SAN
FRANCISCO (By Laura Novak, NYTimes)
April 5, 2008 — One morning in May,
Veronica Salazar stuffed refried
beans into sandal-shaped masa cakes,
concentrating to block the commotion
in a cavernous kitchen here in the
Mission District. The chopping of
vegetables added to the din as the
clang of metal pans against
stainless steel equipment competed
with background music from a local
Spanish-language radio station.
But
this kitchen, known by the Spanish
name La Cocina, is no ordinary
restaurant or commercial operation.
Instead, the chefs here — all women,
most of them immigrants — work side
by side to achieve a common goal:
starting their own food businesses
and, in some cases, elevating
themselves out of poverty.
Known as a “kitchen incubator,” La
Cocina is a shared-use space created
two years ago to provide a platform
for women entrepreneurs without
assets. Offering a low hourly rate
for access to 2,200 square feet of
restaurant-quality kitchen space,
the nonprofit La Cocina also
provides training from high-profile
mentors and technical assistance on
creating business plans and building
marketing programs.
“There’s an entrepreneurial gene,”
said Valeria Perez, executive
director of La Cocina. “And we are
finding amazing entrepreneurs who
are already cooking or have a
product that is so promising that it
deserves to be seen in the market
and that we think has a chance for
success.”
Ms.
Salazar, 32, was one of the first
participants in La Cocina and is one
of its bigger successes. Her
company, El Huarache Loco, makes
traditional foods from Mexico City.
Working with intensity, she needed
to produce 700 of her trademark
huaraches, the bean-filled cakes,
for her weekly booth at a farmer’s
market and hundreds more for
Carnaval San Francisco festivities
over Memorial Day weekend. She also
prepared fish and shrimp ceviche as
an employee stirred 30 gallons of
carnitas in a brazing skillet for a
catering job for 100 people.
“I
come here to learn all the business,
and I need to learn more every day,”
Ms. Salazar said, while dicing
pounds of tomatoes for a salsa roja.
“Tomorrow, I have three parties. So
if I do this tomorrow, I know I can
do something by myself.”
The
specialty foods prepared here are a
reflection of the ethnic makeup of
La Cocina’s participants. More than
half the women are Hispanic, with
another 8 percent African-American.
The rest are Asian or Caucasian.
Their products, both fresh and
packaged, range from Mexican street
fare to Irish chocolates, vegetarian
sushi, South African meat pies and
Brazilian cakes.
La
Cocina has opened its own booth at
the high-end Ferry Building
Marketplace, where it sells its
participants’ packaged products
along with house-made charcuterie,
pricey olive oils and $8-a-dozen
organic eggs.
Every day La Cocina’s calendar is
replete with participants preparing
packaged products and hot food for
catering jobs, coffee shops and a
busy farmer’s market near the
airport. Anna Shi’s Gourmet has a
standing weekly order for 900 of her
vegetarian tofu egg rolls for the
Berkeley school district. Maria del
Carmen Flores sells 1,500 of her
yucca and plantain chips in 50
stores. Independent grocers around
the Bay Area and Whole Food Markets
throughout the state have picked up
many of La Cocina’s specialty
products.
“The really cool thing about a
business incubator is that when you
get entrepreneurial people in one
place, there’s a synergistic
effect,” said Tracy Kitts, vice
president and chief operating
officer of the National Business
Incubation Association, a nonprofit
membership organization. “Not only
do they learn from staff, they learn
tons from each other, and this
really contributes greatly to their
success.”
The
association estimates there are
1,200 incubation programs in the
United States. Only 20 of them are
kitchen incubators, Mr. Kitts said,
because the start-up and operating
costs are much higher than for a
mixed-use space. Eight of those
programs are in urban areas,
including Rochester, New York City,
Denver and Minneapolis.
La
Cocina is housed in a starkly modern
structure wedged among tattered row
houses and apartment buildings in
the Mission District. Residents are
primarily low-income people from
Mexico and El Salvador, where Ms.
Perez says there is a strong
tradition of entrepreneurship.
La
Cocina was created by the California
Women’s Foundation in response to a
survey that indicated that 90
percent of women in the Mission
District said they needed adequate
equipment and proper permits to run
their businesses, but that
commercial kitchen space in San
Francisco was either unaffordable or
geographically inconvenient. Many of
them said they were cooking
illegally out of their homes.
The
foundation and government grants
make up more than three-quarters of
La Cocina’s $575,000 annual budget.
About 17 percent of its funding
comes from rent charged to six
commercial tenants (including men),
who pay $30 to $40 an hour,
depending on the type of equipment
being used. The program participants
pay $8 to $10 an hour for the space,
utensils and small ware.
“We
are not creating a parallel
nonprofit world where they are in a
sheltered workshop,” Ms. Perez said.
“The reason we charge a fee is that
we want them to have a business
model that is sustainable. If they
don’t incorporate the cost of doing
business, it’s artificial, and it’s
going to crumble.”
To
avoid that, Jason Rose, La Cocina’s
culinary director, and Caleb Zigas,
the program director, both of them
bilingual, meet weekly with the
women to review food costs, recipes
and sales and marketing plans.
Participants also pair with
consultants from partner
organizations who work on finances
and cash flow statements.
Ms.
Salazar of El Huarache Loco employs
five family members at her booth at
the Alemany Farmers’ Market, where
Mr. Zigas says she takes in $3,000
every weekend. Costs of goods,
licenses, employee wages and kitchen
rental means she nets $1,000. But he
points out that Ms. Salazar will
soon be able to afford to buy a
home; he is searching for commercial
space for her to open a restaurant,
a prospect he calls “thrilling.”
“It’s the translation from informal
economy, which is cash-in, cash-out,
to a formal economy, which is
concept, then investment, then
growth,” Mr. Zigas said. “It’s a
really hard conceptual translation
to make, to go from knowing how much
you’re making every day to thinking
about money in a longer-term
vision.”
When Jill Litwin applied to La
Cocina, she had abundant vision but
needed help with what she calls her
“road map.” Ms. Litwin is the owner
of Peas of Mind, a line of frozen
organic toddler food that she
developed in Vermont.
At
first, she was only capable of
making 12 mini-casseroles at a time.
The staff brought in a food
scientist to help Ms. Litwin
recalibrate her recipes so that each
batch would turn out 400. They also
introduced her to a human resources
specialist and made a critical
introduction to a food buyer for
Whole Foods Market.
“They are helping people produce
products that are high quality and
of great integrity,” said Justin
Jackson, executive coordinator for
purchasing at Whole Foods in
Northern California. “If it wasn’t
well thought through and executed
properly, our interest wouldn’t be
what it is.”
Peas of Mind is now in 80 stores in
California, 20 of them Whole Foods
Markets, which is discussing plans
to take her product national. Ms.
Litwin says she has doubled her 2006
sales in the first quarter of this
year.
“If
you are an entrepreneur, you are in
your own world and you never know if
you’re on the right track,” Ms.
Litwin said. “This is definitely a
community you can bounce ideas off
of. And if they don’t know the
answer, they’ll find somebody who
does.”
