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If you're looking for "I Spys," dating or LTRs, this is your scene.

Promptly at 9 a.m. last Thursday, Esther Lotz assembled a very official, slightly intimidating crew in a Winooski parking lot. Two fire marshals, an electrical inspector, and a plumbing and heating inspector followed her into a warehouse — not to deduce the cause of a blaze but to assure Lotz that the building wasn't a tinderbox.

A commanding commercial real estate broker, Lotz had called on this team of city and state experts for a preliminary tour of the space with two of her clients, both owners of small food production businesses. The next day, a third would join them for a walk-through with a health inspector. For all three entrepreneurs, this was the furthest they'd gotten in a yearslong search for their own commercial kitchen space.

For an hour that Thursday morning, every inch of the building was scrutinized by Lotz's "fire safety heroes." Winooski fire marshal Bruce Palmer and assistant state fire marshal Chris Boyd pointed out sprinklers, spots for hood vents, and the need for a fire wall or two. Vince Bent, a state electrical inspector, took a close look at the breaker. State plumbing and heating inspector Ann Ross rattled off the math equation used to determine the necessary size of a grease trap.

The two prospective tenants, Angela Chicoine and Sarah Howley, got really, really excited about a hole in the wall that could be used for a hood vent. Its existence could help save some money, which would be huge: Hoods range anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000.

But for all three entrepreneurs, even this preliminary step was a significant one in Chittenden County's competitive commercial kitchen landscape. Lotz has been in business for 35 years and knows all the options on the market. She's shown Chicoine, Howley and Hill just about everything out there.

"Vermont is making a fabulous name for itself with its food products," she said. "Spaces are always coming available, but unless they have $100,000 to put into a space to fit it up, it can take two or three years for entrepreneurs to find the right one."

In order to sell their food, producers making everything from pickles to pies to prepared meals must operate out of inspected, licensed kitchens. Many start by working in their homes, but home-based license exemptions come with limits on sales and equipment. When it's time for these businesses to grow, it's hard to find somewhere to go.

A lack of suitable commercial kitchens doesn't just hurt small business owners hoping to get a little bigger. Even when operating on a tiny scale, they create jobs and increase demand for Vermont-grown ingredients. They add to the variety of what's available in the local food scene, whether creating homegrown alternatives to mass-produced products or bringing underrepresented cuisines to pop-ups and events.

According to data shared in Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund's Farm to Plate specialty food brief, food manufacturing represents $3 billion in economic output in Vermont. Many of those manufacturers — such as Ben & Jerry's, to name one iconic example — are nationally known. They all start small, but Ben & Jerry's gas-station-to-global-domination model has become harder to achieve. And it's the first step past the gas station that's creating a bottleneck.

Will Clavelle said the demand predates the pandemic; he's seen a lack of commercial kitchen spaces in Burlington in the five-plus years since he started as the city's assistant director of business development. Burlington began tracking the businesses it works with more carefully over the past year, he said, but even without that data, the increase in small food operations is clear.

Clavelle and Schneider have helped business owners get their home kitchens licensed with the state Department of Health, and they maintain lists of available kitchen spaces at nonprofits and houses of worship around Burlington.

There are plenty of underutilized church kitchens, Clavelle said. But some require church staff to be present when renters work there. Others don't have the correct wastewater permits for food businesses.

Clavelle's department has worked with several Burlington-born businesses that ultimately landed outside city limits. These include the Vermont Marshmallow Co., which owner Alexx Shuman moved into its own space in South Burlington last summer.

"Some of these other towns have much more affordable space," Clavelle said. "Burlington's market rents have gotten pretty high, and if you're going to outfit your own kitchen and invest in equipment as a small food producer, you want the rent to be as affordable as possible."

Clavelle thinks Burlington is ready for a food incubator similar to Boulder, Colo.'s Rosetta Hall, which consists of eight food truck-size kitchens with shared bar, dining and rooftop space. Meanwhile, Burlington is working with the Intervale Center to plan a food processing space, he said, but the multimillion-dollar project still needs funding.

