Someone's in the Kitchen ...

Reporter Craig Reber of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald wrote a thoughtful overview of the Innovation Kitchen, our collaboration with the new Sharing Spaces Kitchen in Prairie du Chien and our emerging regional network of processing facilities in their Sunday (7/3/11) editions.

Here are a few excerpts:

Someone's in the Kitchen ...

Shared-use kitchens emphasize distributing locally grown produce.

"Rick Terrien sees food as an economic development opportunity. And there's no better place than the Midwest, specifically Illinois, Iowa, Minesota and Wisconsin."

"In November, the Prairie du Chien (Wis.) Opportunity Center broke ground for its shared-use kitchen project, continuing a rapidly growing trend: bringing locally grown food to consumers through a Midwest-based distribution network."

"Construction is under way this month and the Opportunity Center expects Sharing Spaces Kitchen, similar to the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen, to open in late October."

"The two entities are part of a trend. According to Terrien, the executive director of the Iowa County Economic Development Corp., the facilities, which typically employ workers with developmental disabilities, would be run independently but work together sharing ideas, processes and marketing."

"The idea is to take what we grow here and make it shelf stable so it can be used year-round," he (Terrien) said. "That's the goal, and you can't do it without legal, safe, state-inspected kitchens."

"There are 35 million people a half day's drive from Iowa County in Southwest Wisconsin, Terrien said. And every one of them eats."


Dubuque Telegraph Herald story written by Craig Reber. Photo credit to Jessica Reilly and THonline.com Thank You!

Sharing Spaces Kitchen blog, written by Dan Moris

Innovation Kitchen intro video and web site.

What do you name a hub of hubs? The hubba hubbas, of course.

Thanks to my new friend Joe at HmCapital Partners in Pennsylvania for the wonderful question and answer in this post's headline.

A group of emerging food hubs in the Great Lakes region met in Chicago recently. I got to meet Joe and Greg from the wonderful Republic Food Enterprise Center in Pennsylvania along with many other amazing food hub folks from all across the Great Lakes region.

To me food hubs are food-based enterprises that spin off and support a greater good. It seems clear that smart hubs aggregate with others and keep experimenting to see which niches need filling, with all due accolades to Darwin.

The Chicago based organization Fresh Taste hosted a recent weekend retreat for new and emerging food hubs in the Great Lakes region. The working title for the weekend was ‘Building Community Wealth Through Food Hubs’. What a valuable gathering!

Links to all these new friends are below. Since this initial gathering, several new partner projects have emerged. I can’t wait to watch this grow.

The Great Lakes region has historically been a great food provider. Rebuilding that capacity is strategic and critically important to 21st century regional food needs. That kind of long range planning is emerging from all kinds of interesting places.

I’m honored to be hanging out with such a smart bunch! Please visit their info and links below. And welcome new friends and new projects in our wonderful Great Lakes food region.


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First a link to news and info from Fresh Taste in Chicago who hosted this gathering. Then links to participants.

Fresh Taste. Thanks Karen and friends!


Food hub project profiles:

Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Renewable Living. Fred and Dr J.

Center For Urban Transformation. Orrin

Edible Economy Project. Terra, Marty and Elaine.

Gourmet Gorilla. Jason

Green City Growers / Evergreen Cooperative. Mary

Institutional Food Market Coalition. Olivia

Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks. Shelly and Irv

Farm Business Development Center at Prairie Crossing Farm. Mike

The Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission. Local Food Study. PDF. 2.5 MB. Kevin and Beth

Republic Food Enterprise Center / Holly Mead Capital. Joe and Greg

Renaissance Farm / Slow Money Wisconsin. Mark

Southwest Michigan Green Enterprises Incubator. John

Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen / Food Action Alliance. Rick


Supporting partners and resources

Kailo Fund. Tina

Southwest Wisconsin Community Action Program. Wally

Slow Food Midwest / Slo-fig. Joel

Fresh Taste – Meeting conveners. Karen and Vanessa

Food as the biggest picture

This post returns to the big picture and the role of local foods, regional food systems and the kind of experiments that might be valuable to run to make the world a better place.

Continually worsening energy issues only complicate the food issues discussed below. It's clear we need to diversify all these systems. We need to run some new experiments to find ways of getting out of this.

The cover of last week's Bloomberg Business Week was devoted to the possibilities of an emerging food crisis. The full title of the cover is "Weather, Speculation, And Politics Have Created A Global Food Crisis That Threatens... Everything."

The article (linked below) is titled, "Hungry for a solution to rising food prices. Even if global agriculture crisis doesn't turn cataclysmic, it represents a huge test."

The United States may be insulated from the worst of the damaging effects of the food crisis, but we are not immune. Our communities are filled with vulnerable children and families who are in growing, often desperate need of nutrition and food security.

The Business Week article is largely macro-economic and significantly scary. It calls for action from everyone.

One important role the Innovation Kitchen, and now our new Food Action Alliance network can provide is a platform for running valuable business experiments in regional food systems. Our FACT Alliance will start with 3 food processing facilities. Next year we will grow it to 10 facilities and then to 50.

If we can find ways to move increasing quantities of good, local nutrition at increasingly affordable prices to our regional population centers, that's something worth replicating and sharing.

We ran the first of these kinds of experiments during the 2010 growing season, just after the Innovation Kitchen opened last July. Last year we quoted jobs in hundred and thousand pound quantities. That will continue, but this year, we are also quoting 100,000 pound quantities. There is a market.

