Kitchen Incubators Event
FOOD PROCESSING BUSINESS SEMINAR ATTRACTS REGIONAL AND XENIA INTEREST
Xenia City Councilman John Caupp, Community Development Director Mary Crockett, and five other persons from the City of Xenia were among forty-three participants attending a seminar at the City of Wilmington on Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010 on “Kitchen Incubators for the Food Entrepreneur.” The seminar speakers were Rebecca Singer, a food processing specialist with the Center for Innovative Food Technology in Toledo, Ohio and Larry Fisher, Director of Food Ventures for ACENet in Athens, Ohio. CIFT and ACENet are both “kitchen incubators,” non-profit organizations that help food growers, chefs, restaurant owners and others to create value-added food products and bring them to market. CIFT and ACENet both operate “shared use kitchens” for food entrepreneurs. CIFT and ACENet provide technical assistance with food processing, marketing research and direct marketing (farm to school, farm to chef), development of local/regional marketing, value-added crop feasibility studies, product development (food safety training, recipes, packaging, labeling), small business training and with integrating the use of alternative energy into food production. See CIFT at www.cift.eisc.org and ACEnet at www.acenetworks.org.
John Caupp, Xenia City Councilman, said that the City of Xenia has a number of entrepreneurial restaurateurs interested in using a shared community kitchen for bottling their proprietary products, as well as businesses interested in other aspects of the food-marketing system offered by CIFT and ACEnet. Sarah Wildman, Economic Sustainability Coordinator for the Village of Yellow Springs, discussed the rich corridor of possibilities all along Route 68 – from Wilmington to Urbana. Southwest Ohio is the only quadrant of Ohio without a food-incubator presence.
Mary Crockett, Community Development Director for the City of Xenia, indicates that the City of Xenia is interested in exploring partnership opportunities with Wilmington College, and also interested in pursuing related services some of which were discussed by Larry Fisher of ACEnet. As one of the nation’s oldest and most successful food incubators, ACEnet has experience assisting cities in the conversion of vacant downtown warehouse buildings into food-related technology incubators.
Seminar attendees from the City of Xenia included representatives from Central State University and Greene County Career Center, as well as representatives from Clinton, Greene, Clark and Hamilton counties. Sponsors for the seminar were Wilmington College, the City of Wilmington, the City of Xenia, the Village of Yellow Springs and Miami Township Community Resources, and land trusts Tecumseh Land Trust (Greene & Clark Counties) and Clinton County Open Lands, Inc. (Clinton Co.). A dinner of local foods was held afterwards at the General Denver Hotel for about 25 participants. All foods served were grown within ten miles of Wilmington, Ohio.