On a smaller scale, sharing kitchen space could be an immediate solution, he said. The now-closed Tiny Community Kitchen on North Winooski Avenue, shared by Maudite Poutine and a handful of pop-up food entrepreneurs, showed that multiple businesses could operate out of one location when their needs and hours aligned. Farther north, in the Oak Street Cooperative, Poppy café and All Souls Tortilleria will soon share space with Fancy's, a new restaurant from the team behind the Mister Foods Fancy food truck.

Back in Winooski, Lotz's clients were considering a shared space, too. Each was intimately familiar with the challenges of scaling up their small business. Presented with a rare space with commercial potential, Chicoine, Howley and Hill were hoping that many cooks in the kitchen just might be a good thing.

Hood vents are Sarah Howley's archnemeses; that's why the Only Cannoli chef-owner got so excited about the hole in the side of the Winooski warehouse. The crisp, bubbly cannoli shells she stuffs with creamy ricotta filling are fried. Even if she uses an electric tabletop fryer — like she does at the Burlington Farmers Market and other outdoor events — she creates what inspectors call dreaded "grease-laden vapors," which could require a $30,000 hood. But at least there's already a spot for it cut into the side of the building.

From May through September 2023, Howley operated her year-old business out of Winooski's O'Brien Community Center. The center charged hourly and had issues common with shared spaces, mostly around scheduling and cleaning, but it was convenient and allowed her to launch wholesale to accounts as big as the University of Vermont Medical Center. She'd previously worked one day a week out of the now-closed Richmond restaurant Vermont Fine, where she was pastry chef.

Howley had no choice but to close Only Cannoli while she looked for a new kitchen.

"There was nothing more heartbreaking than packing up my business that had just had its busiest month ever — doubled revenue — and putting it into a storage unit," Howley said. Between Only Cannoli and her previous venture, gluten-free bakery Black Rose Briar, it was the third time that complicated situations and changing availability at shared spaces had caused her to close. The latest shutdown, she estimated, cost her roughly $10,000 in lost revenue, on top of the $260 inspection fees she has paid each time she secures a new location.

"I need a lease with my name on it," Howley told Seven Days last fall.

She was looking at listings every day — along with 40 or so other people she said she could name off the top of her head. But Chittenden County spaces were expensive, and affordable ones were far away.

"I pulled every string I have, even [with] people who don't like me," Howley said with a laugh.

Months later, she landed at Williston's Champion Comics and Coffee, which she now shares with Emma Slater of the doughnut company Twisted Halo. It's small, and her hours there are limited to Monday and Tuesday. But it has everything she needs — including the right vent — until she finalizes a place of her own.

Eric Hill has been making English muffins in his home kitchen — or rather, his dining room — since launching Birch Hill English Muffins in May 2022. Other than needing to rewire the 1830s Jericho farmhouse after his electric griddles kept tripping the breaker, the lack of overhead coupled with an extremely short commute have made for a great setup, he said.

But Vermont's home bakery license limits producers to run-of-the-mill home appliances, and Hill's fluffy muffins are wicked popular, often selling out at farmers markets and grocery stores such as Burlington's City Market, Onion River Co-op. It's hard to keep up with demand on a regular mixer or without commercial equipment such as a dough divider-rounder, a specialized machine that would cut 19 minutes off what's now a 20-minute process of portioning and shaping batches of dough.

Late last summer, Hill started looking in earnest for a commercial production space with real estate broker Esther Lotz's help. In some cases, cost was a barrier. Other spots were too "restauranty," since Hill's vision is purely wholesale.

The cost of retrofitting a space is a big leap from Hill's home setup. As he's explored what's available — spaces ranging from 500 to 10,000 square feet — he's accepted that he might need to do more than buy that divider-rounder.

