When Bill Cobb was looking for a commercial kitchen where he could develop food products based on a purple sweet potato, he found just the place in Creative Food Ventures.
The $1 million kitchen in Ashe County is a business incubator started up through a cooperative effort of local government and nonprofit agencies.
"It's been very helpful to us to start a business adding value to agricultural products we grow in Stokes County," said Cobb, who used the kitchen to perfect a frozen puree of the Stokes Purple sweet-potato products.
"Without access to the kitchen, we wouldn't have been able to develop our value-added product," Cobb said. "The experience we had there doing it on a small scale was essential to doing it in a larger facility."
But while Cobb is a success story for the Ashe County business-incubator kitchen, not enough people have used the kitchen since Creative Food Ventures opened in spring of 2007.
The kitchen will shut down Wednesday, the last day of 2008.
Organizers are looking at ways it can be reopened, perhaps by a nonprofit agency willing to run it.
The kitchen was opened with about $1 million in grants, including money from the GoldenLEAF Foundation, the N.C. Rural Center, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and other agencies or foundations.
Part of the idea of developing the kitchen was to offer a place to develop new agricultural enterprises for farmers affected by the tobacco buyout.
In the past, farmers could grow vegetables, can them at home and sell them. Today's more stringent health regulations make a commercial kitchen the place to do that kind of work.
But organizers found that instead of shifting to those kinds of commercial agricultural ventures, the tobacco farmers retired.
There were other issues: The proposed marketing plan never developed. Many people were unaware of the kitchen. The souring economy meant that some people might not have been willing to risk their resources in starting a business.
The kitchen has been operated through the Ashe County Partnership for Children and is in Family Central, the old Ashe County high school that now houses a number of programs and agencies. The kitchen includes stoves, convection ovens, pie-making equipment, an industrial-size dehydrator, a walk-in freezer and a walk-in refrigerator.
Sarah Wolf, the new director of the Partnership for Children, said that the kitchen costs about $5,000 a month in rent and salaries.
It was losing money last year when Ashe County commissioners voted to shift $25,000 to it from the budget of the Ashe County Economic Development Commission. That kept the kitchen going, but organizers said they can't keep pumping money into it.
Pat Mitchell, the director of economic development for Ashe County, said that the kitchen could still be a successful venture.
"We're open to looking at a lot of different types of partnerships to make it work," she said.
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.
■ Anyone interested in operating Creative Food Ventures can contact Pat Mitchell at 336-846-5502 or pmitchell@ashecountygov.com.
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