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Food entrepreneurs who share a warehouse kitchen space in Long Island City, Queens, talk about what makes their products special. Inside a brick warehouse in Queens, Free Bread turns out gluten-free loaves for tables at Le Bernardin, Blue Hill at Stone Barns and the cafeteria at Facebook’s headquarters just south of Union Square in Manhattan. Down the hall, Bronx Hot Sauce bottles its secret recipe for sale at New York’s Greenmarkets and Whole Foods. And upstairs, the Hella Company concocts bitters and tonics in huge steel tanks. None are household names — not yet, anyway. But the food entrepreneurs at work at the Organic Food Incubator, and dozens more like them, are churning out handcrafted treats to satisfy discriminating palates in a city that never stops eating and never stops talking about eating. New York, of course, has an extraordinarily vibrant and eclectic restaurant scene as well as what seems like an endless number of specialty food stores. This culinary passion is fueling a growing business sector: food start-ups, driven by weekend chefs, career changers and others hoping to turn their recipes and ambition into money-making businesses. “Food is as hot as tech right now,” said Richard Madonna, the chief financial officer at Union Theological Seminary, who in 2013 founded an incubator, Union Food Lab, to help aspiring food entrepreneurs get their start. “You go into any market, and there’s a huge selection of products that are made here in New York City. It’s artisanal, it’s small batch, it’s handmade.” In 2014, the city documented a total of 1,078 food manufacturing companies employing 16,356 workers, up from 940 companies and 14,284 workers in 2008. Those numbers do not fully capture the picture, because many businesses are run illegally out of home kitchens or fail before they get off the ground, according to food industry consultants and others. City officials, seeing food start-ups as sources of jobs and revenue, have invested more than $2.5 million since 2010 to develop three culinary incubators, the Entrepreneur Space in Long Island City, Queens; HBK Incubates in East Harlem; and a third that is scheduled to open early next year, Brooklyn FoodWorks in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The incubators provide access to commercial kitchens and equipment, typically below market rates, along with a host of other support services, like help getting insurance or connecting with potential buyers. “We see it as an area of growth,” Miquela Craytor, director of industrial initiatives for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, said. Brooklyn FoodWorks has signed up 30 companies before it even opens its doors; the incubator’s “turnkey cooking experience” includes garbage removal and laundry service for towels and aprons. “We are trying to promote and support the entrepreneurs who are looking to turn their passion for food into a profitable business,” Drew Barrett, its president, said. The growing infrastructure of publicly and privately financed kitchen spaces and artisanal marketplaces has eased the way for a new generation of food entrepreneurs. Kathrine Gregory, a consultant who worked with a nonprofit group in 1996 to create what she described as the city’s first culinary incubator on Court Street in Brooklyn, recalled that those earlier efforts were often built around job training programs. Today, Ms. Gregory oversees an expanding roster of more than 300 “food-preneurs,” as she calls them, at the city-backed Entrepreneur Space, a 12,000-square-foot incubator divided into four kitchens, classrooms and offices in Long Island City. “A lot of them are professionals coming out of other industries,” she said. “In the 1990s, a lot of them were home cooks. Now we still have home cooks, but also former lawyers and financial services executives.” In Harlem, the Union Food Lab has been used by more than 40 food start-ups, a dozen of which have become regulars. Others have fizzled. Mr. Madonna, who often stops by for tastings, recalled that one woman found out the hard way that her brownie recipe did not work on a large scale. “I think my face when I tried the brownie said a lot,” he said. Mr. Madonna, who charges $25 an hour to use the kitchen, said he hears from newcomers every week, including one recently who makes an alcohol-infused gummy bear. “In technology, there’s a barrier for many entrepreneurs — you need to understand coding — but in food, you just need a good recipe and you need to be motivated,” he said. The Hella Company is one success story. It grew out of the home brews that Jomaree Pinkard, Tobin Ludwig and Eduardo Simeon used to give out as birthday and holiday gifts. They were such a hit that in 2011, the men set out to raise $900 through a Kickstarter campaign to make enough for all of their friends. They raised $2,300, or enough for extra bottles that they handed out to bars and liquor stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The orders poured in. The three men scraped together $7,500 and founded their company with no investors, employees or storefront. Instead, they rented space first at HBK Incubates, and after outgrowing that, the Organic Food Incubator. This year alone, they have realized nearly $1 million in sales so far of their bitters, mixes and do-it-yourself cocktail kits, up from $500,000 the year before. Mr. Pinkard, 37, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania who previously worked as a consultant for the National Football League, said Hella could not have succeeded without the incubators. “If you’re not financed upfront, there are all these things you need, which are impossible for a start-up,” he said. “For most companies that would stop you in your tracks.” At HBK Incubates, which is run by the nonprofit Hot Bread Kitchen, nearly one-third of the 140 companies that have used the kitchen were started by low-income residents. Clinton Shabazz, for instance, used to sell the pies that he baked for his company, the Harlem PieMan, off a table on 125th Street. With the incubator’s help, he has formalized and expanded the company. Last month, he filled one of his largest orders yet: 300 pecan, sweet potato and apple crumb minipies for Barnard College.
