimize your business and grow your business.

And so you want to make sure that you're following those steps to, to that, that you don't end up putting yourself at risk or your business at risk based on not having those things and falling into, damages later on.

[00:19:14] Andy Blechman: And then I'm curious to look at a macro level. If you have a view on, like, where shared kitchens are today obviously, Travis Kalanick speaking of Uber, he has cloud kitchens.

I think that's mainly for the on demand folks. What is like the space today? And how does that fit into the health of sustainable local food systems. Most of the vendors on our platform are local.

[00:19:34] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah. Yeah. So I started my, I did my dissertation 9 years ago on shared kitchen.

You mentioned I might be that the expert on share kitchen. That's probably true. I don't know if anyone else I haven't found anyone else that wrote their dissertation on share kitchen. So I wrote the book. I've also written a a toolkit on how to own and operate shared kitchens.

I'm actually updating this. I wrote this or I wrote this with a partner, my friend, Dawn 5 years ago now, and we're updating it right now. When we're talking about the insurance and stuff, I literally was reviewing that chapter yesterday. I was like, glad I. Glad I read that. But yeah, so the industry has been really interesting.

Like I said, a lot of it was informal economy and underground. Many communities have commissary kitchens and oftentimes food trucks and caterers will use facilities like that. And then some have what are called incubator kitchens. And the difference is we use an umbrella term for all of these models of shared kitchens under that you'll have commissary kitchens.

And then you'll also have incubator kitchens. What that means is they haven't they have facilities that they rent out. They have a commercial kitchen. They rent out. But they also have ecosystem services or programming that's attached to that kitchen. And so you're not only renting the space. You're also getting a business development expertise.

You're being introduced to advisors in the community that can help service providers, discounts on insurance, those types of things. So there's kind of these wraparound services that support these businesses that are coming through. And you can imagine from an economic development lens that model, the incubation, food incubation model has become very popular.

Because starting a food business is one of those more accessible types of businesses. People that immigrate here from other countries that, maybe don't have language barriers. But they know how to cook and they know how to cook something really unique and special. They're really tangible type businesses for folks like that.

And everybody, I think every, or a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people have a family member that makes the best salsa ever, or the, you're all, I love my. My grandma's tamales or whatever it is. And so a lot of people are usually encouraged to go, you should, make this a business.

You're really good at this. I'm sure a lot of people that are listening right now, that's their Genesis stories. My friends say I'm such a good cook. And so I started doing these meal kits for my community because I'm, this is what I'm good at. And so that, from an economic development standpoint, a lot of EDAs and community development organizations and folks that are focused on economic development and job creation have thought about food as a vehicle for creating economic development.

And so incubator kitchens are starting to pop up even more and more in many of the cities and in rural areas all over the US

[00:22:23] Andy Blechman: it strikes me that if if I were starting today, like an incubator could be actually quite powerful. From this idea of like business development support, but also from procurement and having access maybe to ingredients and things that you might not have access to at a price that makes a lot of sense.

We hosted a small round table in Nashville. I want to say maybe four months ago, and. I kid you not. I'm sure everyone on this chat will appreciate this. We had a 10 minute conversation about chicken at Costco. Because I guess during the pandemic, especially there was this massive increase in the price of chicken and you could really only get like affordable chicken at Costco.

And so I think, one of the things that's super interesting to think about is like something that is important for anyone in the food business is quality of ingredient and then cost of ingredient. And, managing those 2 is really challenging. So the advantages of getting access to suppliers that are delivering to an incubator feel really strong, what would you say most major cities have incubators at this point and have those types of setups, or is it hit or miss or, how

[00:23:32] Ashley Colpaart: Hit or miss? On The Kitchen Door, we have listings in most of the cities have at least 20 different listings of types of kitchens. Not all of those are incubators.

