The Kitchen: Where Food Businesses Grow in North IA

View the project final report

Commodities

Practices

• Crop Production: food processing facilities/community kitchens
• Education and Training: farmer to farmer, focus group, technical assistance
• Farm Business Management: value added
• Sustainable Communities: new business opportunities, partnerships

Healthy Harvest of North Iowa (HHNI) interviewed fifty local businesses and organizations about local food and agriculture needs. We heard interest from small farms to increase profitability, improve sustainability by reducing waste of potentially viable product, and identified lack of value-added production space. We heard buyer demand for increased availability of locally-produced value-added products. 

Our initial proposal involved the development of a physical space for "The Kitchen" to address the barrier around individually financing appropriately-scaled and licensed kitchen space incurred by businesses looking to add, or expand, value-added production. The site was to feature commercial-grade equipment, storage space, and a flexible layout that would allow for production, hosting of networking and educational programming to support business incubation efforts, and community education around local food access and consumption to increase consumer knowledge of the product offerings within North Iowa. 

This grant was part of a large project that was dependent on funding from three grants. Unfortunately, one grant was not funded and additionally, the owner of the originally proposed kitchen space went a different direction with their property in the time it took for us to receive the approval of our funding. We still expect to achieve the majority of the original project objectives and outcomes; however we are no longer building a new shared-use kitchen. Our updated objectives are explained below. 

• Objective 1: Develop a network of kitchens in our 9 county region of North Central Iowa. Update the Iowa Kitchen Connect website to list existing certified kitchens which are available for rental. Producers, and regional partners, can reserve these kitchens for value-added processing and hand-on culinary/local foods educational opportunities. 
• Objective 2: Creating a rental library of commonly used kitchen equipment for small scale value added processing and cooking classes. Producers, and partners, will be able to pick up the equipment they need from our centrally located storage room. They will then use it at one of the participating kitchens, found in the directory, or another certified kitchen of their choice.
• Objective 3: Offer technical assistance for producers and kitchen managers in North Iowa. As we identify suitable kitchens to be added to the Iowa Kitchen Connect directory we will provide technical support to the kitchen mangers to list and rent their kitchens. We will also  host networking opportunities to provide technical assistance related to licensing requirements and production of value added products. Our first workshop is scheduled for March 28, 2024.