![]() ![]() To sell food legally, you have to make it in a state-certified kitchen, like the space People’s Pops now runs in the old Pfizer plant. ![]() The building is just one-albeit the biggest and weirdest-of half a dozen commercial spaces where happy hipsters (and Bay Ridge moms) stir giant pots of goat’s milk into caramels, pit cherries, whip buttercream, simmer blackberries into jam and pile pallets of kombucha onto trucks bound for shelves across Brooklyn and beyond. They’re currently transforming the motley collection of decommissioned blast rooms and pill labs into a manufacturing mecca for farm-stand-sourced popsicles, seasonal pickles, hand-crafted sodas and vegan food makers with the moxie to rework semi-raw spaces to fit their needs. ![]() The building, an eight-acre gated compound that included a doctor’s office, a gym and a cafeteria, was bought for $26 million last year by Acumen Capital Partners. “This,” he says as he offers a strawberry-basil popsicle, “is Shangri-La.”Īctually, it’s an abandoned eight-story factory near the Marcy Houses project in South Williamsburg, where drug giant Pfizer opened for business more than a century and a half ago, stamping out Advil, Viagra, Lipitor and other pharmaceuticals before it closed the manufacturing plant in 2008. But he’s most excited about the company’s new digs: a 1,700-square-foot space tricked out with a walk-in freezer as big as a food truck, a shiny new automated popsicle-wrapping machine and enough room to host the 25 employees he’s in the process of hiring-all backed by a sweeping view of north Brooklyn and the Manhattan skyline. “I don’t think I would have been able to correctly or even to grow as much as I did in the last year if it wasn’t for everyone at Hot Bread Kitchen.David Carrell, one of the three cofounders of People’s Pops, is standing in his office talking a mile a minute about the four-year-old company’s many irons in the fire-a new Park Slope retail shop, the soon-to-be published cookbook and the brightly colored boxes mocked-up for the company’s upcoming wholesale line. “I’ve learned so much about how to look at things from the perspective of a food business owner,” says Springer. Vendors at the space say that the nonprofit offers business support that sets it apart, including coaching and advice on city permitting. Hot Bread Kitchen explored leasing the space immediately after Pilotworks went under, but another renter, who also owned a food and beverage incubator program called Nursery, surfaced and briefly laid claim over the location, before backing out weeks later.īut Hot Bread Kitchen is no start-up - it’s been around for a decade and gained a reputation for establishing careers for women in the food industry. It started out as Brooklyn Food Works, which was then bought out by Pilotworks when the company took it over in 2016. The food incubator space has had a rough few years. Andre Springer, who owns popular hot sauce brand Shaquanda Will Feed You, will be moving back in at 630 Flushing, alongside preservative-free jam company Oswald & Co, and Umikah, which sells small-batch curds and spreads. When it shut down, Asamoah’s team talked to about 90 businesses that had been stranded by the startup and ended up signing on about 33 of them. It’s also known for its wholesale bakery, which supplies bread to grocery stores and restaurants across the city like Whole Foods and chef Daniel Boulud’s Boulud Sud on the Upper West Side, and it recently opened a stall at Chelsea Market that features products from its incubator members.Īt the new headquarters, Hot Bread Kitchen’s head of workforce Karen Bornarth plans to expand the training program, which currently sends more than 100 women per year to jobs at companies such as restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, fast-casual chain Dig, and corporate catering company Restaurant Associates.Īnd many of the former Pilotworks businesses are signed on at Hot Bread Kitchen, according to head of small business Kobla Asamoah. But the nonprofit also has a training arm, with graduates placed in jobs at restaurants like Breads Bakery, Russ & Daughters, and Roberta’s. Like Pilotworks, Hot Bread Kitchen has a local food business incubator program. The company is currently transitioning its headquarters from East Harlem to the 11,000-square-foot space inside the former Pfizer Building at 630 Flushing Avenue, between Marcy Avenue and Tompkins Avenues, in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The embattled former Pilotworks space - the small business incubator that abruptly folded at the end of 2018 and stranded its roughly 175 vendors - now has a new tenant: well-regarded restaurant industry nonprofit Hot Bread Kitchen.
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