Stock Pot Malden is a for-profit, social impact company with a threefold mission
- Provide high-quality, culturally appropriate, affordable meals for economically disadvantaged school-age kids, seniors and families.
- We aim to upgrade the freshness and quality of meals served to kids, seniors and families by using local kitchens and providing cultural appropriateness of our food.
- Partner with minority, ethnically and culturally diverse food entrepreneurs of Massachusetts to provide those meals and develop their own business.
- Today, the prepared meals industry is dominated by “Big Food” industrial players.
- To compete effectively, local prepared meals entrepreneurs need to be given access to an affordable kitchen, as well as some capital and business support, which is what Stock Pot Malden provides.
- The meals they learn to prepare for schools, seniors and families, constitutes the launching pad for their own private business.
- Act as economic engine for the city of Malden and greater Boston (employment, wealth creation).
- We believe in the creation of a virtuous cycle where our community of entrepreneurs, under the leadership of Stock Pot Malden, utilizes the revenues of their successful prepared meals programs to hire people from the same ethnic and cultural populations they serve.
- These people can then become entrepreneurs themselves.
Stock Pot Malden is a for-profit LLC, owned by Co-Creation Ventures. Co-Creation Ventures is a social impact angel fund created in 2014 by a small group of investors wanting to demonstrate the economic development power of investing in a local food platform (shared kitchen) to enable the development of a local community of under-resourced food start-ups that would transform the quality of food served to the local under-served community (schools, seniors, families).
We subscribe to the triple bottom line model that tracks performance in terms of People, Profit and Planet. More specifically, here is what we aim to achieve in each area:
- In the People area, we want to feature in our business the culinary diversity of ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the population of Malden and Massachusetts, with its rich heritage of first-generation immigrants (Italian, Irish) and more recent waves (Chinese, Haitian, Latino, African, Eastern European), while transforming the quality of food served to kids, seniors and families from similar backgrounds.
- In the area of Profits, we want to earn a slow money return for the investors that entrusted us with their money, while enabling our food entrepreneurs to develop wealth for themselves.
- In the Planet area, we want to demonstrate that we can be an economic engine for the sustainable development of the city of Malden and Massachusetts. We believe the creation of a vibrant ecosystem linking local food entrepreneurs with local populations needing quality food will result in a more sustainable environment than what currently exists.
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Stock Pot Malden and Lunchbox served 3 million meals during the pandemic!
How do we support food entrepreneurs?
TOURS ARE BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
Please fill-in the application form and someone will contact you
We enable the birth and development of food entrepreneurs in two ways.
Food start-ups first and foremost need an affordable kitchen. We make our kitchen infrastructure available to them at a fraction of the cost of developing their own kitchen. We charge a rental fee for access to our kitchen. The rental fee is a function of time in the kitchen, size of team, storage requirements and parking needs. This is our landlord role. This constitutes the “shared kitchen” part of our “shared kitchen incubator” tag line.
For entrepreneurs who are selected to participate in Stock Pot Malden’s meals program for school kids, seniors and families, we offer to participate in what is known as a “shared partnership profit” where they run their own independent business separately from Stock Pot Malden, but we set up a joint meals project with them that guarantees them a level of income for two years, provides them with free access to our kitchens (including for their private catering), we provide them with sales contracts to serve schools or senior centers , and supply all the financing required for them to succeed. Our partner entreprenurs run the operational side of the program (making the food, recruiting the team, setting up their own menus and operations) and share the profit generated by our joint project (if and over the guaranteed compensation), while building their own catering business. The shared profit partnership program constitutes the launching pad for the entrepreneur’s business, while helping Stock Pot Malden find quality chefs and teams able to serve the needs of underserved kids, seniors and families. This is the “incubator” part in our “shared kitchen incubator” tag line. The entrepreneurs we invite into the shared profit partnership program often come from the pool of “regular” tenants in our shared kitchen, thereby giving us a chance to see them at work and providing them with an opportunity to get to know us. We also invite outside restaurateurs into our program after vetting them through a comprehensive relationship development process.
Our food entrepreneurs come from two broad groups:
- Prepared meal companies and caterers that prepare individual meals delivered to customers in their homes, to various institutional customers such as schools or senior centers and corporate offices, and who supply food for events such as weddings and corporate hatherings.
- Food truck companies that make their living as a combination of street-vending, catering and special events such as food truck festivals.