Is your creation edible? Now you can create your cake and eat it too!
Posted by Vanessa Ho at 3:05 PM
In my opinion, cooking is a form of innovation. I happened to stumble upon this concept of "incubator kitchens" while researching for a paper and it really reminded me of Sector 67. Incubator kitchens are kind of like the food version of a tech shop, where people pay for use of a commercial kitchen to produce things and innovate. Incubator kitchens help entrepreneurs to start up small food businesses by providing "on-demand" use of a commercial kitchen with kitchen equipment at an affordable cost. The incubators can also provide marketing and technical assistance to get products and businesses up and running. Madison doesn't currently have an incubator kitchen, but there are plans underway to develop one here.
I'm glad that there are toolkits available for ordinary people who might not have the resources in their kitchens or in their pockets to create wonderful (and edible) works of art.
Here's the link to the article
Eliminating large fixed costs seems to be the core idea of the kitchen...what about variable costs? I couldn't find anywhere in the article whether or not all, some, or no ingredients are stocked in the kitchen.
In addition, who would handle the costs of cleanup? Would cooks do their own cleanup, or would they pay for cleanup? Or is it standard for the kitchen to handle the cleanup?
As far as buying their own ingredients, I personally would want the kitchen to be stocked with ingredients, and be charged by a per pound or per item charge on a list of food available that I use, with unavailable items having to be bought myself.
This places the burden of storage on the kitchen, but I think by eliminating the need for people to buy their own food and make it convenient for them, you are truly allowing them to enter a stress-free world where they can truly create.
So the kitchen would ultimately want to weigh cost savings versus potentially attracting more customers.
This is a great example of a creativity enabler. The real question for me is the degree to which potential customers can effectively use their imagination to envision what they might do with these culinary tools. Thus, these kitchens may have to engage in some literacy work to help educate their potential customer base.