Thankfully, Birch Hill already has a wait list of customers. Hill isn't looking to take down Thomas' English muffins, but his expansion plan includes grocery stores and restaurants throughout northwestern and central Vermont. That growth would mean hiring his first employees, whom Hill plans to pay a livable wage. It would also mean sourcing more Vermont flour, butter, milk and maple syrup, which creates a "multiplier effect" on the local economy and food system, he explained.

At the potential space in Winooski, Hill would take over the larger of the warehouse's two available units and have roughly 1,800 square feet to design to his needs — right in the sweet spot of what he was seeking. There's already a walk-in cooler and a floor drain. It's a longer commute, but Winooski is close to many of Birch Hill's current customers and conveniently located from a distribution standpoint.

After a pause, he added, "It'll be worth it."

During the walk-through with the fire marshals in Winooski, Angela Chicoine of the Tipsy Pickle fielded several questions about her alcohol collection: How many cases? Spirits and beer? What's the proof?

Each batch of Chicoine's sweet, sour or spicy artisan pickles is flavored with products from Vermont's breweries and distilleries. She started her business as a hobby in 2014, and by 2021, her pickles made the finals in the nationwide Good Food Awards — an honor she's received yearly since, including several wins.

Finding adequate and affordable production space has been an ongoing challenge. In 2021, Chicoine was boiling brine and sealing jars at Burlington Friends Meeting. She also occasionally produced pickles at Brian Stefan's Southern Smoke catering space in Winooski.

She was already seeing the pandemic-prompted explosion in entrepreneurship and had teamed up with Ryan Nakhleh of Local Maverick, a sales and marketing platform for Vermont-made products, and landlord Peter Edelmann to build a food incubator space at Edelmann's Essex Experience, a community-oriented shopping center. Inspired by the Vermont Food Venture Center in Hardwick, the team saw Maverick's Kitchen as a hub with multiple production spaces, a demo kitchen and a retail shop promoting products made on-site.

"We would work together to share tools and information — all the stuff I've learned the hard way as I've grown," Chicoine said. "It would have been phenomenal."

In early 2023, they pulled the plug on that project. At the time, Nakhleh told Seven Days that construction costs had risen to an unrealistic level, and his organization was unable to secure 501c3 status, which would have helped with funding.

Chicoine currently works out of the Burlington Elks Lodge, an arrangement she found through her cousin's boyfriend — a bartender at the lodge — last May when she outgrew Burlington Friends Meeting. Chicoine pays $800 per month to use the Elks' kitchen roughly three days a week. It's flexible, but she has to work around events held at the privately owned club, which can leave her scrambling to make 80 cases of pickles.

The Tipsy Pickle is continuously growing, though, and Chicoine is ready for her next step. She's not interested in co-packing — a common way of scaling food businesses that involves outsourcing production to larger, specialized facilities — because she doesn't want to give up the hands-on quality control of doing it herself.

If she won the Powerball, she'd build a large-scale facility for herself and other small business owners, she said. "It's really all about money, unfortunately."

For now, sharing kitchen space in Winooski with Only Cannoli's Sarah Howley feels like the right move. If they signed the lease, the two women would work together to design and outfit the smaller of the warehouse's two units as a production kitchen; like Eric Hill of Birch Hill English Muffins, neither plans to operate a storefront, so it would mostly be counter space and burners.

Howley's and Chicoine's equipment needs aren't totally aligned — Only Cannoli requires a more powerful hood vent to fry cannoli shells, for one. But they weren't shocked by what the fire marshals and electric and plumbing inspectors found during the initial walk-through. They'd both seen worse.

And the price seems right. Fully equipped available spaces, such as the former ArtsRiot in Burlington and Friendly's in Williston, were listed for as much as $10,000 per month, Howley said. Her share of this space could be as low as $600.

"It's the perfect place to grow," she said.

The original print version of this article was headlined "Everything but the Kitchen Sink | Small food producers navigate a lack of commercial cooking space in Chittenden County"

Tags: Food + Drink Features, Chittenden County, small food producers, commercial kitchen, Tipsy Pickle, Only Cannoli, Birch Hill English Muffins

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