Pizza Kits Start in an Incubator
Tom and I, and many other small food companies and farmers, just happen to be lucky enough to live in western North Carolina. We live in Asheville, the location of the Blue Ridge Food Ventures commercial kitchen. It’s a non-profit shared use facility for start-up food businesses and farmers in North Carolina, the first one in the state, started in 2005. The success of the kitchen has prompted several other incubators in the state as well.
Tom and Sue of GalloLea Organics cook up pizza samples.
It’s hard for me to imagine how we ever could have started GalloLea Organics, and brought our Pizza Kits to market, without the Blue Ridge Food Ventures. As a non-profit, everyone who uses the facility pays for their time and space use, and much comes from other funding and grants. There’s a pretty big selection of expensive equipment that goes into making a huge variety of products, from health products to food, from farmers to ‘value added’ artisan foods, like our Pizza Kits. All of us are grateful for the grants provided by organizations to keep us in business and add to our equipment list.
This past year, a grant helped to purchase new equipment to make our Pizza Kit production easier. I’ll tell you about the new ‘filler’ in another blog. For now, just picture us filling each dough pack by hand, 1,000 of them in a day, weighed out on a hand scale to 168 grams. Just the two of us, filling one, by one, by one…. Just part of the process to make the the crust part of the Pizza Kit.
The Golden Leaf newsletter featured The Blue Ridge Food Ventures and GalloLea Organics yesterday: “The incubator has helped one couple become self-employed. Tom Gallo and Susan Devitt of Asheville lost their jobs in 2009, due to the economic downturn….” (Read more)
We’ve come a long way in a year and half, it really blows my mind! I know that it couldn’t have happened (and where would we be?) if it wasn’t for the BRFV, and the assistance they get to keep a lot of small businesses get going! A big thanks to the world!
