E
Emily Satterlee
Guest
- Thread Author
- #1
The envelopes are open, the trophies have new homes, and the Gnomes are still humming sea shanties. The third annual Golden Whisk Awards set sail at the Herreshoff Marine Museum, closing out the 2026 Shared Kitchen Summit in Providence, Rhode Island.
Photos courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
The Golden Whisk Awards are the only awards dedicated to the shared kitchen industry: the commercial kitchens, kitchen incubators, mentors, and advcates who help food entrepreneurs start, grow, and scale. This year’s Summit brought together 150 attendees representing 77 shared kitchens across 40 states. Out of 36 finalists, nine winners took home a Golden Whisk across seven categories, including one we created this year.
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Grab a slice of something sweet. Here’s who took home a Golden Whisk, and what makes each of them one of a kind.
Warren, RI · makefoodyourbusiness.org
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
The top honor went to our host-state hero. Since opening in 2014, Hope & Main has helped launch more than 550 food businesses, and one in four of Rhode Island’s licensed CPG companies got their start there. In the past year alone, members logged more than 17,700 kitchen hours, and 49 new entrepreneurs completed the business readiness process that takes them from First Course through licensing, insurance, and ServSafe.
And 2026 was a big one. After twelve years in Warren, Hope & Main opened West End Kitchens in Providence, going from one campus to two and adding three new shared kitchens to meet demand. They didn’t just unlock the doors and hope. In the year before opening, the team guided prospective members through onboarding and licensing so the kitchens would be busy from day one, and redesigned how they run scheduling and member services across two sites. The result: a second campus that hit the ground running.
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
What hasn’t changed is the high-touch part. Staff work from open offices that members drift in and out of all day, so a quick question can turn into a problem-solving session. The team likes to say they stay “one lesson plan ahead” of their members, and in Hope & Main’s latest member survey, staff approachability scored 4.8 out of 5. Hope & Main also builds the path to market, from on-site Makers Markets to the 2026 Rhode Island Tabletop Show, which connected 78 food businesses with 392 registered buyers.
Take D’Norah Bites. Mother-daughter team Dinorah and Maria Polanco started in their home kitchen in 2023 with cakes and desserts inspired by the Dominican Republic. When ghost kitchen rent got too steep, they moved production to Hope & Main. Today they’re in more than a dozen Rhode Island stores and just signed a lease on their first brick-and-mortar café.
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Hope & Main was everywhere in Providence this year, too. Founder Lisa Raiola, our 2025 Shared Kitchen Industry Champion, opened the Summit with her keynote, The Platformed Kitchen, making the case that shared kitchens are quietly building the infrastructure of a more local food economy. Mike Mowry, Shelby Doggett, and Luca Carnavale walked through Hope & Main’s three-tier model for co-packing members: cash flow coaching through its Seedlings program, lean manufacturing training with a local Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and the RI Tabletop Show, Rhode Island’s only B2B trade show connecting food makers with buyers, and our bus tour stopped by to see it all in action. We brought the Summit to Rhode Island because of Hope & Main. One year after Lisa took home a Whisk, the kitchen she built takes home the biggest one of the night.
Pittsburgh, PA · catapultpittsburgh.org
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Catapult gives emerging culinary entrepreneurs the space, resources, and support to grow their businesses and bring their ideas to life. They’ve built their kitchen incubator into a community-rooted, equity-first platform, pairing kitchen access with emergency resource distribution, peer-to-peer support, wealth building, trauma-informed financial counseling, and policy advocacy. Their philosophy is simple: center people and justice, and the impact reaches far beyond the plate.
Their Catapult Culinary program is a six-month accelerator for minority food entrepreneurs. It’s completely free, trauma-informed at every stage, and has put more than $500,000 directly into entrepreneurs’ hands. Graduates earn the chance to incubate in Catapult’s commercial kitchen, moving from hope to ownership.
