Providing Community Resources
To achieve these goals, Culinary Commons provides almost 700 square feet of kitchen space, allowing entrepreneurs to avoid the expensive upfront costs of a commercial kitchen. Culinary Commons also includes commercial kitchen equipment such as a six-burner range, convection oven, tilting kettle, merchandiser refrigerator, mobile racks, and several stainless-steel worktables, among other items. Culinary Commons offers these resources at an affordable rate of $25 per six-hour block or $50 per day.
How Policy Changes Allow Culinary Commons to Support Local Entrepreneurs
Douglas County revised the policy in 2017 to eliminate inconsistencies with the existing policy and fairgrounds policy that had emerged from the use of the kitchen space by entrepreneurs. Schnoes explains, “In particular, the new policy explicitly forbade the sale of goods on premise and align[ed] other aspects of the site’s rental policy and procedures with a broader policy update that the County was completing for the fairgrounds.”
In addition to the policy changes, the Douglas County Food Policy Council collaborated with Kansas State Research and Extension to do a branding effort that included naming the space “Culinary Commons” and promoting it through local partners such as the KU Small Business Development Center.
The policy changes also brought some challenges. The reservation and key system could be more user-friendly, and there is no method for tracking how the Culinary Commons is being used nor the impact it is having. Nonetheless, the Culinary Commons is an important asset for the Douglas County community. “What we’ve done is a great example of what a little bit of investment in intentionally thinking about public assets in new ways can lead to, and of the enormous value that some creative design work can bring to change ‘incubator kitchen at Building 21 at the fairgrounds’ into Culinary Commons,” said Schnoes.
This publication was drafted by the Public Health Law Center. Funding for this publication was provided by KC Healthy Kids. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of KC Healthy Kids.