WASHINGTON — Popular food incubators such as Union Kitchen and Mess Hall have made it possible for D.C. startups to make and sell small-batch coffee, homemade ketchup and craft kolaches.
Now, the demand for similar artisan products is spreading to the suburbs.
Culinary creatives in Northern Virginia will soon have a place to call home when Brenda Brown opens Frontier Kitchen in Lorton this summer.
“We get a lot of phone calls from people who want to change the food industry here in Virginia,” says Brown, who has lived in the Woodbridge area for 11 years.
“We work in D.C. all day, they come back and they want to have the same kind of ability to find different foods, and good foods, here at home.”
Frontier Kitchen has been an 18-month project for Brown. It all started when her husband left the tech industry to attend pastry school and open his own bakery.
Building a kitchen for the bakery was too expensive, and they couple says they couldn’t find a shared kitchen space with a nurturing entrepreneurial environment outside of the District.
Brown, whose background is in capacity building and helping startups navigate business plans and strategic elements, decided to take matters into her own hands and open the type of food community she had hoped to find for her husband — only much closer to home.
Frontier Kitchen, which will open in July, holds up to 50 rotating businesses.
The production area includes four bakery workstations, with convection ovens and commercial-size mixers, and four culinary stations, which are equipped with six-burner stoves, grease hoods and space for fryers.
The space will include six prep workstations, a walk-in freezer, shelf storage space and a lounge with a mailroom for the member businesses. Pastry chef Cassity Jones will serve as the business’ chief operating officer and will oversee the day-to-day operations of the kitchen.
Brown says so far, Frontier Kitchen has received 27 applications for membership, one of which is her husband’s. Grant Brown plans to grow his business, Granted Artisan Bakery, out of the new production space.
He also hopes to be a part of a new food movement in Northern Virginia and replicate the culture and community that D.C.’s food incubators have fostered.
“[The D.C. incubators] are very much into the D.C. scene and working with the D.C. restaurants, which is great, but D.C. is where everybody commutes to. So you’re having these wonderful lunches there and those great restaurants and you’re meeting those wonderful people, but you do have to go home sooner or later. You go home to your family and you want to show them the same type of meal that you had for lunch. You get excited about food; you want to share it,” Grant says.
“Bringing some of it out into the suburbs and the outlying communities, we can actually grow the D.C. food industry and get our own flavors going.”
Grant, who trained at the L’Academie de Cuisine, currently sells his brownies, cupcakes and cookies at a handful of Northern Virginia’s SMART Markets. With the new kitchen space, he plans to expand his product list to include traditional French pastries, such as Napoleons and éclairs.
Claudia Reyes, of Falls Church, is another new member who hopes to grow her company out of Frontier Kitchen. With her mother, she runs Casero Creations, a Bolivian bakery.
The two make everything from vegetarian empanadas to cuñapé (a Bolivian bread made of yucca flour and cheese), to alfajores (cookies that sandwich dulce de leche) to no-sugar banana bread. Similar to Grant, they sell their products at a variety of farmers markets across Northern Virginia.
Having a bigger production space then their current one is key, Reyes says.
“Now we can make more of the product and start selling more.”
One way Frontier Kitchen is already helping its members sell more of their products is through a partnership with the Workhouse Arts Center, also in Lorton. Last weekend, Frontier Kitchen took over the center’s cafe, where it will sell products from the kitchen’s members.
“It’s going to become a place for us to show our best work and for customers to find us,” Grant says.
Brenda also plans to host events and cooking classes out of the Workhouse Arts Center.
“As our cooperation increases, throughout the year, we’ll be doing more and more events based around our member products,” she says.
Those interested in becoming members don’t have to wait until July to start cooking. Some members are already working out of a temporary space in Haymarket.
Brenda is already predicting the need to grow the incubator’s space — both in Lorton and throughout the Northern Virginia area. She currently has a right of first refusal on the warehouse space directly behind Frontier Kitchen’s current location. She also says there’s potential to add another location in the Sterling area.
“We’ve heard there’s a big demand there, we’re getting the phone calls,” she says.
But right now, she’s focused on getting the first location up and running.
“We want to get people pumping out product from this location … Our members are working on their own small businesses to change the community for the better.”