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
If the name rings a bell, it should. Catapult has been part of the Summit family for years. Director of Entrepreneurship Lachelle Bell joined our 2024 panel on supporting food entrepreneurs in New Orleans. In 2025, Tammy Thompson, Lachelle, and Nissa’a Stallworth-Hewitt took the main stage in Cleveland with Beyond the Kitchen: A Justice-Driven Model for Building Food Businesses that Change Lives, reminding the whole room that shared kitchens can be engines of economic mobility and dignity. And they were back in Providence this year, with Nissa’a and Lachelle leading a QuickFire on how cohorts help kitchens manage capacity and scheduling while moving food businesses from structured programming into the commercial kitchen. After a Shared Kitchen of the Year finalist nod last year, the Whisk finally came home to Pittsburgh.
Knoxville, TN · therealgoodkitchen.com
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Bailey Foster has a soft spot for the places a city grows up on. She fell for the shared kitchen model years ago at a La Cocina street food festival in San Francisco, carried the idea home to Knoxville, and opened Real Good Kitchen on January 8, 2021, smack in the middle of the pandemic. Members were cooking from day one.
Since then, Real Good Kitchen has helped chefs like Tarik grow from brewery pop-ups to his own North African restaurant, and the Real Good Kitchen Foundation now runs workshops and an incubator program for aspiring food businesses. Bailey even took on Magpies Bakery, a 35-year Knoxville institution, to keep its birthday cakes (and its beloved CrumBum) in the city for good.
The numbers back it up. Since opening, Real Good Kitchen and its foundation have served more than 250 food businesses, most of them startups and 65% owned or co-owned by women. One in five has gone on to open its own brick-and-mortar, and four businesses grew out of the kitchen in the past year alone (they still team up with RGK on catering). Take Grace Li of GraceCakesUS, who joined the foundation’s incubator to share traditional Chinese culture through baking. Today she sells out weekly at the farmers market and landed a national contract for her mooncakes. In her words, the program helped her start “thinking like a business owner, not just a baker.”
Her reach now goes well past her own kitchen. Real Good Kitchen is the technical assistance lead with United Way on the region’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative, and it has a formal consulting partnership with La Cocina, the very incubator that inspired her years ago. Full circle, Whisk in hand. Bailey was a finalist in two categories this year, and Torrie Boggs, Director of Impact at the Real Good Kitchen Foundation, joined our Mission and Margin panel to share how a for-profit social enterprise kitchen and a nonprofit foundation work side by side. We’re a little biased, since Real Good Kitchen has run on The Food Corridor since the day it opened. Read her full story in A Shared Kitchen, a 35-Year-Old Bakery, and One Woman’s Bet on Knoxville.
Greenfield, MA · fccdc.org
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Twenty-five years in, the Western MA Food Processing Center knows what works, what doesn’t, and what food businesses actually need. They started as a shared rental kitchen and spent the past 13 years evolving into a co-packer. This year alone, they gave one-on-one technical assistance to 129 food businesses, processed or stored product for 62 more, and turned 46,000 pounds of produce into value-added products for 16 local farms.
What earned Kate Minifie and Liz Buxton this Whisk is how freely they share all of it. Over the past year, they mentored 12 kitchens and food processing organizations across the Northeast, from shared kitchens and incubators to farm-based processors and gleaning operations. The results are concrete: two kitchens launched new client onboarding programs, one chose the equipment for a new production line, one developed three new value-added products, and two made the switch to organic processing.
Their longest-running partnership is with Fork Food Lab in Portland (a fellow Golden Whisk winner, for Sustainability in 2024), which is growing from a shared kitchen into a local processor and co-packer. For 18 months, Liz has met with Fork Food Lab’s Kitchen Director every other week on operations, equipment, food safety, and SOPs. The teams have traded four in-person visits to Greenfield, and Liz made the trip to Portland herself. That’s mentorship as a long game: not just handing over answers, but working alongside another kitchen as it grows.
