Bangor will build a kitchen for small food businesses at a former Air Force officers’ club

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The former web page of the officers’ club for Dow Air Power Foundation in Bangor will be remodeled subsequent yr into a shared-use commercial kitchen, immediately after the town was awarded more than $1 million in congressionally directed cash for it final 7 days.

The kitchen area, to be situated at 50 Cleveland St. by the University of Maine at Augusta campus in Bangor, will supply smaller foods producers across japanese Maine a opportunity to scale up their organizations affordably, without having getting to make their very own high-priced investments in larger creation facilities.

“This new enterprise advancement facility will create a skilled, shared-use atmosphere for Maine farmers and other agricultural producers to increase their businesses and increase benefit to their goods, supporting careers all over the area,” mentioned U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, who supported the task.

There is an untapped prospective in foods-based mostly tiny companies in Maine, mentioned Tanya Emery, Bangor’s neighborhood and financial enhancement director. Several run out of their properties but absence both the money or the services to expand production.

“It’s definitely really hard to make the leap from a household-centered organization into a accurate business business with much larger creation room,” Emery mentioned. “This will be a middle position. You don’t have to make your individual manufacturing unit place. You can entry a cooperative share of a area, in which we present the elementary pieces you want to develop.”

The new facility will provide room for industrial baking, cooking, canning and packaging, and for cold and dry storage, among the other probable programs. Enterprises can indication up for time slots to use the a variety of amenities. There is 1 other identical shared industrial kitchen area in Maine — Fork Foodstuff Lab in Portland — but Bangor’s house will be the to start with municipally owned position of its form in the state.

For area meals producers like Todd Simcox of Todd’s Salsa in Bangor, a facility like Bangor’s will imply that he can basically start out generating his Maine product or service in-state again.

“We applied to create in Gray, and now we deliver in Connecticut. There is just no place for us to make our item here in Maine, even while we are proudly a Maine small business,” Simcox claimed. “We’ve essential a facility like this for many years now, and I assume it’s going to make items a great deal much easier for people like us to hold it area.”

Some of the salsas and incredibly hot sauces made by Bangor-centered Todd’s Salsa. Owner Todd Simcox explained he hopes to employ the new shared-use industrial kitchen area the town of Bangor will establish up coming calendar year to produce his salsa.

Emery explained that the plan for a metropolis-owned commercial kitchen has been kicked about for more than a decade. But that idea did not get started to turn out to be a fact until 2016, when the Maine Army Countrywide Guard gave the setting up at 50 Cleveland St. to the town, just after it vacated the premises.

For many years, the 19,000-square-foot developing, designed in 1957, was applied as offices and as an officers’ club for both Dow Air Force Base and the subsequent guard foundation.

“It applied to host banquets and gatherings, and there was a bar place and a practical kitchen area. Of program, the kitchen area hadn’t been updated in decades, but the basic potential was there — plumbing, wiring, a hood method, all that,” Emery reported.

The city undertook some fundamental renovations of the creating in 2018, which includes asbestos elimination and other structural function, but it requires considerably additional operate to get it up to code and performing as a present day facility.

When the prospect arrived to technique Collins about supporting funding the venture with federal dollars, Emery said the metropolis jumped at the possibility, and Collins was enthusiastic about it.

It’s all part of a broader hard work to assist job creation and workforce enhancement in the Bangor region, in both of those the food business and the trades.

A related challenge, a collaboration involving Bangor, Brewer, Orono and Old City, was not long ago awarded a $375,000 grant by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, as component of its Working Communities Obstacle. That grant will support perform to transfer men and women with criminal histories and material use ailment into work, largely in the food items support market and the trades.

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