San Francisco has a really famous incubator called La Cocina. They're actually a sponsor of our event and going to be speaking about incubation services at our share kitchen summit this November. Rhode Island has a really amazing incubator called Hope in Maine. That's, Rhode Island of all places, but they're they just opened their second location actually.

New York City has a really cool incubator called Hot Bread Kitchen, which is focused on bakers and probably one of the most forward think really specified for bakers. Do some amazing programming out of there as well.

[00:24:15] Andy Blechman: I worked with them a little bit in business school through the SBDC in Harlem.

Oh

[00:24:19] Ashley Colpaart: yeah. They're branding. Did you say they're branding?

[00:24:21] Andy Blechman: Brand. Yeah.

[00:24:22] Ashley Colpaart: Beautiful brand. Absolutely. Yeah. They really and La Cocina does a really good job of telling the stories of their makers. They focus on immigrant women populations and just tell beautiful stories. They actually had a cookbook that they put out.

Very cool organization. Yeah, not every community has a, an incubator. But I would say that most shared kitchens when they open, they don't realize it, but they end up becoming a little bit of an incubator because when you have a food, but most. Food business people or people that want to start a food business are creatives first, they're artists they're chefs, right?

Largely, they're not so much business people. And these people show up at the door at a shared kitchen and they're like, I have this my, my friends like my salsa. I want to start making salsa. And then the kitchen looks at them like, all right, fill out this form. And they ask them do you have a, do you have a business plan?

What hours do you need? How much are you producing? Where are you selling? And then all of a sudden, this kitchen. Glazed overlook happens. It's do you have a business license? Do you have liability insurance? Have you talked to the health department and it's like all of a sudden the reckoning comes where it's oh, if I want to start a business, I actually have to start a business, not just cook salsa or not just cook, cook my food.

And so by default, many of these kitchens, if. if they want this person to come use their service, their kitchen, they actually have to help them get over that hump and help them, figure out how to become shared kitchen ready is how we talk about it. So we've built onboarding flows and tools in our software to really help that relationship happen faster, because the faster the food business can start running from the kitchen, obviously the faster the kitchen starts getting the revenue.

Yeah. And the faster that person can start up their business. And so I would say that even if a kitchen isn't a formal incubator many of them are become default or like our incubators, just because the customer development that is required becomes a, an incubation service in a sense. Does that make sense?

[00:26:22] Andy Blechman: That does make sense. And I'm curious, you mentioned the process of, making sure you have all your ducks in a row from from the legal side. But if we take a step, like just thinking about operationally running a business that's going to use a shared kitchen maybe we can spend some time like going through that process and talking about Ways to be like maybe to get a little bit of an edge to learn some things that someone might not know.

So we talked a little bit about, okay, you can maybe go the underground route, but let's say I've got my business going. Maybe I'm even in an underground kitchen. And I'm starting to think about how do I scale up? So maybe I'm going to go to an incubator, but I don't like, what are some of the things that, as I think about like, how do I optimize my production?

Many of our vendors only produce two to four days a week at most, so they don't need. To own their own kitchen space, but what are some of the things from a cost perspective as I'm going out and looking for a shared kitchen? I might be thinking about because I can imagine it might actually look like 1 space is cheaper than the other.

And space is space. I'm curious your perspective on choosing a shared kitchen, shopping for a shared kitchen. Pricing it out, yeah, let's start there and then we can talk about actually the mechanics of optimizing time booking, because I think that might be something you see a lot as well.

[00:27:36] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah yeah, I would say, just like with anything, you get what you pay for. 1 place that's going to look like the hourly rate is really low and it may be, you might, yeah, it might not be the most pleasant place to work, or you may not have the most pleasant operator. Oftentimes person, there's personalities and, in a shared space, obviously you want the vibe to be good.

And like anything, if it seems too good to be true, it might be so I would say like, even uh, measuring for culture might be high on the list of intangibles. Maybe not that you're not budgeting for, but maybe at least having on your radar. You want to know what your budget is going in.

