Piedmont Food Processing Center has the space and equipment for most food business to make their products efficiently. (courtesy of Piedmont Food Processing Center)
The Piedmont Food Processing Center (PFAP) in Hillsborough, North Carolina, is a commissary and incubator facility operating four commercial kitchen rooms. Today, one of the rooms is occupied by Chef Tova Boehm and her team at Short Winter Soups. They make about 50 gallons of soup from local ingredients every week. “It's a good space for us,” says Boehm. “It's big, there's a lot of storage, there's a lot of perks and add-ons that make it easy for a small business like us to operate.”
PFAP Executive Director Eric Hallman says the space serves primarily as a home for new food businesses -- entrepreneurs who have outgrown the home kitchen but aren’t at the level of having their own factory or production space. “People come to the facility, they rent kitchen space by the hour, they rent dry or refrigerated or frozen storage, and they start their food business,” he explains. “Without this, the barriers to starting a business would be significant.”
Each kitchen is outfitted with ranges, ovens, freezers, and coolers, and also specialty equipment like a chocolate tempering machine, a bottler, and a liquid nitrogen blast freezer. About 60 local food producers currently work out of P-FAP. There are caterers, food truck chefs, and people making packaged goods like mushroom jerky, lactation cookies, and barbeque sauce. In order to accommodate this many people sharing the facility, it is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. These hours require that all clients have something resembling team spirit. “Everyone here knows that the facility works, because everybody helps each other,” says Eric. “So it kind of runs itself.” But he laughs that “it's also like having 60 roommates and somebody is always leaving the dirty cup in the sink.”
And a dirty cup, at a commercial food kitchen, can be a sign of a bigger issue. “Our one fear is that there'll be one bad actor who will cause the whole facility to have to be shut down if they are doing something that is unsafe,” Eric says. All clients are walked through basic food safety training, and cleaning and sanitation are always on the forefront of Eric’s mind. Out in the hallway, food safety consultant Currey Nobles is taking photos for an upcoming webinar on safe kitchen practices for the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association. He says he’s here because PFAP serves as an example of how to food safety the right way. “I've been in a lot of food facilities that have really, really terrible floors, and that can be a big issue for cross-contamination and foodborne illness outbreaks,” he says “Here, all of the curves along the floors and the walls is very smooth and rounded.. So I've been kind of down on my knees taking pictures of the floor.”
In another of the four kitchens is Dr. Kalpna Ramjii, who is trained as a nutritionist. Her business Safi Foods produces a low-carb flour mix. Today is her first food safety inspection with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, and she and the Department of Agriculture representative are bent over a giant industrial mixer, having trouble with its settings. They wave over Sue Ellsworth, the facilities manager for PFAP, to troubleshoot. For Sue, it’s important to help clients through checks from the local health department, the Department of Agriculture, or the FDA. She started here as a producer herself, with the popsicle company LunaPops, and remembers those hurdles well. Her favorite topic is also one the trickiest for new producers -- regulatory guidance for things like allergens and labeling. She shares an experience she had when she was running her own business. “One of our popsicles was a hibiscus pop,” she says. “And we had that out for a couple of years before we realized that hibiscus is typically intercropped with peanuts when you purchase it from Egypt. So we had to go back and really look at the product and make sure that we had the appropriate allergen information on it. Luckily, we had always put on our boxes that the product was manufactured in a shared commercial kitchen. But we were a little surprised to find out that that was the case.”
A big part of Sue’s job is providing training in everything from operational planning to product marketing. And she’s finding there are more and more home-grown businesses in need of these services. “A lot of people have had a lot of time to work on making products at home, and now they’ve decided they want to go into food,” she says. “A lot of these folks have no food experience. They were just locked up at home, making strawberry jam, or making barbecue sauce, or whatever it was.” In addition to providing trainings, P-FAP operates a scholarship for free kitchen time, a statewide network of incubator kitchens, and a grant program for purchasing local produce. Sue also runs WE Power Food, an organization that supports women operating food businesses. “Women try to do everything themselves,” she says. “And when you're an entrepreneur, you're often working in a silo. So you don't have the support that you need. WE Power Food is really about providing educational resources, tools, networking, and most importantly, a safe place for women to be able to share what they're dealing with and ask for help when they need.”
A WE Power Food mentor and PFAP client is Ashlyn Smith of Spicy Green Gourmet, an established catering company that provides over 600 individually portioned meals a week for food banks, Meals on Wheels, and other clients in the community. Her business has been around for 10 years. “I’m able to say that there is a light in the tunnel,” she says of what she tells other women entrepreneurs. “You keep working at it, and there's gonna be trial[s], but you keep going forward.” She shared these words at a recent meet-up, but also says that producers often catch her in the PFAP hallway to talk.
A handful of products made out of PFAP now have national distribution, but for Director Eric Hallman, every business that’s still running, especially through a pandemic, is a success. “We're just as proud of these smaller regional brands,” he says. “We help people define what success is, and a success may be ‘I've got a little I've got a local business that people love.’ [And] of the 130 companies that have come through here, 75% of those companies are still in business. We're very proud of that.”
Listen to the audio version of this story on this episode of Earth Eats.