Liz is a familiar face on the Summit stage, too. She joined our 2025 co-manufacturing and co-packing panel, and this year she brought more than 40 years of food service and operations experience to a breakout on designing SOPs that keep members happy, alongside Paul Stephen of Clarence Creative Kitchen.
New York, NY · hotbreadkitchen.org
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Hot Bread Kitchen has supported more than 800 food businesses since 2008, with free programs for New Yorkers facing barriers to starting or growing a business. Many are immigrants, and 89% reported low-to-moderate incomes in 2025.
This year’s Whisk shines a light on Emma Meyers, Senior Director of Small Business Programs. Emma came up through restaurants and hospitality, and when she arrived she did something simple and powerful: she asked entrepreneurs what wasn’t working, then rebuilt all three Hot Bread Kitchen Incubates programs around the answers.
In 2025, Emma and the team worked with 159 entrepreneurs, saw 32 business plans to completion, and helped Start participants generate $531,000 in sales. Ask Priscilla Terrero of Morito Chocolates how that feels. Emma coached her one-on-one for five months before she won Hot Bread Kitchen’s Breadwinners Pitch in June 2026, in front of 350 supporters. In Priscilla’s words, Emma “made me feel comfortable.” That’s community impact that starts with listening. Emma brought that expertise to the Summit stage this year, too, sharing the stage with Mechanism and The Good Food CFO (the same team now coaching her Start participants) to unpack the Raising Dough research on getting food businesses ready for capital.
Houston, TX · litcommercialkitchen.com
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Plenty of kitchens give members a place to produce. LIT Kitchen helps them get seen. From their 24/7 space in southwest Houston, Ronnie and Linda run workshops and panels and built an on-site food photography studio, so members can go from production to promotion without leaving the building.
It starts even earlier than that. Many of LIT’s members, most of them women-owned businesses, walk in without so much as a registered business name. Linda Nguyen personally walks them through registration, manufacturer’s licensing, sales tax permits, and state requirements, whether they’re launching juices, baked goods, seasonings, or sauces. She’s been there herself: Linda helped grow Roostar Vietnamese Grill to more than 85 employees and into Shell Energy Stadium, the first Vietnamese food concept in a Houston sports stadium. Now she’s passing that playbook on.
When your kitchen turns first-timers into licensed businesses, then makes them better marketers, that’s innovation worth a Whisk. LIT also made our roundup of Houston’s top shared kitchens, and you can find them on The Kitchen Door.
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
This Whisk wasn’t on the menu when nominations opened. As we reviewed our finalists, we had a glaring realization: some of the most important work lifting shared kitchens happens far from the prep tables, in research, policy, and community planning, and none of our award categories quite recognized it. We needed a way to honor the people gathering the data, shaping the policy, and building the plans that help shared kitchens get funded, grow, and prove their impact.
So the Gnomes did what Gnomes do and whisked up a new award.
Industry Partner of the Year honors an individual or organization moving the shared kitchen industry forward through policy development, research, and advocacy: the people shaping the data, standards, and support that help shared kitchens grow. This year, it goes to three of them.
Fort Collins, CO & Lexington, KY · colostate.edu & uky.edu
Ask any operator what they wish they had more of, and somewhere between “hours in the day” and “freezer space,” you’ll hear “good data.” Dawn and Rebecca are on it.
Dawn co-leads the Regional Economic Development Institute at Colorado State University. Working with CSU Extension, the Food Systems team, and USDA partners, she creates and shares engaged research that aims to understand, analyze, and inform economic development strategies in struggling rural and urban regions, especially across Colorado. She is one of the nation’s premier researchers in local and regional food systems..
Rebecca is a newly minted Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky, where her Extension work supports food and agribusiness entrepreneurship. In her shared-use kitchen research, she’s tackling the questions this whole industry keeps asking: where do shared kitchens thrive, why, and what does that mean for the food entrepreneurs inside them?
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Put them together and you get a clearer picture of the shared kitchen industry nationwide, plus the kind of evidence that helps operators make their case to funders and policymakers.
