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Bake a bigger pie in an incubator kitchen
When there's only so much pie to go around, there are a couple choices. In a socialist society, it's carved up into tiny pieces and everyone gets a crumb or two. In a capitalist society, everyone fights for the biggest share, and, ultimately, it all ends up on one plate.
Ron Steiner believes in a third choice. Make the pie bigger.
Where that leaves him politically isn't really clear, but one needn't see pie on his bib to believe that crazy ideas like that just might work.
Call it a leap of faith, but understand that faith, without works, never gets the pie baked to begin with.
So, with a little faith and quite a bit of work from a lot of faithful people, Steiner today stands in his "incubator kitchen" in a Hart industrial park, urging whoever has a crazy idea to get cooking and share a pie that needn't be limited by the size of the plate, or even the oven.
This is no longer abstract thought. There really is a kitchen in Hart where people can try new recipes, develop new tastes, get support when it's needed and build a marketing plan.
The whole thing started several years ago, Steiner said, when the Michigan Partnership for Product Agriculture was formed to investigate how agriculture could break out of its commodity mentality. Farmers, it seems, were growing all the ingredients for a pie, but never put them each together.
"We were all defining value-added on our own," Steiner said. "The idea that came from the partnership, which was chaired by the Michigan Integrated Food and Farming Systems (MIFFS), was that we needed to put all those pieces together to stimulate food-based entrepreneurial opportunities."
It was an idea MIFFS had espoused for years, and one that was being promoted by the relatively new Michigan State University (MSU) Product Center for Agriculture, which had gotten started in part due to the efforts of then-MIFFS director, the late Tom Guthrie. With MSU, Farm Bureau, the Michigan Economic Development Corp. (MEDC), the Michigan Department of Agriculture, USDA and nearly 50 other interested parties at the table, there seemed to be a lot of faith that agriculture's economic pie, small as it was, could slide into the oven. MSU's Product Center was beginning to warm with help from a $1 million USDA grant, but the Michigan Partnership for Product Agriculture had already been talking about value-added products, and wanted to move ahead with incubator kitchens. That's when the heat was turned up.
The flame was provided by two USDA Rural Business Enterprise grants to MIFFS, which, according to executive director Elaine Brown, worked with the MEDC to get the two grants off and cooking with feasibility studies for incubator kitchens in Oceana County and Huron County.
The two $283,700 grants enabled both areas to take a leap of faith, but so far, only the Oceana region has begun to take on the aroma of pie.
Huron County, according to Carl Osentoski, Executive Director of the Huron County Economic Development Center, is still trying to pick a location for its regional incubator kitchen.
"We've finished the environmental work on an older industrial building we can convert, and we have another site that has a kitchen in it, and we're debating to see if there's room there to do what we want," he said. "In the meantime, we've put up a business mentoring program with up to seven retirees who can give people the advantage of their lifelong business experience for guidance and direction."
Which maps the way back to Hart, where an early October opening of the incubator kitchen (actually, there are two kitchens in the building) is beginning to send fragrance throughout an eight-county region.
"We have a dozen clients ready to go," Steiner said. "We have one kitchen for catering, and another commercial kitchen. We'd like to have revenue of $10,000 a month within three to six months, at an average hourly rate of $12 per hour, providing the clients have an MDA food establishment license ahead of time. Clients will have access to the building 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so there's a real element of trust."
Clients not only are enabled to experiment in the kitchens anytime of the night or day, but the building offers office space, computer access, an entrepreneurship library, staff support, dry goods storage, walk-in freezers and coolers and more, as the client list - and income - grows. The MDA will offer instruction in sanitation and adherence to law, as well as business training.
There's one more key ingredient to this pie. The MIFFS-generated grants helped with feasibility studies and got the project off the ground, but for operational funds, the kitchen is on its own. That's why Steiner, along with office administrator Jane Dosemagen and husband Jim Henley, the kitchen manager, incorporated into The Starting Block, Inc., in order to contract services.
For Jane and Jim, who at one time operated a restaurant in Hart, it also was a leap of faith just to believe in an infant incubator kitchen, but their input is invaluable, Steiner said.
"I'm the dreamer, and Jane is the practical one," he said.
"Jim is the muscle, and also is a chef," Jane said, "so it was kind of a natural fit for us. We had received a survey before from the feasibility study, and Jim said he'd like to use the kitchen to work on new recipes, so we both were intrigued by the incubator kitchen project," she said.
Entrepreneurs such as Jim and Jane are just the kind of folks who are supposed to be intrigued by an incubator kitchen, and the opportunities it offers are likely to flourish as the pie gets bigger.
"This takes a lot of the risk away," said Chris Peterson, director of MSU's Product Center for Agriculture. "And it takes a lot of the costs away too. Especially for the small entrepreneur or small farmer, incubator kitchens offer them the ability to connect with their local community on a small scale, which is the key to this kind of venture. You really have to have the support of the local community, and Ron Steiner is a terrific cheerleader who has made this happen."
Steiner said he had good models. He and several other principals in the incubator kitchen venture received invaluable input from the Community Kitchen Incubator in Athens, Ohio, but there's another source of inspiration, and, appropriately, it's right in Hart's backyard.
"About five years ago," said John Bakker, executive director of the Michigan Asparagus Advisory Board, "the asparagus industry got a grant to study the industry, and the recommendation from that was to expand into fresh markets. Buyers at that point considered Michigan an unreliable supplier to the fresh markets. We tended to want to jump in when the fresh market was good and processing was low, and when it wasn't, we'd abandon it. So then we formed the Michigan Asparagus Growers Inc. (MAGI), and got growers to sign a contract to supply a steady supply of fresh asparagus, and that enabled our guys who were packing fresh to invest in new fresh infrastructure. Some folks made new packing lines. In the last four years, we went from less than 10 percent of the crop going to fresh markets to 25 percent. It helped the Michigan industry sustain itself, where Washington and California growers have seen drastic declines."
Aside from the economic advantages, Steiner said, MAGI was and is a great model for cooperation, which will help that pie get bigger.
"The asparagus growers have become more cooperative than ever before," he said. "They share data, and have really become a community."
That's where the pie comes out of the oven. When a community bands together to share the pie, they tend not to worry about how big it is. They can always bake another one. And that's what incubator kitchens are all about. There are always new ideas, some good and some not so good. But even the crazy ideas sometimes make sense when put in a pie. How big it is will be decided by that community, as long as they're all working together in the kitchen.
"If we can work together," Steiner said, "the pie can be bigger."
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