Make Change Through Food is the real short and sweet tagline of Real Good Kitchen, which has served over a hundred start-up food businesses in East Tennessee in almost five years. Real Good Kitchen Foundation is hosting a fundraising evening, Real Good Gathering, on Oct. 23. Founder Bailey Foster shares details about the work of the kitchen and the foundation, and the vision of a better food system for everyone, including food entrepreneurs, those who are food insecure, and those who appreciate and seek out a good meal.
What is Real Good Kitchen?
Real Good Kitchen is a shared commercial kitchen [Knoxville’s first], and we style ourselves as a food business incubator, meaning we have a kitchen facility where folks pay for their use of the space and storage by the hour in monthly packages. We make commercial kitchen equipment and commercial permitted kitchen space available in a co-working arrangement for food businesses.
The advantage of that, for anyone who knows about food businesses and restaurants, is that there are many rules, expensive equipment, and infrastructure to consider. Many times, when people are getting started, they don't even know if it's really what they want to do.
We help folks find that intersection of passion and opportunity so they can figure out what they're uniquely bringing and how they're going to do it. We help them with a longer runway to hopefully build a sustainable business. I always tell everybody who comes in, ‘Start as small as you can, try something, take the next step, make a little change.’ There's just no alternative to putting in the work.
Can you describe the work of Real Good Kitchen Foundation?
We opened in January 2021, so we're in year five now, which is a little hard to believe. We've always provided support. That’s what the incubator part is about—helping people start and grow businesses. We’ve always been very resource-intensive to provide individual support, connecting entrepreneurs with resources beyond the facility.
Real Good Kitchen Foundation makes it possible to take a more programmatic approach to that support. Our food business basics course teaches foundational concepts that folks need to know to take their idea or existing hobby into a business.
The food business incubator program is a more full-scale approach to business education. We bring underserved and marginalized entrepreneurs into a cohort to go through a curriculum. They're then able to come into the kitchen at reduced cost and continue with that ongoing individual support that is very important. Throughout that whole process, a community is built. Food is the lane, but I can't say how important the community that is built around Real Good Kitchen has become—especially for a community that was splintered.
The foundation allows us to provide resources in a more sustainable way. Real Good Kitchen and Real Good Kitchen Foundation are great partners for the community. We make a broad spectrum of resources available, whether folks are ready to use the kitchen, just exploring their ideas, or already have a business they're trying to grow. For the first time, we’ve broken out our food business basics course into workshops called deeper dives: going more deeply in certain areas, like marketing and social media, where folks are interested in growing.
Our tagline is exactly what I want it to be: Make Change Through Food—through the lens of food, doing everything we can to create more equity and opportunity in the food industry. We’re working on the capacity to provide the kinds of technical assistance businesses need to commit to taking SNAP. Through the foundation, we have a partnership with United Way, the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, that is helping bring healthy food into underserved neighborhoods through food enterprise and food retail.
Tell us about the 2nd annual Real Good Gathering.
We sold out last year. This year, Trevor Stockton of RT Lodge will be cooking, also Laurence Faber of Potchke Deli, and a number of other folks. We're also proud to be able to bring five-time James Beard award-nominated chef Katie Button, who has Asheville-based Cúrate, as the keynote speaker. We want to bring the community together, let folks taste great food from well-known chefs—chefs working out of Real Good Kitchen, and chefs going through our incubator program—while we also raise money to keep our foundation going.
Knoxville is a maker community, a collaborative, information-sharing community, a place where you can start businesses. We have wonderful support from our founding sponsor, the Lawson Family Foundation, and a great partnership with Pathway Lending, our primary partners on our programs.
We want to continue to respond to the needs and strengthen opportunities in the food industry, build sustainable businesses, which in the end helps us all eat better, and come together as we celebrate the diversity of food culture we have here.
Information and tickets at RealGoodKitchenFoundation.org.
Listen to the full podcast at tennesseefarmtable.com.