What we see: the shrimp trucks along roadsides, pizza and taro mochi at farmers’ markets, cookies, jams and sauces at craft fairs and on grocery store shelves.

What we don’t see: the shared-use kitchens, without which Hawaii’s culinary landscape would look a lot different.

Without these community kitchens, also known as kitchen incubators, the cost of starting a legitimate food business by leasing or building a kitchen according to health code would be prohibitively expensive. Many of the businesses that have made names for themselves locally and nationally may never have launched: PacifiKool, a ginger syrup listed in Saveur magazine’s 100 list; CakeLava, a specialty cake shop recently featured on the Food Network; Waialua Soda Works, locally made premium sodas distributed nationally; North Shore Farm’s pizza, which amasses the longest lines at the Kapiolani Community College farmers’ market.

Not to mention nearly all of Oahu’s beloved food trucks, of which the “truck” is only one part of the equation. For many businesses, a stove on wheels is hardly enough space to prep plate lunches and clean equipment afterward. A kitchen incubator provides the rest of the facilities–as a sort of docking station for a fleet of food trucks.

Cooking up ideas

Two of these “stations” are Pacific Gateway Center’s (PGC) Culinary Kitchen Incubator in Kalihi, and Waialua Community Kitchen. Both operate as nonprofits and rent time to clients. The $5 million, 20,000-square-foot Kalihi incubator opened in 2003, funded in part by the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation and government grants. As an extension of the Pacific Gateway Center, it shares the mission statement “to empower Hawaii’s low-income residents, immigrants and refugees to achieve self-sufficiency while respecting the integrity of diverse cultural heritages.” It pursues this goal by providing free classes to help fledgling entrepreneurs–classes covering business plans, marketing plans and forecasting, as well as classes in safety and sanitation taught by the Department of Health (DOH).

But since the incubator is at 80 percent capacity, the kitchens are “pretty much open to everybody,” as long as they have the proper paperwork, like TB clearance and proof of insurance, says Ave Asa, a program assistant at the incubator. Some referrals come from the DOH, which refers people who have been cooking illegally from their homes.

Baking foundations

The layout of PGC’s kitchen incubator resembles a hospital. Twelve separate kitchens flank each side of a clean, fluorescent-lit corridor: four prep kitchens, primarily for food trucks to prepare food out of and clean equipment after a run; four baking kitchens, equipped with ovens; and four full kitchens with ovens and stoves. There’s also refrigeration, freezer and dry-goods storage space for rent.

A recent afternoon finds seven of the kitchens occupied. In one of them is Paul Zarate of the nascent food truck Zaratez Mexicatessen, which opened just over a month ago. He’s prepping for lunch. In another, Kathryn Pajela, of Yummy Cake Delights, bakes 250 cupcakes. Her pearly pink car with the license plate “YUMMY” is parked outside.

“A lot of cake artists started here,” Pajela says. “[The kitchen] allows us, people who can’t afford to open up a store, to run our business.” Eventually, she hopes to follow the CakeLava dream of opening her own space.

Across the hallway, Craig Nomitsu has been making okoshi, a Japanese puffed rice candy, based off his mom’s recipe, on and off for five years, transitioning his hobby to a full-time business when Aloha Airlines shut down. He calls himself an Aloha Airlines refugee, a nod, perhaps, to PGC’s mission statement. Owning his own food business has been a dream of his since college, but it appears some of the excitement has worn off; he laughs as if somewhat bewildered at the amount of hot and physical work involved. “This type of business is not for everyone,” he says.

Country Kitchen

Jon Hirota, kitchen manager at the Waialua Community Kitchen, knows this firsthand. He estimates that only 10 percent to 15 percent of the businesses that come through the kitchen take off.

“We’ve launched 50 to 60 businesses,” Hirota says, “and maybe 8 to 10 are successful. There are some success stories. People have started in our kitchen and moved to their own facilities: Waialua Soda Works and Luibueno’s (a new Mexican restaurant on the North Shore).”

“But we have a lot of people not having any kind of business-related experience. Everyone has mom’s favorite recipe, marmalade or chutney or good banana bread recipe, and immediately they want to start a business…but they’re not going to make the big kinds of money they envision.”

Ideally, Hirota wants would-be entrepreneurs to take the free classes offered by Empower Oahu (a nonprofit group which now oversees the kitchen) so they have at least a business plan with which to start.

Finished in 2001, the Waialua kitchen was funded with a Department of Defense grant of $100,000 (under the colorful premise that former sugar cane workers might grow and produce food for the military) and $100,000 from a community development grant aimed at employing a community that had just lost its main industry. There’s only one room, with one stove, two ovens, a fryer, a steam kettle, and a walk-in refrigerator and freezer in about 600 square feet of space.

About 10 regular clients currently use the kitchen. They include the shrimp trucks around North Shore, and North Shore Farms. There are also the “occasional entrepreneurs,” as Hirota calls them, people with temporary food permits who use the kitchens to sell food for the increasing number of farmers’ markets in the area–Haleiwa, Waialua and Sunset.

While it was originally anticipated that farmers would use the kitchen to make value-added products, these days, Jeanne Vana of North Shore Farms is one of the few farmers who still uses the facilities.

“Since [it opened], I’ve been utilizing it weekly,” she says. “It’s where we came up with fried green tomatoes…I use the kitchen to make pizzas, mozzarella, salsa, tomato soup. We cater from here, we work from here. It has space, refrigeration, equipment. What’s great about the kitchen is that I can utilize 100 percent of what I grow. So if there’s a defect in a tomato, it looks ugly, it’s not going to sell…I can trim off blemishes and use it in salsa. Cherry tomatoes–when I have an abundance of those, I can pickle them. So I use the kitchen for my advantage.”

Though kitchen incubators tend to be just that–incubators, a launching point for businesses to then raise enough capital to invest in their own kitchens–the Waialua Community Kitchen functions somewhere between an incubator and co-operative. For businesses like North Shore Farms that don’t want to or can’t grow larger, the kitchen is a shared space integral to the small food operations of the North Shore. “It’s not cost feasible for me to have my own,” says Vana. “I couldn’t do what I’m doing if I didn’t have [the kitchen].”