Montpelier, VT · northboundventures.com
Holly has a knack for walking into a town with big challenges and walking out with a plan. Since co-founding Northbound Ventures in 2013, she’s worked with more than 60 communities and regions across the country. Many of those projects came through the U.S. EPA’s Local Foods, Local Places program, where she helps communities turn ambitious goals into focused action plans and attract the resources to carry them out.
These aren’t easy assignments. Holly’s projects often land in places dealing with empty main streets, lost industry, and generational poverty, with plenty of stakeholders who don’t always agree. Through feasibility studies, market analyses, and food system assessments, she brings the research and facilitation to get local governments, community groups, and funders behind one shared plan. For under-resourced communities, that’s often the difference between a good idea and a funded one. True to its name, Northbound keeps them headed the right way.
If Rebecca and Holly look familiar, you probably caught them on the main stage in Providence. Together with our own Ashley Colpaart, they led Data Nerds Welcome: Inside the Numbers on Shared Kitchen Impact. They shared first-of-its-kind nationwide data linking what kitchens offer to what tenants actually use, and what that means for profitability, client success, and sector resilience. Data nerds, welcome to The Golden Whisk club.
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Every one of these kitchens and leaders is doing work worth celebrating. Below is the full lineup, winners in bold.
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
To every winner, finalist, and nominator: thank you. You make this industry what it is, and celebrating you is the best part of our year.
Whisk winners have a habit of paying it forward. At this year’s Summit, past winners including Wingman Kitchens, Cherry Street Kitchen, South Amboy Kitchen, and Piedmont Food Processing Center all took the stage during the week’s sessions to share what they’ve learned. We can’t wait to see what this year’s class teaches the rest of us next.
Missed last year’s celebration? Catch up on the 2025 winners in our Shared Kitchen Summit and Golden Whisk Awards recap. And if you’re a food entrepreneur looking for your own commercial kitchen home, you can find kitchens like these on The Kitchen Door.
Know a kitchen, mentor, or champion who deserves the spotlight next year? Start thinking about your nomination now. The best way to hear when nominations open, plus where the next Shared Kitchen Summit will land, is our monthly Shared Kitchen Connect newsletter.
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Until next time, keep whisking.
The Food Corridor Gnomes
The post Meet the 2026 Golden Whisk Award Winners appeared first on The Food Corridor.
The Golden Whisk Awards are the only awards dedicated to the shared kitchen industry: the commercial kitchens, kitchen incubators, mentors, and advcates who help food entrepreneurs start, grow, and scale. This year’s Summit brought together 150 attendees representing 77 shared kitchens across 40 states. Out of 36 finalists, nine winners took home a Golden Whisk across seven categories, including one we created this year.
Grab a slice of something sweet. Here’s who took home a Golden Whisk, and what makes each of them one of a kind.
Shared Kitchen of the Year: Hope & Main
Warren, RI · makefoodyourbusiness.org
The top honor went to our host-state hero. Since opening in 2014, Hope & Main has helped launch more than 550 food businesses, and one in four of Rhode Island’s licensed CPG companies got their start there. In the past year alone, members logged more than 17,700 kitchen hours, and 49 new entrepreneurs completed the business readiness process that takes them from First Course through licensing, insurance, and ServSafe.
And 2026 was a big one. After twelve years in Warren, Hope & Main opened West End Kitchens in Providence, going from one campus to two and adding three new shared kitchens to meet demand. They didn’t just unlock the doors and hope. In the year before opening, the team guided prospective members through onboarding and licensing so the kitchens would be busy from day one, and redesigned how they run scheduling and member services across two sites. The result: a second campus that hit the ground running.
What hasn’t changed is the high-touch part. Staff work from open offices that members drift in and out of all day, so a quick question can turn into a problem-solving session. The team likes to say they stay “one lesson plan ahead” of their members, and in Hope & Main’s latest member survey, staff approachability scored 4.8 out of 5. Hope & Main also builds the path to market, from on-site Makers Markets to the 2026 Rhode Island Tabletop Show, which connected 78 food businesses with 392 registered buyers.
