Shon Rainford can’t help but revel as he walks around the new headquarters of Worcester Regional Food Hub. Once an underutilized storage space at Union Station, the area now features five glistening kitchens where cooks and aspiring restaurant owners can pursue their dreams.
“It is state of the art,” Rainford said, pointing out a cavernous walk-in freezer and stainless steel cooking equipment, like a 40-gallon kettle and a combination oven that also steams food. “We didn’t mess around.”
The nonprofit partners with local farmers to distribute fresh produce to businesses as well as needy families across the region, and also serves as an incubator for food startups that can’t afford to open up their own kitchens. Rainford said providing cooking space is especially important because local regulations limit what business owners can prepare in their own homes.
The food hub spent the last seven years fundraising and constructing the nearly $5 million headquarters at Union Station. Rainford said the new space will go a long way toward helping the nonprofit accomplish its mission.
The first business owners to break in the new equipment Monday were Evan Solomonides and Duaynet Spinola Garcia. The duo recently started Cuban Tapas To Go, filling what they saw was a gap in Worcester’s food scene. Spinola Garcia is originally from Cuba, so the couple thought they could use her expertise to bring authentic Cuban cuisine to the area.
Solomonides said the caveat was they didn’t have the financial capital to start their own restaurant or food truck. The food hub has allowed them to still move forward selling Cuban specialties like yuca frita, tostones and churros stuffed with condensed milk.
“I don’t think there’s any chance we would be doing this if this kind of facility didn’t exist,” Solomonides said, adding that the space “is absolutely amazing.”
The food hub’s new headquarters is located near the end of the Union Station’s concourse, an ideal location, Rainford said, because it’s adjacent to the city’s downtown bus terminal.
The location is also significantly larger than the food hub’s old headquarters in a local church.
“We’re going from one kitchen to five kitchens,” he said. “We were really limited on our cold storage and freezer storage at our former location. So now we’re able to provide storage for ingredients as well as finished product here.”
Although it may sound odd to have commercial kitchens at a train station, he said the 6,000-square-foot space is being taken advantage of more now compared to years ago: It used to be the baggage area for the station before becoming a makeshift storage unit for city-owned holiday decorations and other random relics.
The nonprofit charges its nearly 150 startups a $20 monthly fee as well as about $30 an hour to use the new space. That pales in comparison to other commercial kitchens around the state, which can cost over $1,000 a month to rent.
Brian Neyenhouse, who runs Nutty Bird Granola, used one of the new kitchens for the first time Tuesday. He noted that the food hub’s old space booked up quickly, and as a result, he sometimes had to cook his granola late at night or in the wee hours of the morning.
That shouldn’t be a problem at the new headquarters, he said. Plus, the extra equipment and space allows him to double the amount of granola he makes at any given time.
“It’s beautiful,” Neyenhouse said. “It expands the options for a lot of people to do different things.”
