In this edition, hear from the executive director and founder of the Bohemia Food Hub in Cottage Grove. The organization offers people who are trying to get a start in the food industry a chance to rent commercial kitchen space and get advice on how to turn their passion into a living.
Bohemia Food Hub recently received $500,000 grant from the Oregon Department of Agriculture to expand its operation. It will allow more food-based small businesses and startups to access the commercial prep space and storage they need to grow.
Oregon Rainmakers host Zac Ziegler met up with Kim Johnson at the Bohemia Food Hub, a building that's easily spotted from the road because of the large butterfly mural on its exterior. She starts by telling Zac about her business.
Kim Johnson: Bohemia Food Hub is a shared use commercial kitchen and food business incubator. Ultimately, it started out as just a kitchen that served the needs of my food business, and I built this kitchen out. I scaled my food business, and I was still only using this space two days a week, which felt like a waste for the other five days. And so I started opening up and sharing the space with other food manufacturers, and then it just kept growing from there.
Zac Ziegler: So when people hear 'commercial kitchen,' people may be surprised to think about that notion that when they're buying something that's a cottage food ,this isn't someone's home kitchen often being used. You need a space like this for health code reasons.
Johnson: Right! Yeah, you quickly outgrow your home kitchen for cottage food law. I think they've like expanded it recently, but very quickly, if your business is going to grow, you'll need to find yourself a commercial kitchen, which is pretty challenging to find an affordable space when you're just starting up in food business, because you're surely not making any money.
Ziegler: At first, yeah, eventually, hopefully you get there.
Johnson: And that's the idea with the food hub, is that we have this shared infrastructure. We have wraparound support, we have a community of folks in this kitchen that are an open book and willing to share for the next folks coming in, demystifying the process of starting and growing those businesses.
Ziegler: So when you say, wrap around services, tell me a bit about what it is that you offer beyond this lovely commercial kitchen that we're now standing in.
Johnson: Yeah. So let's see, it's a myriad of ways that we offer the extra support. All of us are at some scale in our process of having either started, scaled, or sold a food business. And so for folks coming in, it's often myself that's offering that one-on-one support of how do you even begin? Who do you need to talk to get licensed? What kind of insurance do you need? What about nutrition facts? And so we have this wealth of information and this network of support so we're able to point people to those people to solve those problems. Oregon State University has the Food Innovation Center. That's a place where we point folks a lot, oftentimes, to get their nutrition facts figured out, or some nuance in their process for pH testing that's particularly relevant for hot sauces and any tomato-based products, jams and so for particular nuances, we'll send them over to Food Innovation Center. But for the most part, we're able here, myself and the other food manufacturers in the space, to kind of direct people in the basic initial steps of starting a food business. Also, we've offered, thanks to business Oregon's EEIP program, we were able to offer $5,000 micro grants to startup businesses. So in the past, we've been able to even offer financial support for those businesses to get started as well.
Ziegler: Start walking me through this space that we're sitting in here. I worked in commercial kitchens for a couple years, so I have some passing familiarity with space like this. But for those who don't necessarily know, tell us about it.
Johnson: Yeah, I will. Let's see. Over here, it's a basic dish pit. We started out very analog. It's a triple bay, is what it's called. It's a triple compartment sink, and it's the basic requirement for a commercial kitchen. So we've always had the analog triple bay sink. We've upgraded the size of it along the way, and more recently, we added a dishwasher from Auto-Chlor. These upgrades and additions come along the way and organically. So our dish pit is in this area. We have cold and freezer storage of all kinds. We have the walk-in cooler at the moment. It's an 8 by 10 walk-in cooler. It felt magnificent at the time. We outgrew it immediately. And so that's the nature of cold storage. In particular, there's a lot of swells in the needs for cold storage at the post harvest for farmers, this thing is packed to the gills. And so that was the impetus of our RFS. The application was like, wow, we will always outgrow our cold storage, and now we have a lot of these reach-in freezers and fridges to supplement as needed. So if we need to add some more, we can just plug in a couple of these for those swells. And then in the center, we have just general production space. Folks have varied needs, like from a major blitz, they might need all of these eight-foot tables, 10-foot tables, but some folks might just need a really small table to just try out or package something. These main production spaces are $15 or $18 an hour. And that little tiny flex zone over there is available for $10 an hour for somebody that's just trying to get started.
Ziegler: Real quick, the RFS, I that you mentioned, it was the Regional Food . . .
Johnson: Regional Food System Infrastructure Program.
Ziegler: And that's how I got introduced. I was doing a story on that. You got a nice size grant to expand what is going on.
Johnson: It is, it's true. I tell everybody, even though it's a magnificent kitchen, my feeling with this space is that it's been sort of the feasibility study mockup of what should this space be. How does it need to serve our region's producers? I built this kitchen initially for my business, which was a very specific Grab and Go perishable product. So we blitzed it in the kitchen and it went directly onto shelves and stores. Seven day shelf life. There was no storing it. It was just make it and get it to the stores. Many businesses in our kitchen make a shelf-stable product: pickled onions or sauces that get made, put in a jar and then palletized for later shipment. So there's all of these different models of business types and this kitchen, as these producers come in and use the space in these different ways, where we build out those zones in the kitchen to accommodate those different ways of producing food. So this has been this mockup of sort of responsive development as needed. All of a sudden I had bakers coming in, bakers that were looking for space. And I'm like, okay, let's build out a bake zone. And so this magnificent zone here has an $80,000 rack, a double rack oven that picks up your goods, spins them around, and bakes them real evenly. So something that a home baker certainly is not going to go and acquire 80 quart mixers, 20 quart mixers, proofers and a sheeter. So it has all of these items that are typically not accessible to somebody that just comes in to use a kitchen. That's equipment that you would have to purchase yourself, and it's cost prohibitive. So the idea is that we buy these pieces of equipment as needed, we write these grants, we buy these pieces, and folks can then come in and use them.