Take D’Norah Bites. Mother-daughter team Dinorah and Maria Polanco started in their home kitchen in 2023 with cakes and desserts inspired by the Dominican Republic. When ghost kitchen rent got too steep, they moved production to Hope & Main. Today they’re in more than a dozen Rhode Island stores and just signed a lease on their first brick-and-mortar café.
Hope & Main was everywhere in Providence this year, too. Founder Lisa Raiola, our 2025 Shared Kitchen Industry Champion, opened the Summit with her keynote, The Platformed Kitchen, making the case that shared kitchens are quietly building the infrastructure of a more local food economy. Mike Mowry, Shelby Doggett, and Luca Carnavale walked through Hope & Main’s three-tier model for co-packing members: cash flow coaching through its Seedlings program, lean manufacturing training with a local Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and the RI Tabletop Show, Rhode Island’s only B2B trade show connecting food makers with buyers, and our bus tour stopped by to see it all in action. We brought the Summit to Rhode Island because of Hope & Main. One year after Lisa took home a Whisk, the kitchen she built takes home the biggest one of the night.
Kitchen Incubator of the Year: Catapult Greater Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA · catapultpittsburgh.org
Catapult gives emerging culinary entrepreneurs the space, resources, and support to grow their businesses and bring their ideas to life. They’ve built their kitchen incubator into a community-rooted, equity-first platform, pairing kitchen access with emergency resource distribution, peer-to-peer support, wealth building, trauma-informed financial counseling, and policy advocacy. Their philosophy is simple: center people and justice, and the impact reaches far beyond the plate.
Their Catapult Culinary program is a six-month accelerator for minority food entrepreneurs. It’s completely free, trauma-informed at every stage, and has put more than $500,000 directly into entrepreneurs’ hands. Graduates earn the chance to incubate in Catapult’s commercial kitchen, moving from hope to ownership.
If the name rings a bell, it should. Catapult has been part of the Summit family for years. Director of Entrepreneurship Lachelle Bell joined our 2024 panel on supporting food entrepreneurs in New Orleans. In 2025, Tammy Thompson, Lachelle, and Nissa’a Stallworth-Hewitt took the main stage in Cleveland with Beyond the Kitchen: A Justice-Driven Model for Building Food Businesses that Change Lives, reminding the whole room that shared kitchens can be engines of economic mobility and dignity. And they were back in Providence this year, with Nissa’a and Lachelle leading a QuickFire on how cohorts help kitchens manage capacity and scheduling while moving food businesses from structured programming into the commercial kitchen. After a Shared Kitchen of the Year finalist nod last year, the Whisk finally came home to Pittsburgh.
Shared Kitchen Industry Champion of the Year: Bailey Foster, Real Good Kitchen
Knoxville, TN · therealgoodkitchen.com
Bailey Foster has a soft spot for the places a city grows up on. She fell for the shared kitchen model years ago at a La Cocina street food festival in San Francisco, carried the idea home to Knoxville, and opened Real Good Kitchen on January 8, 2021, smack in the middle of the pandemic. Members were cooking from day one.
Since then, Real Good Kitchen has helped chefs like Tarik grow from brewery pop-ups to his own North African restaurant, and the Real Good Kitchen Foundation now runs workshops and an incubator program for aspiring food businesses. Bailey even took on Magpies Bakery, a 35-year Knoxville institution, to keep its birthday cakes (and its beloved CrumBum) in the city for good.
The numbers back it up. Since opening, Real Good Kitchen and its foundation have served more than 250 food businesses, most of them startups and 65% owned or co-owned by women. One in five has gone on to open its own brick-and-mortar, and four businesses grew out of the kitchen in the past year alone (they still team up with RGK on catering). Take Grace Li of GraceCakesUS, who joined the foundation’s incubator to share traditional Chinese culture through baking. Today she sells out weekly at the farmers market and landed a national contract for her mooncakes. In her words, the program helped her start “thinking like a business owner, not just a baker.”
