Lansing, MI (November, 2021) -You can feel the excitement when you walk into the Allen Neighborhood Center’s Rathbun Accelerator Kitchen in Lansing. Four small food businesses — Mr. Leslie’s Cheesecakes, Tantay Peruvian Cuisine, Smoothie Queen, and Gogi 2 — recently opened in this sparklingly new, shared-used kitchen, taking the next step in their entrepreneurial food journeys, supported by a Walters Family Foundation grant.

All

Detroit, MI (November, 2021) - Eastern Market Partnership is known for connecting Detroiters to fresh and affordable food. They also excel at providing a suite of tools to help food-based businesses launch, scale-up, and succeed.  Since 2015, Eastern Market has offered affordable shared commercial kitchen space. Now, with support from a Walters Family Foundation grant, its Eastern Market Metro Accelerator is going a step further. This 15,000-square-foot facility is divided into eight ready-to-occupy suites for emerging food businesses to expand their production, limit displacement and keep creative entrepreneurship within the Eastern Market district. It also provides invaluable business coaching support and networking connections.

Curr

Lansing, MI (June, 2021) -Breaking into the food industry can require a lot of grit and hard work, not to mention extensive capital and market savvy. It’s an enormous undertaking for a sole entrepreneur. To ease the burden, shared Incubator kitchens have been popping up all over the U.S., including 15 in Michigan. One such Incubator space was opened by the Allen Neighborhood Center in Lansing, and has since supported the dreams of 57 small food businesses.

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Detroit, MI (February, 2021) - All across Detroit, small businesses are struggling to respond to the changing market conditions created by the coronavirus pandemic. Many are in need of critical business and technical assistance to transition in a crisis. TechTown, Detroit’s most established business accelerator, is working with more than 400 entrepreneurs to ensure they weather the storm and move their business forward. Most of these businesses are low- to moderate-income micro-entrepreneurs that employ fewer than 10 employees. “These are legacy neighborhood business owners that have had to quickly shift to use and understand technology that they had shied away from, frankly, for years,” says Amy Rencher.

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