Lisa Raiola, founder and president of food business incubator Hope & Main in Warren, shared insights from her years of bringing amateur cooks through the crossroads from taking the advice of family and friends to sell their specialties, to the giant step of making food their business.
The organization is embarking on a big next step of its own as it prepares to establish a presence in Providence with the debut of its Downtown Makers Marketplace in early 2023.
The new urban eatery and local market will occupy the ground floor of Paolino Properties LP’s office building at 100 Westminster St.
The destination will offer handcrafted and locally sourced coffee bar items for breakfast and lunch that will spotlight Hope & Main’s culinary creators. As part of an innovative incubation program to test-drive new food ideas, Hope & Main entrepreneurs will prepare and sample items representative of their business concepts and unique food heritage.
“The Hope & Main Downtown Makers Marketplace is a place dedicated to showcasing the enormous talent of our emerging and iconic member businesses,” Raiola said. “This project is about giving our diverse community of food-preneurs access to markets and consumers they could not otherwise reach.”
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GROWING PRESENCE: Lisa Raiola, founder and president of food business incubator Hope & Main in Warren, stands in front of the organization’s Downtown Makers Marketplace in Providence, which it plans to open in early 2023.
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Raiola says it is costly for new brands to find their way to grocery store shelves or onto menus of established restaurants, which makes it challenging for them to scale.
“We know how good these products are and can’t wait to accelerate the success of these makers,” she said.
The 100 Westminster St. venue will support what’s new in local food. It is an ideal complement to a revitalized downtown Providence driven by the vision of former Mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr, managing partner of Paolino Properties.
What attracted the Papitto Opportunity Connection to invest in the nonprofit’s mission was the fact that 40% of Hope & Main’s entrepreneurs are founders of color.
The Papitto Opportunity Connection is a nonprofit private foundation dedicated to Rhode Island’s people of color communities to empower and create individual success stories by investing in education, job skills training and entrepreneurial ventures.
From the moment Barbara Papitto stepped into the kitchens in Warren, she understood how the incubator’s affordable and accessible shared-use space is transforming what is possible for entrepreneurs of color, Raiola said.
“Post-pandemic, we’ve seen a surge of folks leaving traditional food service jobs seeking to create their own food businesses. About half of these inquiries are coming from the Greater Providence area, and many are from members of historically underserved communities,” Raiola said. “We want to meet these entrepreneurs where they are, and that means building additional shared-use kitchens in the city. We are currently in negotiation for a facility located in the West End of the city where we can equip three new shared-use kitchens, as well as build out kitchens for Hope & Main graduates.”
Raiola says the Providence kitchens, along with the Warren location, will be feeders to the Downtown Makers Marketplace.
Since 2014, Hope & Main has helped more than 450 food and beverage businesses to launch, scale and thrive. The 501(c)(3) offers shared-use, code-compliant kitchens, business and technical assistance, access to markets, and connections to capital for aspiring food entrepreneurs.
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