The most rewarding piece of these experiments is that customers are returning and placing new orders for the coming growing season. After many years doing start ups, I can honestly say you can't fake this customer-reordering piece. It happens, or it doesn't.

I am convinced by the evidence that we need these new small processing facilities and they can be operated profitably and sustainably. I am convinced these facilities can act independently and collaboratively. I am convinced we can grow this collaborative network wisely and in ways that can help the emerging food crisis in positive ways and in ways that can be widely replicated.

We will need help from partners in the marketplace, in government and in NGOs to help run these experiments.

We need change. We need new approaches. Our experiments starting in Southwest Wisconsin will make a contribution to the bigger debate worldwide.

As the Business Week article closed out, we have little choice but to act:

"Civilization has faced down pandemics and world wars—and has emerged stronger for having met the test. The current series of droughts and floods are not simply wreaking havoc on food supplies. They're harbingers of life in a hotter and more chaotic climate. Could hunger, and the threat to power that accompanies it, be what finally forces political leaders to act?"

Now is the time to launch smart, new experiments in food and energy efficiency. Not everything will work, but if we don't find what does, nothing else will.


Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen

"Hungry for a solution to rising food prices." By Eric Pooley and Philip Revzin in Bloomberg Business Week, Feb. 21, 2011

Launching our network of shared-use food processing and distribution facilities - the Food Action Alliance

There is a large, growing, demand for good local and regional foods year-round.

The Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen is a shared-use facility dedicated to providing not only commercial food processing tools, but also professional processing services.

Given the chorus of positive feedback this model is getting from customers and growers, I'm convinced we need to increase this capacity. The markets are there.

To that end, three neighboring facilities in Southwest and Southern Wisconsin are joining into a collaborative alliance to provide small and mid-scale food processing, packaging, storage and distribution services for regional food partners.

We're going to organize under a voluntary, collaborative model we're calling the Food Action Alliance, or FACT Alliance. The web site will be www.factalliance.org

The first three facilities to join as partners in the this new collaborative alliance are the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen (Hodan Center, Mineral Point), Sharing Spaces Kitchen (Opportunity Center, Prairie du Chien), and Greenco Industries in Monroe.

This project is designed to learn what works and doesn't work in this kind of collaborative regional food system. We will run the experiments and continuously improve, with a goal of replicating the model into a growing network of local food processing centers.

Here is the outline:

Project Mission
Our mission is to develop an increasing capacity for providing an increasing amount of good local and regional foods to an increasing number of people at increasingly affordable prices.

The Food Action Alliance, (FACT Alliance)
The Food Action Alliance, (FACT Alliance), is a collaborative network of small and mid-scale food processing, packaging, storage and distribution facilities and services. The first three network partners are wonderful community organizations serving people with disabilities in South and Southwest Wisconsin.

At the launch of this network these three partners are working together:

The Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen in Mineral Point is in place to prepare, package, label, store and ship large quantities of many foods, all through a beautiful a state-inspected commercial kitchen.

Greenco Industries in Monroe offers food packaging services, (FDA & USDA inspected), and 4,500 square feet of food-grade refrigeration, storage and distribution capabilities.

The Sharing Spaces Kitchen in Prairie du Chien broke ground in Oct. 2010 and expects to open this year. The Innovation Kitchen and Sharing Spaces Kitchen have been partnering with with one another since the start and together will offer 16,000 square feet of regional food processing, storage, shipping, and sales capacity.

In combination, these three network partners will have over 20,000 square feet of regional food processing and distribution capacity, while providing new marketing and sales channels for our growers. The effort will also create new jobs across our region.

"Local-food facilities plan to join forces"

The publication The Country Today did a very nice story this week about our new Food Action Alliance. Here are a few quotes:

"Three southwestern Wisconsin food-processing facilities are making plans to work together to meet a growing urban demand for local food."

"The facilities employ developmentally disabled people from five counties to process and package food for local farmers and food companies."

"Local food-processing plants are the missing link between farmers and urban markets, Terrien said. He said there are about 35 million people within a half day's drive of southwestern Wisconsin, and they are looking for locally produced food."

"Terrien said Karen Lehman, executive director of Fresh Taste, an organization formed to advance local agriculture and healthful eating in Chicago, recently brought a five- state delegation to the Innovation Kitchen and left impressed.

"She said, ‘We have 8 million people in the Chicago metro area and this is what we need,' " Terrien said. "She said these kinds of facilities build communities and human capital."

"Terrien said he's optimistic that the Food Action Alliance project will take off.
'It's the next layer up,' he said. 'We're going to try three facilities working together first and then next year go to 10 and then after that go to 50.'"

Thanks to Jim Massey, Editor at The Country Today for a good story.

Our new food processing network is at the heart of one of America's great growing regions, and is within a half day's drive of 35 million people.

What a network like this represents to small and mid-scale food enterprises and consumers alike, are proprietary food processing supply chain services, where foods and their preparation can be regional, local, and even farm-identified. All product lines going through the network can be marketed under FACT Alliance shared brands or private labeled under customers' own brands.

In reality we will need all kinds of help, especially customers and sponsors, who would like to partner with us to grow this kind of network.

I'm convinced we can use these kinds of platforms to create jobs and to get increasing amounts of good food to growing numbers of people.

Our Food Action Alliance network is underway!




The Country Today article introducing the new 3-facility Food Action Alliance. Access fee charged

Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen, in Mineral Point, WI.

Greenco Industries, in Monroe, WI

Sharing Spaces Kitchen at the Opportunity Center in Prairie du Chien, WI.

Iowa County Area Economic Development, Come Grow With Us!