Fork Food Lab owner to tweak capital campaign to fund planned move
File Photo / Tim Greenway
Bill Seretta, president of the Sustainability Lab, in front of Fork Food Lab in West Bayside
Fork Food Lab’s nonprofit owner plans to relaunch its capital campaign in 2020 to fund a move to a bigger space.
“We can't say where or when, but we've outgrown our space," Bill Seretta, president of the Sustainability Lab, told Mainebiz, this week,
The Sustainability Lab, a Yarmouth-based nonprofit, bought the indebted shared commercial kitchen and food business incubator in Portland's West Bayside neighborhood last year, saving it from closure.
Today, it’s home to 44 food-related business startups that generate a combined $5.5 million in annual sales and employ more than 60 people.
Reiterating what he told Mainebiz in September, Seretta said the current space is both expensive and not set up for manufacturing, "and we need to change the whole formula ... We'd like to do it yesterday."
He added that they’ll need to raise around $1.2 million in total though details are still being worked out.
The plans come on the heels of what Seretta said was a successful season of sold-out events in December, including holiday retail markets.
Other events are planned for January and February, mostly around classes in making different types of food. They include a dumpling workshop on Jan. 9, and an empanada workshop on Jan. 23.
Need to retire debt
An end-of-year emailed plea for tax-deductible donations addressed to Fork Food Lab friends and supporters noted that it cost $200,000 to bring the facility "back from the brink of extinction," and that it needs to retire that debt "to make this critical community asset sustainable."
The note, from Bill Seretta and Beth Boepple, chairperson of the Sustainability Lab, goes on to say: "We are actively planning a move to a new facility that will lower overhead costs, better provide for the varied needs of our members and increase our capacity to distribute member products and source local ingredients."
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