Her reach now goes well past her own kitchen. Real Good Kitchen is the technical assistance lead with United Way on the region’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative, and it has a formal consulting partnership with La Cocina, the very incubator that inspired her years ago. Full circle, Whisk in hand. Bailey was a finalist in two categories this year, and Torrie Boggs, Director of Impact at the Real Good Kitchen Foundation, joined our Mission and Margin panel to share how a for-profit social enterprise kitchen and a nonprofit foundation work side by side. We’re a little biased, since Real Good Kitchen has run on The Food Corridor since the day it opened. Read her full story in A Shared Kitchen, a 35-Year-Old Bakery, and One Woman’s Bet on Knoxville.
Shared Kitchen Mentor of the Year: Western MA Food Processing Center
Greenfield, MA · fccdc.org
Twenty-five years in, the Western MA Food Processing Center knows what works, what doesn’t, and what food businesses actually need. They started as a shared rental kitchen and spent the past 13 years evolving into a co-packer. This year alone, they gave one-on-one technical assistance to 129 food businesses, processed or stored product for 62 more, and turned 46,000 pounds of produce into value-added products for 16 local farms.
What earned Kate Minifie and Liz Buxton this Whisk is how freely they share all of it. Over the past year, they mentored 12 kitchens and food processing organizations across the Northeast, from shared kitchens and incubators to farm-based processors and gleaning operations. The results are concrete: two kitchens launched new client onboarding programs, one chose the equipment for a new production line, one developed three new value-added products, and two made the switch to organic processing.
Their longest-running partnership is with Fork Food Lab in Portland (a fellow Golden Whisk winner, for Sustainability in 2024), which is growing from a shared kitchen into a local processor and co-packer. For 18 months, Liz has met with Fork Food Lab’s Kitchen Director every other week on operations, equipment, food safety, and SOPs. The teams have traded four in-person visits to Greenfield, and Liz made the trip to Portland herself. That’s mentorship as a long game: not just handing over answers, but working alongside another kitchen as it grows.
Liz is a familiar face on the Summit stage, too. She joined our 2025 co-manufacturing and co-packing panel, and this year she brought more than 40 years of food service and operations experience to a breakout on designing SOPs that keep members happy, alongside Paul Stephen of Clarence Creative Kitchen.
Community Impact Award: Hot Bread Kitchen
New York, NY · hotbreadkitchen.org
Hot Bread Kitchen has supported more than 800 food businesses since 2008, with free programs for New Yorkers facing barriers to starting or growing a business. Many are immigrants, and 89% reported low-to-moderate incomes in 2025.
This year’s Whisk shines a light on Emma Meyers, Senior Director of Small Business Programs. Emma came up through restaurants and hospitality, and when she arrived she did something simple and powerful: she asked entrepreneurs what wasn’t working, then rebuilt all three Hot Bread Kitchen Incubates programs around the answers.
- Seed went from fixed weekly Zoom classes to a flexible, self-paced model, because many founders were building businesses around full-time jobs.
- Start now gives entrepreneurs 15 months of subsidized time in the commercial kitchen of their choice (an ice cream maker needs freezer space, a snack brand might need an allergen-certified facility), plus financial coaching through a new partnership with Good Food CFO.
- Scale was paused, redesigned to help businesses find the right capital rather than just a loan, and relaunched with eight established food businesses.
In 2025, Emma and the team worked with 159 entrepreneurs, saw 32 business plans to completion, and helped Start participants generate $531,000 in sales. Ask Priscilla Terrero of Morito Chocolates how that feels. Emma coached her one-on-one for five months before she won Hot Bread Kitchen’s Breadwinners Pitch in June 2026, in front of 350 supporters. In Priscilla’s words, Emma “made me feel comfortable.” That’s community impact that starts with listening. Emma brought that expertise to the Summit stage this year, too, sharing the stage with Mechanism and The Good Food CFO (the same team now coaching her Start participants) to unpack the Raising Dough research on getting food businesses ready for capital.