Oftentimes these kitchens are going to charge application and a fee of application fee for their time to get you over the hump. All the things that I was just saying. And then they're going to. Ask for a deposit so you can think of it as a gym membership. They have risk in this business.

They have equipment and then that equipment requires maintenance and requires all of these things including pest control and energy and soap and towels and all the things that come along with the share kitchen that the kitchen is now taking on as their risk and you're not having to pay for yourself.

And so you want to make sure that you're thinking about all the things that you're not going to be, offloading or all the things you're gonna be offloading to the kitchen that you won't have to be paying for. And so y yeah and then the way a lot of the kitchens work and there's two different schools of thought and there's two different models.

Many of them have moved to a prepay model where you're prepaying for a set you're prepaying for a set amount of hours in the kitchen, and then you're scheduling time on the calendar as that calendar month goes. So you wanna have an idea. Of how many hours per month you're going to use so that you can pick the right package that works for you.

And then you can obviously, scale into bigger packages as you go. But oftentimes the kitchen administrator will give you discounts on committing to a certain amount of hours in the kitchen. And like I said, you prepay. And that, that's a really common model. Some of them also offer a little bit more flexible model, which is pay as you go, where you book, maybe you're booking here and there, seasonal workers, things like that that, that will book as the week goes on, and then they pay the day of the day that they use the kitchen, and they're paying as they go.

So I think it's Knowing what your costs are and your cogs and your production, I think, are really important going, you want to have those things dialed in. And I think a lot of time you're using the kitchen to start dialing those things in. So having a really flexible plan in the beginning so that you can learn how.

You're going to scale how you're going to work in the kitchen, how much time you're going to need to do production, because when you're moving from a home kitchen or a small space, and you're getting more space, you're obviously can start filling more demand. You can start scaling up your recipes and stuff, but you have to give it a little bit of time to adjust because there's a lot of things that happen in that jump that you're going to have to learn and adjust to.

But one of the things that's really nice about a shared kitchen. Is that you can also get storage at the facility and so you can store a lot of your I think a lot of people moving from a home kitchen. They're really excited about the storage because they finally get to get all of all the things out of their home and into a space.

And so for a lot of the meal kits, I'm guessing you guys use a lot of to go materials, right? And those take up a lot of space and being

[00:30:54] Andy Blechman: ready to cook even like meal kit might be like, you cook at home, but most of our folks are actually prepping the meals and putting them. So they're probably keeping raw ingredients and then making the food and that same day.

[00:31:06] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the kitchens also allow for a pickup location. So you can actually make your business look a little bit more formal by having a, a place that they're coming in and you can pick up the meals from that space. So yeah, there's a lot of things to think about.

Price wise on our site, The Kitchen Door we really try to make sure that the listings have a lot of that information so that the food business, isn't spending a lot of time calling and trying to get that information. That information is front and center. And similarly for the kitchen administrator, they get so many leads all the time that we've created really Extensive intake forms that answer and check off all the information so that the match is made.

And so those people are saving a lot of time. I say, 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 for my space based on these questions that we asked. So we try to make the software do the heavy lifting for that part and lead people to the right place that works for them.

[00:32:03] Andy Blechman: This is maybe a newbie question, but in terms of equipment, do the shared kitchens typically have all the equipment you need? Or is it like, you have to buy equipment and store it there? You have to like, are you coming in with a big box of pans and different kind of things that you might need? How does that typically work?

[00:32:20] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, that's a really great question. I will say every shared kitchen is different. Most are going to have like the common. Things that you would need so many they'll have a hood. They'll have stoves. They'll have ovens. Sometimes a fryer, although, huh?

[00:32:36] Andy Blechman: They have grease traps. Not many of our customers need a grease trap.

But

[00:32:39] Ashley Colpaart: yeah, so I think a lot of share kitchens like to avoid the grease trap, because it's high maintenance and dirty and just, I think with grease also you'll have to change the oil every time because it's a shared space and there's a higher risks of food contamination and cross contamination of.

