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GOURMET NEWS DECEMBER 2015 www.gourmetnews.com NEWS & NOTES 8 Incubating Continued from PAGE 1 dealing with adversity is in Johnson's blood. Her great-grandfather, a Japanese immi- grant, was the first Farm Bureau president in Turlock, California, until he died of in- fluenza during the Great Pandemic of 1918. Her great-grandmother decided she couldn't raise her daughters on the farm alone, so she sold the land and returned to Japan with her children in 1921. Years later, she arranged a marriage for one of her daughters, Johnson's grandmother, to a man of Japanese descent who was living and working in San Francisco, returning Johnson's ancestry to California. Farming came back into her heritage when her grandparents resettled onto a farm in Pescadero where her grandfather grew veg- etables until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which uprooted the family again. Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and...the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Sec- retary of War or the appropriate Mili- tary Commander may impose in his discretion, the order read. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary. In the case of Johnson's grandparents, the "food, shelter, and other accommodations" that were provided were at the Topaz in- ternment camp in central Utah. It's now a museum, but more than 11,000 people of Japanese descent were held prisoner there between September 11, 1942 and October 31, 1945. Today, of course, the internment of Americans of Japanese descent is consid- ered one of the great Civil Rights violations in American history. After Johnson's grandparents were re- leased, they returned to California and set- tled in San Gregorio, about 40 miles south of San Francisco and only about seven miles up the road from the home they'd left behind in Pescadero. There they farmed produce until a government once again or- dered their dislocation. In addition to the release of Americans held in internment camps, the end of World War II also brought about a shift in the U.S. food system from local to national and global food sources. That globalization continues: U.S. imports of food products have grown over the past few decades be- cause of many factors that include the growing immigrant population in the U.S., improvements in shipping and quarantine methods and the implementation of free- trade agreements. In 2013, the value of United States' food imports topped $109 billion, with an average annual growth of 7.9 percent from 2004 to 2013, according says. "We bought Anna's Cookies even though we didn't know the first thing about making cookies. But we learned very fast." Napa Cookie Company It took the partners only six months to build out Anna's Cookies bakery into KitchenTown. The nascent incubator kitchen even came with its first maker, Napa Cookie Company, which had already had an arrangement with Anna's Cookies to share its bakery after the company had grown out of the catering kitchen in which Burt and Melissa Teaff had started their bakery business. Their Wine Snaps had be- come a retail product rather than just an item on their catering menu when cus- tomers started asking if they could buy more of the tasty cookies that the Teaffs served as a sweet-savory treat to accom- pany red and white wines. "It put the idea in our head that we should take them to market," Burt Teaff says. "We didn't know anything about baking cookies. We knew how to feed 350 people. We didn't know how to make cookies or have a retail com- pany.... We developed a product with the clients, hired a graphics company to design the packaging and launched in 2009." In 2011, the market for their Wine Snaps had grown to the point at which the Teaffs had to find a bigger kitchen, and they moved into the Anna's Cookies bakery. "The move made it a lot easier to make the cookies, so we have more time. When we were doing them at home, they were hand-cut," Burt Teaff says. "We're now able to make more of them and spend more time marketing and go out to stores and do demos. It freed us up to do marketing." Nine months after opening as an incuba- tor, KitchenTown had 27 companies using the space, and Schwartz and Solis were get- ting two calls a day from new start-ups looking for a home. The KitchenTown ten- ants include four services that deliver pre- packaged dinners or dinner ingredients, a maker of almond milk, a baby food com- pany, an olive oil company that blends and bottles in the kitchen, several companies that make energy bars, one that makes non- dairy ice cream and one that makes crack- ers. "We're not full; we can still add to that," Schwartz says. "The brand new start- ups are coming in once a week for a few hours, and on the other end of the spec- trum, you've got companies that come in for an eight-hour shift five days a week." It's not by coincidence that KitchenTown hosts a wide range of companies: Schwartz and Solis have intentionally offered the space to diverse kinds of food producers. "Partly because it's more interesting for the community," Schwartz says. "They're look- ing for community; they really thrive in a place where there are other food companies doing the same thing. They're learning from each other, and there are efficiencies too. They can source products together," he says. "It's really interesting. We're a start- up, so it's a start-up of start-ups. It's much more complex than running my other busi- nesses. They're all start-ups. There's a lot of energy, a lot to do. It's far more complicated than I thought it would be – a lot of per- sonalities, the principals of all these com- panies and their employees as well." Local Food Movement Feeds Incubators Kitchen incubators like KitchenTown that