Ziegler: These things make your stand mixer in a home kitchen, just, look like a cute little toy, right, for your kids? Yeah, yeah, it's the Fisher Price My First Mixer.
Johnson: I know, I know, that Easy Bake Oven
Ziegler: Yeah.
Johnson: And this zone over here is our bottling zone. So this is where folks will come in. We have a kettle, a steam-jacketed kettle. Over here folks will make their sauces in there and then fill into their jars and have their products over there. So this is a highly used area, and again, informed the new design of our kitchen remodel from the RFSI. We will have a dedicated space for bottling because half of our tenants use that sort of model.
Ziegler: So let's talk a little bit about the industry of small food producers in general, and kind of that entrepreneurial food producer. This is something that I guess, as I've gotten a little older, I've kind of become more aware of. You start going around to the farmers markets and you see folks making products that would be made in a place like this. Is it an industry that really seems to be in growth, or is it just that I was not necessarily that aware of it before?
Johnson: Yeah, post pandemic. So the pandemic was a game changer for inquiries into our kitchen space, and there was an incredible uptick in folks that were curious about starting a food business. We've been at this for 14 years. Jeff Green, for example, is the ODA inspector for our area, so if you want to make any products, he's your guy that is going to have to issue you your food processing license. And so initial inquiries will be made there or to other kitchen spaces, and often, folks will point those inquiries toward us, to Bohemia Food Hub, because we have this space that's able to accommodate from startup to scaling businesses. It is incredible the number of people that have come out after the pandemic, pursuing their passions to make food and quitting their day job that makes them unhappy, or doing both, which is often the case, both. And until you have a business that is growing your food business, you can't really let that livelihood go, right- your your day job go. So it's often the case that people will come in here. Half of my tenants do have day jobs that pay the bills as they're growing their passion work. And so this has definitely grown exponentially since that time. Also our RFSI is also informed by food security in this area and access to our valley's bounty. So most people didn't really understand what food security meant until the pandemic, and all of a sudden we have this awareness of, oh, right, we need to make sure that we can access- that our consumers here in this area- can access all of this incredible wealth of food produced by the producers. And so that is another role that the food hub is going to serve is not only as a shared use commercial kitchen, but as infrastructure to support and help radiate that food that is produced here into the stores and make it more easily accessible by the consumers.
Ziegler: Yeah, because oftentimes, the farmers are plenty busy farming. They aren't necessarily going to be handling distribution things like that. They need a middle person to help them with that.
Johnson: That's absolutely it, and that's what a food hub is all about. People are sort of like, what is a food hub? Well, it is a newer concept, and it's a USDA notion, this idea of cold storage, distribution and the ability to aggregate that produce, right? Like all of the folks that are growing kale or spinach or apples, if they're all dropping off at food hubs. Then that aggregated amount can then be radiated out to a say, Farm to School. And food hubs often have a distribution element, a refrigerated truck that can then go pick that produce up, bring it here, process and then get it to where it needs to go. But it's an essential piece to programs like Farm to School- it has to pass through a commercial kitchen space.
Ziegler: All right, so we've, we've gone through a lot of the questions that I had for you on this. But what is there that we haven't talked about that someone like me should know about the whole idea of food hubs in these kitchens that help grow the small businesses in the food sector?
Johnson: I wouldn't have been able to 10 or 15 years ago. I would never have thought that this is what my 5000-square-foot building should be. I had ideas of how to optimize this space when I was a food manufacturer, but would never have thought I needed forklifts and pallet racking as part of my kitchen design. I had a perishable food product. It was fresh- it's like a sandwich wrapped in a collared wrap. So it just goes on a shelf. Forklifts have nothing to do with it, but when you're making a shelf-stable jarred product, all of a sudden it triggers this. And so I think the the biggest gift that we've had is the ability to develop organically and responsively, based on the needs for our specific region. We have food hubs all over the state right now. Folks might not be aware of that, but there's probably nearly a dozen food hubs around the state, and each one is designed very specifically to that region. What's happening in that region around food with our partners on the coast, Central Coast Food Web in Newport, they're very heavy in fish processing, so their facility is very different than ours. It's also a food hub with infrastructure like refrigerated distribution vehicles, kitchens, pallet racking forklifts, but they're processing fish, right, so that they can get it out and into the other areas of the region. I think that's the biggest surprise with Bohemia Food Hub, is that it turns out, in our region, in the Willamette Valley, cold storage is a big component, right? Cold storage to be able to preserve the harvest, to be able to preserve what you've pulled out in September, October, and then create value-added products. We've also purchased a lot of equipment that accommodates that specific need for farmers as well to create value-added products. We have a commercial dehydrator and a batch pasteurizer that are designed to take those products from the field and turn them into a product.
Ziegler: Great. Well, thanks for letting me in today, showing me around and having a chat with me.
Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for your interest. Thanks for coming in.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