Gluten and there's just all of these things to think about. So a lot of them have moved towards not having friars in their kitchen specifically. But they'll have the main equipment and that's what you're paying for. You're paying for access to this commercially great commercial great equipment.

That's going to allow you to scale up. Then some will have like specialty equipment, blast chillers and tilt skillets that are really helping people to scale up their recipes and in a pretty significant way. And then even more so some of these kitchens will have co manufacturing style food business where they're doing bottling lines and canning lines and packing lines so that, really trying to scale up food businesses.

So This is actually a trend we've seen a lot in the last couple of years is that kitchens are moving into co manufacturing as a service, something that they offer and they start doing some of that production or providing labor as a service to food businesses as an added. As an added I think that's

[00:33:55] Andy Blechman: really cool.

And something that like has come up before we had Eric Stein from this brand mama meals, which is like a postpartum meal delivery business. And they're all shipping, but I think one takeaway for a local vendor That is interesting that they might be thinking, not thinking about is actually like you could develop a bunch of recipes, find shared this is what Eric's doing, find shared kitchens around the country and actually have people produce your recipes and make them on your behalf.

And that's a way, because really there's like a local maximum for how I'm going to scale a meal prep business. But if I want to extend, but I don't want to ship from my main kitchen, like there are, I think. There's a little bit of inside baseball here for people to think about how do I get wider distribution?

And one strategy might be like, I'm actually going to go to a kitchen that's not in my region and have them produce and see if I can scale outside but keep it local, maybe even franchise the operations. So like under so that's really cool to know and really good to know. I think that's,

[00:34:57] Ashley Colpaart: yeah. And that's a really cool idea for scaling that type of business is an opening up in a different city, right?

[00:35:04] Andy Blechman: Before we go in the Q&A, if we have any, and I encourage folks to drop any questions you have. I

[00:35:10] Ashley Colpaart: did have 1 more comment on the equipment, though, because you mentioned it. Can you bring in your own? If you have a really specified chocolate companies have these rendering machines that they need to have.

Some barbecue pits. Sometimes people have a specialty piece of equipment. Oftentimes the kitchen admin will let you store that at the kitchen, but you're just paying for like the space rental for that piece of equipment being in there. And then, yeah, so that's how that would work.

[00:35:36] Andy Blechman: Very cool.

Interesting. Yeah, I've heard specifically around I worked with a chocolate manufacturer at one point, and I remember, like, all the specific equipment they needed, and a friend of mine started this awesome coffee company called Wandering Bear, and he was in a shared kitchen, and, like, When we were working together out of business school and they were like, it was all this crazy equipment they needed and had to buy or think about buying.

And same with bread. We've seen that with bread too, big mixers or size of mixers. So

[00:36:02] Ashley Colpaart: that's actually an interesting thing is oftentimes you'll see the shared kitchen. And this is actually one thing I love about this industry is oftentimes the shared kitchen is a mirror of the local food economy there.

In the North Pacific Northwest or in some of the more agricultural areas, you'll see more value added products producing. So you'll see people, season extension, you'll see canning and bottling lines and things like that. And the type of equipment is a mirror of the type of production that's happening there.

Another example is like in, in like Florida and on the coast that the kitchens are more geared towards catering and food trucks because there's so many, so much more of that season long. And then, some kitchens will be specific to a type of food business. So a bakery type that type of equipment is so much different than what you would need in a typical commissary kitchen.

And so you'll see a shared kitchen that's, focused on bakery surveys, or they have a big room, big house with the proofers and the dough sheeters and everything so that specialized equipment is geared towards that type of production. So

[00:37:04] Andy Blechman: maybe we need some meal prep, shared kitchens.

[00:37:07] Ashley Colpaart: That'd be cool.

