Bangor will make a kitchen for compact food stuff corporations at a previous Air Power officers’ club
The previous web page of the officers’ club for Dow Air Drive Foundation in Bangor will be transformed subsequent yr into a shared-use business kitchen area, following the metropolis was awarded extra than $1 million in congressionally directed money for it very last week.
The kitchen area, to be located at 50 Cleveland St. by the University of Maine at Augusta campus in Bangor, will supply little food items producers across japanese Maine a likelihood to scale up their corporations affordably, with out getting to make their possess pricey investments in larger production facilities.
“This new business enterprise progress facility will make a experienced, shared-use natural environment for Maine farmers and other agricultural producers to mature their companies and increase price to their items, supporting employment throughout the area,” said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, who supported the project.
There is an untapped prospective in foods-primarily based small companies in Maine, reported Tanya Emery, Bangor’s group and financial growth director. Quite a few run out of their houses but absence both the funds or the facilities to broaden generation.
“It’s definitely challenging to make the leap from a household-based company into a genuine commercial company with larger production house,” Emery said. “This will be a middle point. You never have to generate your individual manufacturing facility area. You can entry a cooperative share of a room, in which we supply the elementary parts you will need to grow.”
The new facility will give area for industrial baking, cooking, canning and packaging, and for chilly and dry storage, among other prospective purposes. Businesses can signal up for time slots to use the several facilities. There is just one other identical shared industrial kitchen area in Maine — Fork Food Lab in Portland — but Bangor’s area will be the to start with municipally owned position of its type in the condition.
For nearby meals producers like Todd Simcox of Todd’s Salsa in Bangor, a facility like Bangor’s will mean that he can actually commence building his Maine item in-point out once more.
“We utilized to create in Gray, and now we generate in Connecticut. There is just no area for us to make our solution right here in Maine, even while we are proudly a Maine business enterprise,” Simcox explained. “We’ve desired a facility like this for a long time now, and I assume it’s heading to make items a good deal much easier for people like us to retain it local.”
Emery said that the strategy for a city-owned commercial kitchen has been kicked close to for additional than a decade. But that thought didn’t get started to turn out to be a fact right up until 2016, when the Maine Army Nationwide Guard gave the making at 50 Cleveland St. to the metropolis, immediately after it vacated the premises.
For decades, the 19,000-square-foot setting up, constructed in 1957, was made use of as workplaces and as an officers’ club for equally Dow Air Power Base and the subsequent guard base.
“It used to host banquets and activities, and there was a bar region and a practical kitchen area. Of course, the kitchen hadn’t been up to date in many years, but the simple capability was there — plumbing, wiring, a hood technique, all that,” Emery explained.
The metropolis undertook some simple renovations of the building in 2018, together with asbestos removing and other structural get the job done, but it desires substantially much more operate to get it up to code and performing as a modern facility.
When the option arrived to approach Collins about supporting funding the challenge with federal income, Emery said the town jumped at the likelihood, and Collins was enthusiastic about it.
It is all section of a broader effort to help task development and workforce progress in the Bangor location, in equally the foods marketplace and the trades.
A similar undertaking, a collaboration involving Bangor, Brewer, Orono and Previous Town, was recently awarded a $375,000 grant by the Federal Reserve Financial institution of Boston, as portion of its Performing Communities Obstacle. That grant will help do the job to transfer individuals with felony histories and compound use problem into jobs, mostly in the foodstuff service business and the trades.
Emery stated she expects the design procedure for the business kitchen to start in the coming months, with the task open for design bids someday in the tumble. She anticipates operate to start sometime in the to start with fifty percent of 2023. Emery mentioned the metropolis hopes to husband or wife with a area non-profit to deal with functions of the facility.
Correction: A preceding model of this tale misstated how a lot of the overall project the $1 million in federal cash would include.