Kitchen Center has menu for success

If not for the Kitchen Center at the Spokane Airport Business Park, Huckleberry’s customers would not be savoring a Desserts By Dan cheesecake. The health-conscious would not be thinking good thoughts about Craniums. Brides would be not be slicing Edible Elegance wedding cakes.

And Spokane would be missing a tiny slice of its economic pie, a slice some community leaders would like to grow by combining kitchen space with a farmers market relocated somewhere near the University District.

The Kitchen Center has rented its space and equipment to ambitious cooks since 1996, although the facility on Godfrey Road dates to at least the 1980s. Business Park Director Beth Anne King estimates 152 businesses have used the kitchen over the last eight years, employing 268 in the process. This year, the number of tenants peaked at 11.

The kitchen’s spotless 1,137 square feet houses microwave, convection and stack ovens, a six-burner gas stove, steam kettle and yards of stainless steel counter space. Without it, says Desserts’ Dan Meyer, his cheesecake business would crumble like so much graham cracker crust.

“There’s no way I would have been able to start,” he says. “They’ve got everything out there that I need.”

Meyer rents about 20 hours per month in the kitchen, but expects that time to increase thanks to a new Huckleberry’s deal. He also pays additional fees for use of a locker and cold-storage space where he keeps ingredients, and for use of various appliances. Rents run from $12 an hour for drop-in users to $6.25 an hour for 20 hours per month. There is no charge for local telephone calls, garbage pickup, pest control and other services.

Meyer says he was directed to the center by the Spokane County Health District, which gives each new tenant a short course in the proper preparation of food for sale to the public. That food must be prepared in a commercially licensed kitchen.

Depending on the product, tenants might also need business, catering or other licenses, a food-handling permit, and Food and Drug Administration- approved labels. Everyone must have $1 million in product liability insurance, which costs about $700 per year. That’s a lot of hoops to go through, but Ron Grossman, president of Body Well Design, says gaining access to the Kitchen Center lends the product and maker credibility.

Body Well Design sells Craniums, a “nutraceutical” candy Grossman says stimulates the body’s production of dopamine and serotonin, which relieve stress. Several local nutritional centers sell Craniums.

Grossman estimates it would cost more than $15,000 to purchase new the Kitchen Center equipment he uses to make the candies. By comparison, the center is a sweet deal.

King says the center can offer low rates because, with the exception of the kitchen’s new $2,000 freezer, most of the equipment has long since been depreciated. The center is profitable even with annual revenues of around $9,000.

She says rents and other fees are kept to a minimum to encourage use of the kitchen as a small-business incubator. Although not proprietary, King says relocating the kitchen or starting another in conjunction with a University District farmers market may put rents beyond the reach of would-be entrepreneurs.

Dave Bauermeister, director for Ag & Natural Resources at the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce, is leading the group reviewing options for a new farmers market. A commercial kitchen would help drive economic development around a market, he says, but organizers might have to start with just cold storage for produce to keep costs low.

“No one wants to duplicate anything that’s already in the community,” Bauermeister says. “We can’t afford that.”

Meanwhile, the future of the struggling kitchen at the Bonner Business Center in Sandpoint looks brighter thanks to small rent hikes, renegotiated debt, and interest by new tenants. And the Westminster Presbyterian Church on West Boone in Spokane has applied for a $211,000 grant to fund a commercial kitchen where more poor and battered women could be put to work preparing Christ Kitchen foods.

Director Jan Martinez says adding cooked foods to Christ Kitchen’s line of dried mixes and teas would spread to more months sales that now are overwhelmingly concentrated in the holiday gift-giving season.

Like a good sauce, the dream of putting a farmers market and community kitchen together has simmered for a long time. But the church’s grant request suggests buying fresh produce and locally prepared salsa under an open July sky may still be some years away. Starting with cold storage sounds like a good idea. Until that happens, Spokane’s bakers, caterers and cooks have an excellent low-cost alternative at the Airport Business Park.