to the USDA. The way Americans regard their local farmers and farms has changed as well. The state of California took Johnson's grandfa- ther's farm in an eminent domain action in the late 1970s with the intention of paving it over to put up a parking lot. Johnson was 14. That was crazy and unfathomable, she says. After that happened, her grandparents lost heart for farming. They thought, What's the use, if it can all be taken away. As it happened, the parking lot was never built, and today, the land lies fallow, cov- ered by sagebrush and coyote brush. "It saddens me every time I drive by," Johnson says. With the farm gone, Johnson's family be- came part of another trend that continues today. In 2012, the United States had 2.1 million farms – down 4.3 percent from 2007. Between 2007 and 2012, the amount of farmland in the U.S. declined from 922 million acres to 915 million acres, the third-smallest five year decline in the num- ber of acres in American farm production since 1950. Johnson herself has given some thought to trying life on a farm again, perhaps to grow some of the fruit for her jam-making, but California's real estate market has put that dream out of reach. For me now, land is hard to come by, and it's super-expensive to lease or rent, she says. Here is my way to contribute to the agricultural community, by purchasing the fruit for the jams and jel- lies I make locally. After the psychic's words planted the seed, Johnson made it bear fruit with a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough cap- ital to start a serious food business. "I bought a pallet of jars and a pallet of lids and my commercial license," she says. Obtaining a commercial license required her to move her operation out of her home kitchen and into a real commercial process- ing kitchen. Like about 30 other small food business owners, Johnson chose Kitchen- Town, an 11,000 square foot shared-space processing kitchen in San Mateo, Califor- nia, a suburb of San Francisco. It's owned by Rusty Schwartz and Alberto Solis, who opened it in September, 2015, to serve the needs of small food producers. "Local is the new organic. The market wants locally made small-batch products. We're just re- sponding to that need," Schwartz says. "Those companies are out there – there are tons of companies that want to do this." Kitchen Town Before Schwartz and Solis were business partners, they were bicycling partners. Both of them were living in Oakland, and out on long bicycle rides, they'd have conversa- tions about their common interests in food and entrepreneurship and how they were both looking for new opportunities in the food business. "We were just at that stage in our careers," Solis says. He has been the National Sales Manager for FERMIN and then for The Rogers Collection. "For 25 years, I was in the specialty food import business," he says. From that vantage point, he'd started to see the resurgence of interest in local foods and local producers, and at the same time, he was meeting peo- ple at his local farmers market who wanted to make food, and they were doing some very creative things. And to be truthful, he was tired of eating airport food, since he was doing a lot of traveling with his sales jobs, he says. Schwartz was a serial entrepreneur, in business with small consumer products companies for his entire career. "I found myself consulting, and I sort of fell into food," he says. He found some of his con- sulting clients at local farmers markets. "I started seeing these companies popping up at the farmers market, and I started writing business plans for them and then realized that these companies didn't have a way to scale up," he says. "You can cook at home, but not for very long. You need to find a commercial kitchen to work in." The biggest obstacle between a would-be food entrepreneur and a commercial kitchen is usually money, Schwartz says. It costs about $250,000 to build a small commercial kitchen. A small company doesn't have that kind of money, and banks won't lend it to an entrepreneur who doesn't have a track record yet. The idea behind the incubator is that it provides a shared space where entrepre- neurs can work until their business is pro- ducing enough revenue either to finance their own kitchen or to interest a co-packer in working with them. "We came up with the idea of creating that place where food makers could scale up," Solis says. The two friends decided to partner up and started looking around Oakland for a building they could turn into a kitchen in- cubator. "We decided to focus on one thing, so we built with that in mind, buying particular types of equipment that pack- aged food producers need, as opposed to what caterers need: a piston filler, produc- tion-scale rack ovens as opposed to a smaller convection oven, tilt skillets, weigh scales. That's the type of equipment that we invest in," Schwartz says. "There are no other spaces around that are specifically de- signed for packaged goods. They need to have more storage capacity, forklifts, a freight area so distributors can pick up product. You really have to allow producers to have a time slot that they come in regu- larly, and you have to commit to them." They found available warehouse space that they thought about converting, but found that the cost of installing kitchen in- frastructure into those buildings was pro- hibitive. Then they heard that Anna's Danish Cookies was for sale in San Mateo. The cookie bakery operated in its own building but was only using part of its space, and it already had all the utilities in- frastructure needed for a commercial kitchen. "I was aware of that brand," Solis "That was crazy and unfathomable... What's the use, if it can all be taken away?" — Marilyn Johnson, Spread the Love