Kitchen Incubator opens to help boost small biz. in Georgetown

Georgetown, Del. – Small food establishments that cannot afford to start out on their own now have the opportunity to use a kitchen funded by Sussex County to build and grow their business.

The Kitchen Incubator on the Sussex Tech Campus will host participating businesses including soul food, jams, ice cream, and more, with the help of a kitchen manager with 40 years of restaurant experience on hand to help scale up their skills and business acumen.

“the first thing we do is we try to find fine-tuned their recipes and their cost, so we look at their recipes and if they want to upscale it, sometimes when you double, triple or quadruple recipes, there’s got to be some slight changes and you want to do all the costs involved,” said Kitchen Manager Jim Richards.

With the site already inspected and up to code, Richards says businesses can list the facility as their address and get expedited documentation from regulators in Dover, as well as cut out thousands of dollars and growing pains associated with starting a new business, something entrepreneurs say they are taking full advantage of.

“I was having to decline business because I didn’t have the capacity to do larger parties, but with having this curator kitchen here now, I’ve been able to do larger scale parties and my revenue has quadrupled this year just because I’ve been able to use this kitchen that’s amazing,” said LeTisha Dismuke of A Taste of Jazz.

Dismuke says she is working to expand the scope of her soul food businesses beyond catering to meal kit deliveries, and eventually, a full space, which she says the Kitchen and its state-of-the-art tech are helping her make a reality.

For Beachin Bash, their catering business is just a few months old, and with a schedule that sees some weeks busy and others baren, they say being able to lease the space Alle Carte allows them the flexibility to keep their catering options available.

“we don’t know how busy we’re going to be any given week or any certain season. So the incubator here allows us to kind of plan around that and book the hours that we need as we need them,”  said owner Erica Kirlin adding that with a launch that was supposed to happen during the summer, the space gave them their only option of openign thro0ugh those delays.

Those in the program say as they look around the facility they see more than just the skills and experience to grow, they see the future path for success for their business.

“I’m in the process of getting a food truck ready to be out as soon as possible, just waiting for a few pieces of equipment. And ultimately I want to have my own restaurant. So this is a proving ground, I like to say proving and practice ground,” Dismuke said.