File Photo / Tim Greenway
Fork Food Lab Executive Director Bill Seretta
December 3, 2021
Ahead of planned move, Fork Food Lab gets $750K USDA grant to scale up
File Photo / Tim Greenway
Fork Food Lab members include Mill Cove Crackers, whose owner Nina Murray is shown here preparing baking trays.
As Fork Food Lab proceeds with plans to move to a larger space in 2021, the shared commercial kitchen and startup incubator will use a $750,000 federal grant to add staff and help the lab's southern Maine member businesses scale up.
Fork Food Lab, currently at 72 Parris St. in Portland's West Bayside neighborhood, recently signed an agreement for bigger space on the other side of Casco Bay, at 95-97 Darling Ave. in South Portland. The new space consists of 42,000 square feet, about eight times the size of the current facility, which is now operating at capacity.
With due diligence still in progress for the move, Fork Food Lab is lining up financing and making plans for a three-year, $749,785 grant award by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said Bill Seretta, Fork Food Lab's executive director and president of its Yarmouth-based nonprofit owner, the Sustainability Lab. The grant follows a previous, $100,000 grant awarded by the USDA in 2019 and extended during the pandemic.
Serretta told Mainebiz that Fork Food Lab would put the latest USDA grant to expand in several ways, and grow membership from more than 50 today to 75-plus.
Specific plans include creating new value-added services such as cooperative purchasing and centralized marketing as well as a so-called "tabletop" manufacturing and processing capacity. The lab may also develop additional certified kitchens for gluten-free and vegan products, and seek to become a USDA-inspected meat facility for meat used as ingredients.
"As a nonprofit economic development organization, the economic development piece can't be paid for by money," Seretta told Mainebiz in a Thursday phone interview. "It takes money to create the types of innovation and projects we need to grow."
The new funds will also be used to help Fork Food Lab, currently at six staff members, add two or three more hires within the first quarter of next year, with each new person representing a major project area, Seretta said.
As for the planned move, Seretta said there have been some delays because of an engineering contractor that's booked up. On the financing side, he said that Fork Food Lab recently started talks with a number of potential investors and may also look at low-interest loans or debt financing from banks.
"We don't yet know what the combination is," he said. "We're primarily going after the investors first." He also said that while he's confident of lining them up, "the question is timing."
He's confident of finalizing the real estate transaction by the start of the new year, and believes a move could happen fairly quickly after that. "Once we close have to start the deconstruction and construction processes," he said. "We've got people lined up to do that."
It's been a long time coming for an organization that has gone from the verge of closing at the start of the pandemic to a thriving incubator with businesses waiting to join.
"We have close to a dozen members who have moved here to start a business or have moved here with a business from somewhere else," he said. "We're also talking to one large producer trying to figure out how to move to Maine to make a product with only local product. It would be a big deal if we can make it happen."
Despite the growth, the business remains a roller-coaster from one day to the next. "There are nights when I go to be very relaxed, and other nights where I wake up in a cold sweat," Seretta said. "That's the nature of what we do."
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