NEWTON, MA — After a year hiatus, it's baaack. Inna's Kitchen, the Kosher Jewish Deli which closed last April has plans to return to Newton Centre this summer. According to an update from the mother-son owners, Inna's Kitchen is going to be opening back up in Newton Centre, moving into a space on Commonwealth Ave. The new space will be takeout only. And they're not considering themselves a deli - per se - any more.
Daniela Uribe grew up amongst the coffee farms of Colombia. She remembers piles of cascara—the husk of the coffee cherry—that would either be used as fertilizer or dumped in the river. Her idea lightbulb went off when she saw Starbucks offering a cascara latte, and together with her co-founders, Erik Ornitz and Drew Fink, started experimenting with cascara tea in her kitchen. Lazy Bear Tea—a translation from ozo perozoso, Spanish for sloth—sells a drink made from dried cascara, which when steeped in hot water tastes not like coffee but like a smooth black tea. Lazy Bear Tea launched in 2017 and is now sold in 30 stores in the greater Boston area, with plans for expansion.
It hasn’t always been easy. “It would turn into big blow-up arguments about a sauce, which is dumb,’’ Nini says. Now the two are more able to say, “ ‘I’m not annoyed at you, I’m annoyed at all this other stuff.’ Communication is so important. You have to be even better about communicating.’’
However, in the heart of Boston’s Promise Neighborhood, the nonprofit Commonwealth Kitchen(CWK) is trying to revolutionize the food incubator template by bringing vertical integration into the mix. They still provide a shared kitchen, access to education, and a lower barrier to starting a food company to their 50+ business members, but they don’t stop there. Instead, CWK takes a holistic approach to their incubator business plan, providing their members with resources to overcome the nitty-gritty challenges of food production.
"It becomes a truly seamless experience when you use our food because it's already prepped and then it's cooked in recyclable tray that you can recycle or dispose of," Liss said. "So by having a meal kit, we really bring the whole solution. You don't have to worry about shopping, you don't have to worry about planning, you don't have to worry about prepping, and the clean up is super easy."
When Robin Liss was running Reviewed.com, she was flying an average of 200 days a year. Kevin Incorvia is a former Apple engineer married to a physicist. Though they both appreciated a fancy home-cooked meal, neither had time to make them on a regular basis. Liss and Incorvia decided to team up and make a kitchen robot, something that would actually save people time and feed an entire family but still turn out something healthier than a microwavable burrito. What they came up with is the Suvie, a countertop appliance that boils starches like pasta or rice, steams and roasts vegetables, and uses a sous vide and a broiler to cook protein.
At least that’s what you do if you’re Robin Liss, cofounder of Suvie, a Boston based startup that is creating a next-gen cooking appliance. Liss, who started what would become Reviewed.com in her basement at the tender age of 13, sold her company to USA Today in 2011 and managed and grow the site as part of Gannett until she left in 2015.
Eventually, Max Gitlen is excited to invite local omnivores to try tender, flavorful merlot steaks, culottes, and other more unfamiliar cuts at his whole-animal butcher shop, Meadlowlark Butcher & Grocer. But the butcher recently moved back to the Boston area—and what better way to get settled and make friends than to bring along trays of delicious sausages?
CommonWealth Kitchen (CWK), formerly CropCircle Kitchen, is a collaborative community whose mission is “to help aspiring entrepreneurs build great food companies, create jobs, improve healthy food access, and strengthen our regional food economy.” Founded in 2009 to take over a shared-use kitchen in Jamaica Plain (JP) formerly run as Nuestra Culinary Ventures, CWK in 2014 partnered with the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation to renovate the former Pearl Meats Factory on Quincy Street, transforming the site into a full-service culinary business incubator.
“We wanted to be sure that small producers and local farms can pack their stuff for it,” Liss says. “If we can create a platform where everyone can come together, it creates this amazing value for the consumer.” Platform is one of those words that techies use to describe a device that becomes a kind of agora and attracts lots of different players to participate and reap benefits — like smartphones, for example. Liss refers to the oven as “the original food platform.”
Commonwealth Kitchen in Boston, Massachusetts (pictured right) baked equity and equitable economic development into its mission statement, which is to lift up local food manufacturers, and today 70 percent of its 50 members are minority- and/or women-owned businesses. Seventy percent of the 150-plus employees supported by these companies are also people of color and/or women.
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