[00:37:08] Andy Blechman: I can imagine like all the needs of packing and prepping and there's some real like table needs when especially once you start to scale up. That's

[00:37:16] Ashley Colpaart: actually interesting you say that because like in our kitchens, we allow people to set up calendars for different spaces and different spaces cost different things.

So if you're in the bake shop, for instance, it might be 40 an hour, but that's because you're accessing the dough sheeter and the proofer and that, that high end equipment. But if you're just packing, Maybe you have a packing room and maybe that's 20 an hour or 15 an hour so that people can actually be renting and the type of infrastructure that they need.

And that price is scaled based on the type of access that they're getting at that point. It's something to talk about with the share kitchen owner about, what they need during the specific ty- type of production or the part of production that they're in.

[00:37:56] Andy Blechman: I think that's the right insight.

We're almost out of time. And I do want to allow for questions. I know it's flown by. But I think I want to turn the table. We have a number of vendors who on the other side have scaled up and they've gotten to the point where they basically now have their own kitchen space. And I'm curious, like what you've seen on the flip side, like how can I like, and I don't know if this has occurred to people, but how do I take a space that I now either lease, but it's mine and I've built on a build out or that I actually might own the building and how do I.

Maybe how do I create a new income stream? Or do do you obviously mentioned it's not all shared kitchens, like what are the steps that if I owned or leased my own kitchen, that I could maybe sublease out the space? Cause again, most of our vendors aren't seven days a week. They certainly aren't overnight.

And I have to imagine that there's maybe opportunities for revenue that people aren't thinking about.

[00:38:52] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah. The passive revenue is clutch, but also it's how. So many shared kitchens have emerged. So oftentimes it'll be the story is I started this catering company 20 years ago, and then I bought this facility and the person's tired of catering.

And so they're like, I want to rent out my space and they become a shared kitchen or they rented out, in their off time. So the things you want to think about, talk to your health department, make sure that you are legally licensed to be able to bring in another tenant. You can do it like a sub tenant sort of relationship post your kitchen space on TheKitchenDoor.Com and we'll send you leads through that you'll

[00:39:29] Andy Blechman: buy The Food Corridors that you can effectively run out your space, right?

[00:39:32] Ashley Colpaart: And then, yeah you don't want to Spend your time scheduling and booking and doing compliance management and billing this renter because you're running your own business. So use The Food Corridor software to do all of that for you. So you have your passive revenue and everything's taken care of. But, yeah, you want to find the right renters.

You're going to want to do an intake kind of application form. Make sure the person's a good culture fit. Let them know what that kind of rules of the kitchen are. We have operations manuals on our website and different types of materials on our blog for folks that want to get into doing something like that.

Also, the shared kitchen toolkit that I mentioned, I don't know if I mentioned this on this call, but there's a, this is. Available for free, so go find that and it'll walk you through the steps of doing that. But I think the biggest thing that you want to know is what time is available for that person?

What days of the week? What times how they're going to access the building? And then making sure that they have liability insurance and that you have building insurance to cover that in case something does go wrong. I know we don't like to always think about what could go wrong, but it is your business.

So you want to be very specific and intentional about doing that and formalizing it as much as you can. And then

[00:40:39] Andy Blechman: what do you see for revenue opportunity? Like, how to we didn't talk about this, but I think it'd be good to know Maybe a range of pricing of what on either those monthly packages or and I think like my two cents would be like I would totally only sell a monthly package like if I was starting to share a kitchen It's just easier a flip side It definitely is easier and I think it's harder for maybe the vendor at first But also might force you to make a hard decision and think through what you need So it could be advantageous, but yeah What do you typically see on pricing and how does that work and from like that?

You Renting from a church all the way up to the nimbus is of the world and the high. Yeah.

[00:41:16] Ashley Colpaart: National rates run between 25 dollars an hour and 40 dollars an hour. And that depends on, all of the things, all of what equipment you're getting location density is it an urban population or rural population?

