By Chris Brockel
FEED Kitchens

Without question, riding out the pandemic since the spring of 2020 has been difficult for food businesses of all types. Lack of sales opportunities, lack of walk-in customers, pivoting business models to capture sales and customers, supply chain issues, and quickly rising prices for ingredients and supplies have all played a role in making it difficult to operate a food business and stay on top of issues and trends to keep it viable. These factors, which have played out broadly across the food system, played out inside FEED Kitchens in 2022 as well.

Each year, FEED Kitchens conducts a survey of business activity with its members, and the results never fail to tell the story of what is happening inside the building. Our survey of 2022 activity is no different.

While gross revenue was up for a majority of businesses in 2022, nearly half the businesses responding to the survey saw their profits decrease from the previous year. The reason for this decrease was painfully clear as 62% of the respondents stated that high prices of ingredients and supplies and the inability to source ingredients when needed were the primary factors affecting their business operations.

Despite the pandemic, FEED Kitchens continues to be an economic engine for our region. Total revenue reported by businesses operating out of FEED Kitchens was nearly $1.3 million. We know our entrepreneurs are fiercely independent and loathe giving others their business information, so we suspect this number is under-reported, but we also know it is the number we have and it gives us some comparison to previous years.

This reported revenue is more than double that of the first year of the pandemic when 2020 reported gross revenue barely exceeded $500,000. In the nine full years of operation, total revenue earned by FEED Kitchens vendors exceeded $10.8 million dollars.

FEED businesses created 26 full-time and 48 part-time jobs in 2022 at an average hourly wage of $17.62, which is $2 more per hour than 2021. Despite this, nearly a quarter of businesses operating at FEED reported difficulty in finding and retaining employees.

FEED Kitchens finished 2022 with 90 commercial businesses operating out if the facility at some point in the year. Of these businesses, 66% are owned by people of color, while 55% are owned by women.