By Ed Avis
La Cocina, a non-profit food business incubator in San Francisco, is going all out to help its current and graduated entrepreneurs survive the coronavirus crisis.
“We’ve been pretty much refocusing all of our efforts on COVID response,” says Katherine Sundt, La Cocina’s development associate.
The organization, founded in 2005, helps low-income entrepreneurs launch food businesses by providing commercial kitchen space, mentorship, education and connections to business opportunities. Most of the participants are people of color, including many immigrants. The organization has 39 entrepreneurs in the program now and more than 60 graduates, many of whom operate successful restaurants.
“Our entrepreneurs, both those still in the program and those who have graduated and have restaurants, have all been really impacted by COVID,” Sundt says. “In the weeks leading up to shelter-in-place they were already seeing the effects, and now downtown San Francisco is a ghost town.”
Food Boxes for Sale
One way La Cocina is helping the entrepreneurs is by selling boxes of food assembled from products made by the participants. The idea arose less than two weeks ago and the first boxes were sold on Friday.
“There’s a combination of fresh, frozen and packaged foods from the La Cocina entrepreneurs in each box,” Sundt explains. “For example there were some frozen tamales, tortilla chips, some juice, just a mix of things. Last week we produced 100 boxes that sold for $80 to $150 each, and people picked them up from our commercial kitchen. All of the proceeds go directly to the businesses.”
Sundt says they can only produce 100 boxes a week because social distancing rules limit the number of people who can work at any one time in the kitchen. All of the boxes sold quickly last week and all of them have already been reserved for this week.
“There’s a ton of food in each box,” she says. “You could probably get three or four meals out of each one.”
Direct Cash Fundraising
La Cocina also is helping its entrepreneurs by operating an Emergency Relief Fund (https://lacocinasf.org/relief-fund). They seeded the fund with $100,000 of their own, and as of Monday the fund had raised an additional $109,000. La Cocina’s entrepreneurs began applying for grants from the fund last week.
“We’re expecting about 80 applications,” Sundt says. “The money will be divided evenly among the applicants. We’ll try to do disbursements once a month for as long as we can.”
La Cocina also is helping its graduated members understand how their employees can apply for unemployment benefits and drafting letters that they can give to their landlords asking for rent abatements.
“It’s been hard to watch how COVID is affecting them,” Sundt says. “A lot of them are struggling personally and are unable to pay the rent. We’re making sure they know what resources are available to them.”