Innovative Marketing Award: LIT Kitchen
Houston, TX · litcommercialkitchen.com
Plenty of kitchens give members a place to produce. LIT Kitchen helps them get seen. From their 24/7 space in southwest Houston, Ronnie and Linda run workshops and panels and built an on-site food photography studio, so members can go from production to promotion without leaving the building.
It starts even earlier than that. Many of LIT’s members, most of them women-owned businesses, walk in without so much as a registered business name. Linda Nguyen personally walks them through registration, manufacturer’s licensing, sales tax permits, and state requirements, whether they’re launching juices, baked goods, seasonings, or sauces. She’s been there herself: Linda helped grow Roostar Vietnamese Grill to more than 85 employees and into Shell Energy Stadium, the first Vietnamese food concept in a Houston sports stadium. Now she’s passing that playbook on.
When your kitchen turns first-timers into licensed businesses, then makes them better marketers, that’s innovation worth a Whisk. LIT also made our roundup of Houston’s top shared kitchens, and you can find them on The Kitchen Door.
Industry Partner of the Year: Dawn Thilmany McFadden & Rebecca Wasserman-Olin, and Holly Fowler
This Whisk wasn’t on the menu when nominations opened. As we reviewed our finalists, we had a glaring realization: some of the most important work lifting shared kitchens happens far from the prep tables, in research, policy, and community planning, and none of our award categories quite recognized it. We needed a way to honor the people gathering the data, shaping the policy, and building the plans that help shared kitchens get funded, grow, and prove their impact.
So the Gnomes did what Gnomes do and whisked up a new award.
Industry Partner of the Year honors an individual or organization moving the shared kitchen industry forward through policy development, research, and advocacy: the people shaping the data, standards, and support that help shared kitchens grow. This year, it goes to three of them.
Dawn Thilmany McFadden & Rebecca Wasserman-Olin
Fort Collins, CO & Lexington, KY · colostate.edu & uky.edu
Ask any operator what they wish they had more of, and somewhere between “hours in the day” and “freezer space,” you’ll hear “good data.” Dawn and Rebecca are on it.
Dawn co-leads the Regional Economic Development Institute at Colorado State University. Working with CSU Extension, the Food Systems team, and USDA partners, she creates and shares engaged research that aims to understand, analyze, and inform economic development strategies in struggling rural and urban regions, especially across Colorado. She is one of the nation’s premier researchers in local and regional food systems..
Rebecca is a newly minted Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky, where her Extension work supports food and agribusiness entrepreneurship. In her shared-use kitchen research, she’s tackling the questions this whole industry keeps asking: where do shared kitchens thrive, why, and what does that mean for the food entrepreneurs inside them?
Put them together and you get a clearer picture of the shared kitchen industry nationwide, plus the kind of evidence that helps operators make their case to funders and policymakers.
Holly Fowler, Northbound Ventures
Montpelier, VT · northboundventures.com
Holly has a knack for walking into a town with big challenges and walking out with a plan. Since co-founding Northbound Ventures in 2013, she’s worked with more than 60 communities and regions across the country. Many of those projects came through the U.S. EPA’s Local Foods, Local Places program, where she helps communities turn ambitious goals into focused action plans and attract the resources to carry them out.
These aren’t easy assignments. Holly’s projects often land in places dealing with empty main streets, lost industry, and generational poverty, with plenty of stakeholders who don’t always agree. Through feasibility studies, market analyses, and food system assessments, she brings the research and facilitation to get local governments, community groups, and funders behind one shared plan. For under-resourced communities, that’s often the difference between a good idea and a funded one. True to its name, Northbound keeps them headed the right way.
