This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You can check out the new Hope & Main Makers Marketplace for yourself at 100 Westminster Street in downtown Providence.
TRANSCRIPT:
Luis Hernandez: Tell us about this new marketplace. What is it you hope to do with it?
Lisa Raiola: So the Hope & Main Downtown Makers Marketplace is really a space to feature, highlight, showcase the entrepreneurial talent at Hope & Main. We have hundreds of members. Their products are being featured in this grocery store. They are prepared foods, to-go foods, pantry items – sort of everything you can imagine, from baked goods to salsas to spice blends. And they will be for sale there in a way that you can’t easily acquire anywhere else.
Hernandez: Let’s walk someone through the store, and what is it going to be like – take me into the entrance, and tell us a little bit more about some of the other products.
Raiola: Sure, so when you come in you will see a beautiful bar that is operated by Shastea. They’re on Broadway, they’re a global tea and coffee shop in Providence run by Tony Lopez, who’s just brilliant. And he has curated this collection of global tea blends and craft beverages. Think of a Starbucks inside of a Target. So it’s like they’re the operator there. So you can come and get coffee, tea, craft beverages. You can order from our cafe menu lunch and breakfast starting at seven in the morning to two in the afternoon – made-to-order items that incorporate our member products. We have a kimchi chicken sandwich that is featuring Chi Kitchen, Minnie Luong’s product. We have a barbacoa with Chicamonina spice blend, one of our makers at Hope & Main. We have a taco with a Rishi Rishi hot sauce. So we’re incorporating our member products. If you think of farm to table, this is more like kitchen to cafe, right of getting these products into the menu items.
Hernandez: What you do is, you create the opportunity for people who want to start a business in the food industry.
Raiola: Correct.
Hernandez: But the thing is, for them, they cannot do this at home. They have to have a place to do it. That’s what you provide.
Raiola: Right. So Hope in Main is a food business incubator, right? We’re a nonprofit. We started about 10 years ago in Warren – I’m proud to say the smallest town in the smallest state. And we have launched over 450 food businesses from our incubator in Warren. So we provide kitchens, code-compliant kitchens that you can rent on an affordable hourly rate. So you don’t have to have a lease, you just pay as you go to use the kitchens at Hope & Main. You make your product, you can package and label your product there, and then we help you to get your product into the marketplace for consumers. And, you know, before this marketplace, we were able to get you into different farmers markets and makers markets. And this is now a permanent home for all of these products.
Hernandez: This goes to Hope & Main’s mission, which is to create that equity in the food industry.
Raiola: Right. Because it’s difficult for anybody to launch a food business. There are lots of high hurdles to do that. It’s expensive. Food businesses tend to have high failure rates. They tend not to get bank financing. New people tend not to have a network to sort of launch their business into different sales and distribution channels. So everything, from the shared use infrastructure that we provide, to access to markets, to business and technical assistance to connections to capital – those are the four pillars of our incubation program, and we do all of that. We don’t just say, here’s a key, there’s a kitchen, good luck to you. We really have to help people at all levels to be successful.
Hernandez: I’d imagine you get people who, they don’t know anything about running a business, they just have an idea. And where do they start, right?
Raiola: Our tagline is “make food your business.” And many people know how to make food, most of them don’t know how to make it their business. And so the whole idea is that we’re taking folks, many of whom are artisans, most of whom don’t necessarily have a culinary background, or haven’t even worked in a commercial kitchen. And we’re taking them from, you know, they come to us and say, “here’s my grandmother’s salsa recipe, and everyone says they love it, and I should sell it.” So we have to take them from recipe to product to brand to business – meaning if you have a recipe, you don’t have a product, you’ve got to find a way to put it in a jar or to package it, to label it. You’ve got to scale up your recipe, you’ve got to make it consistently. So now you have a product, but a product isn’t a business. You have to take that product and make it into a business. So we take you every step along the way of that journey.
Hernandez: Is there a story that you could share from one of your creators?
Raiola: Sure. So a great story that I love is Little Maven Lemonade. She is a Brazilian mom who started the business with her daughter. And they make this line of global lemonades. When they started with Hope and Main, they were a refrigerated product. And when you’re refrigerated it’s a very expensive product to transport, to distribute. You have the most expensive real estate on a shelf in a store because you have to be in the refrigerated section. And so we helped her to reformulate that product to a shelf-stable product. Then she attended something that is basically a food trade show that we host, it’s called the the tabletop show, where we invite Whole Foods and we invite Stop & Shop, and we invite all of the universities and hospitals, for example, the institutional buyers. So it’s a B2B, a business to business show. And at that show, she met Boston Children’s Hospital. And she is now on the tray of every patient meal that goes up to a room at Boston Children’s Hospital. Little Maven Lemonade, through Hope and Main. Just starting with an idea to now having this great success with, you know, with getting her product out there.