So that's a pretty wide range. wide range. But it's usually 25 to 40 an hour. And then the monthly plans can range depending on how much time you're committing to from 400 a month up to, 2, 000 a month, depending on like the amount of time that you're needing in that kitchen. So those were the ranges.

Those are big ranges though, right?

[00:41:49] Andy Blechman: Yeah, that's crazy. That's cool. I'm going to pause and open it up for any questions. If anyone has questions about licensing or ending up in a shared kitchen or anything else. I do have a few more questions, so we don't have to do Q&A, but I figured I'd open it up and see, so we can pause for a minute.

And then if no one has a question, we can wrap up with one more thought I have.

if you need a, if you ever need a tip tool tip on Q&A, it's in that bottom on that bottom bar, you just hit that little question mark and it should pop up a little box and you can throw in your question. Now there's a little, Okay cool. I don't know. One's answered. So maybe our last well, while people might be dreaming up their questions here.

I think 1 thing we've been talking a lot about and that's been so exciting for us at Bottle is we really are our number 1 goal this year is to build community. But that's mostly virtual. It's mostly through doing things like this and writing a newsletter and eventually probably opening up a Facebook type group.

I'm curious what we see a little bit of community in the share kitchens, but are you seeing kind of community building in the share kitchens? Is there an opportunity there? Like, how does that work? And then on the flip side what do you do if a competitor is in the same share kitchen as you?

We see that a lot too.

[00:43:06] Ashley Colpaart: Oh, so you mean community at the shared kitchen level, not I thought so. I was immediately thinking we have a community called the network for incubator and commissary kitchens, which is a community of shared kitchen owners and operators that we facilitate. And then we put on events, like the share kitchen summit and try to build community around that community.

But, yes, in the actual share kitchens some of the operators are very intentional about building community. And Getting people to work together and you had mentioned joint purchasing agreements where people are going in. It's oh, I need to buy jars or I need to buy this that we can do bulk purchasing.

So that will bring down costs with the food trucks or caterers. They'll have lists of caterers or lists of producers that can be used to give to for events in the city. If people are looking for a catering list of available caterers, they promote those food businesses in a lot of ways, or those food trucks that are available for events.

I think a lot of them do a lot around community and. When you're in a shared space, some of that community is built just in intentionally because you're working so closely. It's we see a lot of people doing we'll do pop ups and they'll partner different chefs will partner and highlight each other's products.

I know that's

[00:44:17] Andy Blechman: really cool, the partnership angle. And I think if I were in a shared kitchen, I'd be thinking about like, who's the coolest vendor here and how can I do like a. Cool partnership. Maybe we had a guy on the platform and she did a coffee chat and she used to do these awesome partnerships in New York.

And it was like the coolest thing. And she would her instagram would just explode because she did these wild partnerships. And I wonder that seems actually like a key advantage. And I don't. I see it a little bit, but I think maybe there's more of an opportunity for people to actually like financially tie, not only to learn a network, but to financially tie yourself to someone else and cross promote audiences.

Kind of like what we're doing here. It's like, how can you find ways to expand your

audience? I

[00:44:59] Ashley Colpaart: think like highlighting somebody's product and your product, and doing like a little like. It's Oh, this salsa company in this kitchen, I'm going to use it in my chicken meal or something like that.

It's, I think those types of collabs are just exactly that's part of the special value of being in a shared kitchen. So leveraging that opportunity, I think is a huge creative opportunity.

[00:45:19] Andy Blechman: Super cool. Hannah, who actually is 1 of our customers has a question and I know she's in a shared kitchen space because she's been kind enough to refer some people who are in our shared kitchen to us.

And I think I know she's growing and her question really has to do with when do you decide to leave a shared kitchen and find your own space? And I'll add. She's had she also said commercial space can be hard to find. How do you find it? Like, how do you find that new space? And so maybe you can walk through the considerations.