If Rebecca and Holly look familiar, you probably caught them on the main stage in Providence. Together with our own Ashley Colpaart, they led Data Nerds Welcome: Inside the Numbers on Shared Kitchen Impact. They shared first-of-its-kind nationwide data linking what kitchens offer to what tenants actually use, and what that means for profitability, client success, and sector resilience. Data nerds, welcome to The Golden Whisk club.
Congratulations to Every 2026 Finalist
Photo courtesy of Brad Smith Photography
Every one of these kitchens and leaders is doing work worth celebrating. Below is the full lineup, winners in bold.
Shared Kitchen of the Year
- South Amboy Kitchen, South Amboy, NJ
- Chefspace, West Louisville, KY
- Flint Food Works, Flint, MI
- Hope & Main, Warren, RI (Winner!)
- Clarence Creative Kitchen, Clarence, NY
- The Food Fort, Columbus, OH
Kitchen Incubator of the Year
- Kitchen 66, Tulsa, OK
- Catapult Greater Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (Winner!)
- Kitchen of Purpose, Arlington, VA
- El Pajaro Community Development Corporation, Watsonville, CA
- Wahiawā Value-Added Product Development Center, Wahiawā, HI
- Kitchen Incubator of Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN
Shared Kitchen Industry Champion of the Year
- Dawn Thilmany McFadden (Colorado State University) & Rebecca Wasserman-Olin (University of Kentucky) (Industry Partner of the Year winners!)
- Quinlan Carttar, K-State Extension Community Food Systems Team, Lawrence, KS
- Maria Gonzalez, Adelante Community Development, Commerce City, CO
- The Corporation for Findlay Market, Cincinnati, OH
- Bailey Foster, Real Good Kitchen, Knoxville, TN (Winner!)
- Holly Fowler, Northbound Ventures, Montpelier, VT (Industry Partner of the Year winner!)
Shared Kitchen Mentor of the Year
- Pro Kitchen Hub, Sunrise, FL
- Andi Tulipana, Findlay Kitchen, Cincinnati, OH
- Western MA Food Processing Center, Greenfield, MA (Winner!)
- El Pajaro Community Development Corporation, Watsonville, CA
- Bailey Foster, Real Good Kitchen, Knoxville, TN
- Ederique “Chef E” Goudia, Eastern Market Shed 5 Incubator, Detroit, MI
Community Impact Award
- Growing Hope Incubator Kitchen, Ypsilanti, MI
- CLiCK, Windham, CT
- Fourth Plain Community Commons Kitchen, Vancouver, WA
- Hot Bread Kitchen, New York, NY (Winner!)
- The Center for Culinary Enterprises, Philadelphia, PA
- Alchemist Kitchen, Sacramento, CA
Innovative Marketing Award
- Clarence Creative Kitchen, Clarence, NY
- Kitchen Incubator of Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN
- Local Roots, Wooster, OH
LIT Kitchen, Houston, TX (Winner!)
- Ox Street Kitchen / Magnolia Fund, Houston, TX
- e.terra, New York, NY
Here’s to the Kitchens That Make It All Happen
To every winner, finalist, and nominator: thank you. You make this industry what it is, and celebrating you is the best part of our year.
Whisk winners have a habit of paying it forward. At this year’s Summit, past winners including Wingman Kitchens, Cherry Street Kitchen, South Amboy Kitchen, and Piedmont Food Processing Center all took the stage during the week’s sessions to share what they’ve learned. We can’t wait to see what this year’s class teaches the rest of us next.
Missed last year’s celebration? Catch up on the 2025 winners in our Shared Kitchen Summit and Golden Whisk Awards recap. And if you’re a food entrepreneur looking for your own commercial kitchen home, you can find kitchens like these on The Kitchen Door.
Know a kitchen, mentor, or champion who deserves the spotlight next year? Start thinking about your nomination now. The best way to hear when nominations open, plus where the next Shared Kitchen Summit will land, is our monthly Shared Kitchen Connect newsletter.
Until next time, keep whisking.
The Food Corridor Gnomes
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