Do you have a signature dish or recipe that friends and family rave about?
Constantly being told that you should start a food truck or open a restaurant?
You’d like to give it a try but you’d want to get your feet wet first before taking the plunge? Or maybe you’re ready but you don’t yet have sufficient funds to make this part of your dream a reality. Or maybe you don’t want to have a full-time food business but like the idea of making baked goods on the side to sell at farmers markets.
Maybe you’ve heard or thought about working out of a shared kitchen space to get started. As we approach our one year anniversary, I’m going to share what with you what I’ve learned in my journey so far.
Special note: (March 24, 2021) I started this post on March 26, 2019 and here we are almost two years later! So much has changed, but all for the better if I do say so myself. Last March we were in the process of transitioning from the shared commercial kitchen to our own space; it feels good to have grown to this point. I still get questions about working out of a shared commercial kitchen and thought it best not to leave this post laying dormant in my drafts. Back in 2019 though I was ready to publish, I felt (and still do now) that I needed to post video along with this expounding on my bullet points. By hitting publish today I’m holding myself accountable to creating those videos!
It was not my intention to start Amazing Ackee LLC in the way that we did. For very much of our journey up to this point we’ve been figuring things out as we go.
When I started this blog in March 2017 the intention was to share my passion (read: obsession) for the versatility of ackee. It was my intention to write a book, but I couldn’t contain my excitement and the blog became the outlet. Since then I’ve gotten the following questions countless times:
Where is your restaurant? Do you have a restaurant? When are you going to open a restaurant? Do you have a food truck? Are you going to do a pop-up? Where can I buy this? How can I taste this? and so on.
We’re in Connecticut and the cottage food laws here are strict. There have been updates since but at the time you weren’t allowed to make food or baked goods for sale out of your home kitchen. We explored going the food truck route but there were challenges there as well. All of this lead to taking the leap and forming Amazing Ackee LLC in March of 2018 and acquiring a bakery license to sell ackee patties locally while working out of a third party commercial kitchen as for us it was the most cost effective option out the gate.
Our main product is our patties. So our prep consists of: making dough, making fillings, shaping the patties and baking. This is important since depending on what product you’re making your prep breakdown will be different. Also when I talk about the tips some of these things will be related to our experience so having an understanding of what we do will help you differentiate when trying to see how it would relate to your business.
Without further ado, here are the advantages and challenges of working in a shared commercial kitchen and some tips to make the best of it.
Advantages of Working in a Shared Commercial Kitchen:
- Test drive your idea
- Access to full kitchen
- Build a customer base & sales
- Low cost
- Pivot with ease
Challenges in working out of a shared commercial kitchen:
- Working around kitchen availability and time of other users
- Difficult to capitalize on last minute orders/opportunities
- Comes a point where your volume makes renting on an hourly basis not worth it
Tips for successfully working out of a commercial kitchen:
- Start small
- Use credit only if you have to and WISELY if you do
- Get tools that improve your efficiency as soon as you can afford them. Don’t sleep on Ebay, Craigslist or closing restaurant auctions
- Understand that time is money, literally!
- Be efficient always – Set yourself up for success
- Get help
- Pay attention to work flow – write your list before going to the kitchen
- Streamline as much as you can from orders etc
- Find and use free resources around you
- Just start, you’ll have to learn and adjust along the way