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When Afghani Ayoubi, proprietor of Pak-Afghan Food, came to Vermont in 2001, she didn’t know how she would feed her family. She didn’t know where she would live. In fact, she didn’t know anything about Vermont. Ayoubi came to Vermont from Afghanistan, her homeland, after spending five years as a refugee in Pakistan.
Like many who come to the United States as refugees, Ayoubi was fleeing political instability and violence in her home country. In Afghanistan she’d been a preschool teacher, so her first jobs in the U.S. were in daycare facilities. But as the sole supporter of her four children (her husband had disappeared in the country’s conflict and she didn’t know his whereabouts until 2005), the income wasn’t enough to support the family. So she decided to start her own food business.
It’s the classic American story: Come to America, start your own business. But for immigrants wanting to start food businesses, the details—like ingredient sourcing, health department regulations, and business licensing—can be particularly challenging. Community kitchens can make it much easier.
A community kitchen, sometimes called an incubator kitchen, is outfitted with industrial equipment and provides a licensed space in which to produce value-added food products. The space allows entrepreneurs to start small food businesses or grow their existing food business beyond their home kitchen, saving them the costly expense of having to build their own commercial kitchen to satisfy health department regulations.
Ayoubi, who is now 45 and lives in Barre, started by making traditional Afghan food in the small kitchen of her rented apartment. She stayed up late rolling the dough for mantu and diapazay, fried pastries filled with spinach, curried mushrooms, and other spiced vegetables. But the constant heat of the stove made her afraid of a fire, and her fridge was overflowing with food for other people, not for her family. She approached a local store about using their kitchen, and the store owner referred her to the Local Agricultural Community Exchange, or LACE. LACE is a nonprofit food market and café in downtown Barre dedicated to putting the community back in touch with local food and family farms.
When Ariel Zevon founded LACE in 2007, the community kitchen she envisioned had yet to be built. But she knew she wanted LACE to incubate small food businesses, so she offered Ayoubi use of the LACE restaurant kitchen in the evenings. Many small food businesses start this way—renting space after hours in someone else’s kitchen—but it’s not ideal. Community kitchens allow entrepreneurs to work during daylight, instead of at midnight in a kitchen set up for someone else’s business.
Ayoubi grew as LACE did. When the nonprofit received a grant to build a separate community kitchen in 2009, Ayoubi was the first food producer (there are now seven) to use the space that includes stainless-steel preparation tables, an industrial stove, and a walk-in cooler. As her business has grown, she has expanded from her first retail venue—Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier—to sell at several others, including City Market, Shelburne Supermarket, and the Capital City Farmers’ Market in Montpelier, where she trades with farmers for raw ingredients. Her husband, with whom she was reunited several years ago, helps her make deliveries.
“Being at LACE is good, because at home I was nervous,” Ayoubi says. “When I came here, it got good at home, because I had space at home again.” Ayoubi also notes that use of LACE’s walk-in cooler has allowed her to produce more food—and to reclaim the family’s refrigerator for the family.
The LACE community kitchen has three main objectives: to help aspiring food entrepreneurs start their new business using local ingredients whenever possible; to host educational programs covering such subjects as diet, nutrition, and seasonal cooking of farm-fresh local foods; and to provide a processing facility where local food can be made into year-round products that go beyond the current seasonal offerings. A few other community kitchens are in the planning stages throughout Vermont, and most have similar objectives. Some groups contemplating or planning kitchens are Food Works at Two Rivers Center in Montpelier, the Rutland Area Food and Farm Link, the Great Falls Food Hub in Windham County, and the Intervale Center in Burlington.
The community partnerships made possible by community kitchens are of particular benefit to immigrants, who can face isolation and difficulties acclimating to their new community. In addition, all the proposed kitchens in Vermont seek to connect independent food producers with local farmers and growers—links new immigrants might not be able to make on their own.
LACE provides an additional community link: partnerships with regional organizations that provide technical assistance in business planning, licensing and certification, production, packaging, and marketing. LACE works closely with the staff of two programs of the Central Vermont Community Action Council (CVCAC): the Micro Business Development Program and the Vermont Women’s Business Center. The kind of support provided by programs like these can help immigrants become familiar with the business environment in the U.S. and acquire the skills they need to create a successful business venture.
Lalitha Griffin, a Malaysian woman of Indian decent who has begun creating food for sale at the Capital City Farmers’ Market under the label “Lalitha’s Cuisine,” used this support from LACE and CVCAC as she developed her nascent business. Through LACE and CVCAC, she accessed assistance sourcing local foods, pricing her product, and cooking according to health department regulations. “If I’d tried to do this all on my own, it would have taken me a long time,” she says.
Another facility well established in Vermont that helps small food businesses produce value-added products is the Vermont Food Venture Center (FVC), currently located in Fairfax but soon to move to a brand-new facility in Hardwick. Established in 1996, the FVC has helped well over 100 small food producers envision, plan, test, produce, and market their value-added food products. The FVC provides business-incubation services that some smaller community kitchens might not be able to provide, most notably food science advice and safety testing in conjunction with the University of Vermont and Cornell University.
FVC Project Director Brian Norder notes that while few immigrants have produced food at the FVC, one famous immigrant entrepreneur has benefited from the organization’s services. Fuad Ndibalema, who hails from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is now known throughout Vermont as “Samosaman,” participated in a food business training program sponsored by the Vermont Foodbank and delivered by Norder. When Ndibalema was ready to expand to a custom-designed production facility in Winooski, Norder and the FVC helped him design the space. Ndibalema also has a small restaurant in downtown Montpelier now.
Sometimes, just extra kitchen space can serve a community function, as Benji Adler, owner of the Skinny Pancake restaurants in Burlington and Montpelier, discovered while searching for more room for the Skinny Pancake’s catering business. Adler ended up buying a property in Burlington’s Old North End, an area that is home to many immigrants and working families. This location, dubbed the “Chubby Muffin,” will offer baked goods and coffee and provide back kitchen space for the Skinny Pancake’s restaurant and catering operations, but those uses will occupy only a fraction of every day.
“We said, ‘let’s share this resource,’” Adler relates. “We don’t use it all the time, and it’s a way we can push the envelope of our local foods efforts and social mission.” He decided to one day use the extra space to package local foods and to provide a place for other community organizations seeking kitchen facilities.
When Adler spoke of his plans at a Burlington Food Council meeting, several organizations seized on the possibilities. The Vermont Campaign to End Childhood Hunger is eager for a place to hold “Cooking for Life” classes, designed to improve food security for families with limited budgets. City Market is also interested in using the space for cooking classes. The Skinny Pancake has also partnered with the New Farms for New Americans program of the Association of Africans Living in Vermont (see article on page 18) on a grant application which, if funded, will allow the community kitchen to be used as a value-added food processing space for produce that African immigrants grow at the Intervale Center.
There’s a lot to look forward to as Vermont’s community kitchens develop. Across the country, such kitchens are becoming more prevalent as people realize the many benefits of local food. Vermont, as a leader in local food production and small-scale agriculture, is well poised to develop a statewide network of community kitchens, each serving its host community in a unique way. The immigrants who join our communities from faraway places stand to benefit from, and contribute to, these kitchen communities in wonderful ways.
Sylvia Fagin writes about local food and agriculture from her home in Montpelier. Contact her via her blog, “Aar, Naam ~ Come, Eat,” at
sylviafagin.wordpress.com or via email at sylviafagin@yahoo.com.
Photo by Sylvia Fagan