We talked a little bit about if you have your space, how to turn it into a shared kitchen, which is, I think, a thought you go and find a space that could actually. Not be a revenue stream for you beyond just a place to produce your food. That's one thought, which we talked about, but what are the mechanics of actually going, okay.

What are the considerations leading up to when should you leave a share kitchen? And then what are the, what do you think are the considerations of going and finding your own commercial space?

[00:46:17] Ashley Colpaart: Yeah, it's a really interesting question because by default, the goal of a share 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 is to get this person to leave. It's there comes a friction point with a, a company that in a share kitchen that's doing really well where they start needing more and more. They need more and more time. They need more and more storage and they're starting to get to a point where they're, the operator can't bring in new businesses because that this person's becoming what we call like an anchor tenant. They've become the primary user. That's probably when you need to start thinking about finding your own space. I would say, unless you have a different relationship with the operator and they prefer that you stay in there and maybe they don't.

Do the shared kitchen thing anymore. You might take over the whole space that actually would be operationally an option. The other option would be like, finding a broker and helping, a real estate broker to help you find spaces that might be becoming available restaurants that are closing down.

No, sadly tend to be really good options for moving into so you don't have to go through the infrastructure of. Sorry, the budget of doing infrastructure project of needing a hood and needing plumbing and all the things that you would need to if you had to move into that direction, 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 some of the thinking that you need to have if you do need to finance your own building, but also looking on, listing sites obviously, kitchen doors, just shared kitchens, but for others, craigslist still has tons of those types of facilities on there.

I think Reddit oftentimes will have people post, available spaces that are coming up and then real estate sites often have a commercial real estate sites will have listings of places. I would just, look for that, but also, circling back to the very beginning.

We were talking about going to the farmers market and just asking people where they're producing sometimes just talking to people and getting out in the community. And finding out what's what's might be coming available at a commercial level would be a good strategy as well.

[00:48:19] Andy Blechman: Do you have a sense of what, what leases are you mentioned?

I know, shared kitchen, but where do you think lease prices are? And what's my, if I'm ready and call it, Maybe I'm paying 2, 000 a month. What should my expectation be? Do you have a per square foot idea? I know that might be a little out of your domain, but

[00:48:38] Ashley Colpaart: yeah, it's a little out of my domain.

I would say, and also the industry is so strange right now. Like downtown, it, I think it largely depends on where you're at. If you want to be in downtown, like prices in downtown areas of any city right now, are just like. Crazy that's why restaurants are closing down. It's they can't afford the lease prices are going up and restaurants are like, I can't even afford to be in the space anymore.

But this has happened in Des Moines. I live in Des Moines and we have 1 of my favorite restaurants. They were like, oh, our lease is going up. So we're closing. They just like shutter 2 locations. It's crazy. So I think, I think with your clients and you don't necessarily need to be in a downtown location.

So you can actually find a space that's in a more industrial park or industrial area. That's going to be more reasonable for rents. But I don't know. I think it's just going to be different every city. So I don't even know if I could come up with a range, but I'm guessing like 3, 500. Yeah,

[00:49:35] Andy Blechman: that's like a great, that would be a great price.

Maybe I'm biased to Atlanta. I also think that there's like a math, like just a pure spreadsheet exercise here, Hannah, that you got to do of what's the advantage, what do you have to buy? What's the build out look like? Is it already built out? What equipment are you really need to think through every line item of what the cost is going to be.

And then I would say what's the advantage of going to a new space? Am I, Can I increase my production? Do I know that I have demand to increase production? What are the, it's like buying a house. It's what are the reasons for me moving into the space? But here you can actually do a true ROI calculations.

I think that's something that I'd be thinking about and considering. Yeah.

[00:50:12] Ashley Colpaart: And there is also that short term versus long term. It's if the benefit of moving into your own space, if you really can achieve the growth that you're trying to achieve, it might. It might be the right decision for you, which is awesome, but yeah, if you can, especially if you can get financing based on the business that you've built, I think that's great.

