INCUBATOR HATCHES COOK'S DREAMS

Toronto Star, September 20, 2001

By Donna Jean MacKinnon

For $20 an hour, cooks with a dream can rent space by the hour at the Toronto Kitchen Incubator. It's a licensed commercial kitchen where fledgling entrepreneurs can try out their cherished food ideas on a large scale for the marketplace without investing in expensive equipment.

The 4,500-square-foot kitchen is inside a building at 200 Eastern Ave. in the lower east end. It's available for rentals 24/7. Renters can try out a recipe, fill a food order, or prepare servings for a catered event in a culinary setting that would be almost impossible to afford or install at home.

The kitchen has two six-burner Garland gas ranges, a new custom soup kettle purchased for $30,000, a vacuum sealer, professional mixer, griddle, grill, pots and pans.

There's also a walk-in fridge, storage space, a gluing machine and loading dock.

In order to qualify for rental of the kitchen, budding food purveyors must have a reasonable business plan, a Food Handler's Certificate from the Department of Health and product and tenant's liability insurance.

Akemi Kobayashi, manager of the Incubator, estimates only one in 100 people who test a food idea ever take it to the marketplace.

"They have the vision and the dream, but then the reality of the cost and the work sets in. Also, they don't have a client list in place," says Kobayashi, a chef herself and an original partner in The Big Carrot health food supermarket on the Danforth.

But the incubator has hatched a number of viable food ideas. The list includes Mary's Gourmet, Under the Umbrella, Vegan Delites and International Foods, a snack food wholesaler.

All of these companies are niche marketers and supply specialty items not usually found in mainstream supermarkets.

There are no real statistics available that chart the rise in mom-and- pop food production businesses, according to Vincent Mancuso, executive-director of the Canadian Association of Specialty Foods, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people get new food products on the shop shelf. But he says the interest in specialty foodstuffs has grown by "leaps and bounds."

"Most of our 120 members have companies that specialize in high-end goods sold in smaller shops," he says.

Mancuso adds people are willing to spend the extra $5 for a special olive oil or jelly. He believes the reasons for this trend are two-pronged: People have more money to spend on self-indulgent luxuries and with foreign travel, their taste buds have changed.

"And Canada is so culturally diverse now, people have been exposed to all kinds of new foods," Mancuso says.

Sharing the Eastern Ave. premises is Field to Table, an agency that distributes Good Food Boxes to 4,000 Toronto homes at a cost of $17 for a two-week supply. Organic boxes sell for $22 to $32.

Both operations evolved out of Foodshare, an agency started in 1986 with the help of the Toronto Public Health Department. Today both the Incubator and Field to Table are non-profit services partly funded by the City of Toronto Economic Development Corporation and controlled by an advisory board.

Besides entrepreneurs, the Kitchen Incubator facilities are available to women on social assistance and community groups, who are taught healthy cooking or club together to prepare ethnic specialties.