For Pasco County, there is no such thing as "too many cooks in the kitchen."
The county opened a new food incubator this week, which will allow entrepreneurs in the community to spend 10 hours a month in the open space and work on recipes, photograph their food and even record podcasts.
"People call me to start all kinds of businesses and a lot of people have been calling me — about a quarter of people — talking to me about food businesses," Dan Mitchell, manager of the Smart Start program under the Pasco County EDC, said.
Smart Start is the county's entrepreneurship program, which gives startups a chance to attend roundtables, use the coworking space in the food incubator and have one-on-one mentorship.
"Right now there isn’t an in-between space between doing it in your house and having to own your own facility — other than calling a restaurant that's a friend and making an agreement," he said. "There's commercial kitchen space in Hillsborough, not any in Pasco County. There have been Pasco County people that have been driving to Tampa to use the space. That's where it all came from."
The Start Smart program has an option that allows use of the food incubator, with that specific membership costing $100 a month. Because of the 10-hour-a-month limit, Mitchell estimates the new program will have roughly eight entrepreneurs a month that will change on a rotating basis.
"The goal is not to keep them here," he said. "It's to get them started and on their way."
That could mean opening their own restaurants (in Pasco County, Mitchell hopes) and adding to the growing community.
"What's really nice is east Pasco (County) has a lot of growth, new housing and all those people need to eat," he said. "There are plenty of restaurants but what will be nice is to see some homegrown, local, non-corporate chain restaurants opening. In a charming downtown like Dade City or Zephryhills, to support these entrepreneurs we would love to go meet the chefs and see the pics of the farm the food came from."
Or, there is the ever-popular avenue of going down the packaged food route.
"Packaged goods, talk about economic growth," Mitchell said. "If they take off and get their own facility, talk about real jobs, real growth."