That's how to scale. So congratulations on you for being at that, needing to ask that question.

[00:50:34] Andy Blechman: Yeah, cool. And then someone it's an anonymous person asked, how do we search online? And use techniques or tips to find shared kitchen listing. So you've mentioned it a few times, but I'll do the plug for you.

And we can we'll put this in the show notes as well. Your you have a directory that I think is the foremost. That's how I actually found your business is the foremost directory for as many share kitchens as you could possibly imagine in a given in the US at least

[00:51:03] Ashley Colpaart: and Canada

[00:51:04] Andy Blechman: and Canada. And it basically is called The Kitchen Door.

I don't know what I can put the URL here in the notes, but the your

[00:51:12] Ashley Colpaart: kitchen door dot com,

[00:51:14] Andy Blechman: and it's an awesome site. It really does shows you pictures. It's like the Yelp of shared kitchens is how I would describe it. Highly recommend that you check that out. I think it, it'd be quite helpful.

And then

[00:51:27] Ashley Colpaart: if you end up renting out some of your own space, you could post there for free and get leads. So it's it acts as both if you're a kitchen renting out or your business looking for kitchens, it's both of those things.

[00:51:37] Andy Blechman: Very cool. I'm going to just grab that link and drop it here in the notes.

So people have it. And then I guess we didn't do this. Maybe we finish off with it's all right. We're at the hour, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about oh, great. And I also put it there. You can tell us a little bit about just the 30 seconds on The Food Corridor as a closing because we didn't really have a chance to talk about it because we aren't talking to share kitchen owners.

But what is The Food Corridor exactly? And maybe some of our folks are interacting with it as well.

[00:52:07] Ashley Colpaart: Cool, I'm going to put 2 other resources in our chat if you want to share them with the folks. So the shared kitchen tool kit. Again, there'll be a new 1 coming out in a couple weeks. And then also there's 8 questions to answer to get shared kitchen ready that I thought might be helpful for some folks.

That's on our blog. Yeah, so essentially The Food Corridor is the back operation management platform for a shared kitchen. So basically we're getting people out of the kitchen or out of the office and back in the kitchen is what we like to say. So 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 to said kitchen.

Booking reservable equipment. We manage all the hours and billing plans on behalf of the kitchen. And then we do compliance. So we have a document management system that manages the business license insurance and the food handler card. Sends notifications when those are set to expire.

So people don't have to be managing all of that. And then billing is included in that. So the, the kitchen administrator can just set it and forget it. It runs automatically. Food business doesn't have to worry about it. It's all running automatically. They can schedule time on the calendar.

They can change their schedule, which oftentimes has to happen without having to go through a person. So it, it just saves time and money and energy for both. The food business and the commercial kitchen operator. So you can think of it as like mind body for the food industry.

[00:53:35] Andy Blechman: Very cool.

I love that. Awesome. So thank you so much, Ashley. This was so much fun. Really informative. You've lived up to the foremost expert in shared kitchens. And

[00:53:46] Ashley Colpaart: if anyone wants to read my dissertation, it's really fun, fun to read.

[00:53:50] Andy Blechman: Yeah. You keep it right there. You might read it.

I don't

[00:53:53] Ashley Colpaart: recommend it.

[00:53:55] Andy Blechman: Yeah. PhD dissertations are not exactly beach reading, but yeah. So thank you so much. This was awesome. And I guess the last thing I'll say is Ashley hosts. An incredible conference in New Orleans more to come there. It's in the fall and there may be a partnership between us on that front as well.

So anyone's looking for an excuse to go to New Orleans and hang out with the Bottle team. We may be there. So thank you again. This is great. And yeah, talk soon.

[00:54:20] Ashley Colpaart: Thanks. Everybody.

[00:54:22] Andy Blechman: Bye. Bye.