CoMo Cooks is a commercial kitchen and food business incubator located on The Loop. We believe all good cooks deserve a chance to turn their recipes into reality so our mission is to provide accessible, welcoming, and affordable kitchen space for local food-based businesses, farmers, and small-batch producers. We’re eliminating obstacles to entrepreneurship and making it easier for everyone to start and grow their food-based business.
Basically, the Loop Community Improvement District provides the kitchen--everything from kitchen equipment to prep space to smallwares--and then we rent the space to small, independent businesses. Kitchens are expensive to build so by providing an affordable shared space, people can start a food business without a lot of investment. And as a bonus, you have a built-in collection of colleagues to partner with and share knowledge with.
We have quite a range of different businesses including food trucks, caterers, bakers, chocolate makers, hot sauce bottlers, and farmers doing value-added products like kimchi and sauerkraut. We also have the largest collection of ethnic food being made here at CoMo Cooks including Mexican, Swahili, Nigerian, Korean, BBQ, Soul Food, Cajun, Indian, Venezuelan, and more.
Yes! They are all separate businesses with their own websites, socials, and distribution systems.
The goal of our shared kitchen is to help small food start-ups by providing them with kitchen and pop-up space so they can build a business without a lot of cost. That means we have around 45 small businesses working out of the Loop office--all with their own menus, ordering info, and hours.
We maintain an online listing of all our CoMo Cooks vendors which includes the type of food they serve, how to find them, and whether it's a food truck, a caterer, or a pop-up. Browse our online listing on the Loop website.
Many CoMo Cooks clients are at the Saturday or Wednesday Farmers Market, others are food trucks that can be found at festivals and around town, and others can be contacted directly for special orders, catering, or to see where they'll be set up.
Each listing will have some information about the vendor and where they operate--whether it's from a food truck, our office, or via special order. We recommend following a business on social media to get the latest on menus and schedules.
The CoMo Cooks Shared Kitchen is in the same building as the Loop office. We are located at 14 Business Loop East, next to Boost Mobile and across the street from McCosh Chevrolet. So don't worry if you show up and it doesn't look like a kitchen--it's much bigger on the inside than the outside!
Pop-ups are held after work hours in the front office. Pick-ups are run through the alley entrance to the kitchen--you can enter the alley behind the building via Grand or Garth. But if you can't find it, come to the front and we'll help you out.
Here's a map! And we have a downloadable map as well.
We'd love to have you!
Details about our kitchen can be found at www.comocooks.com. We host a monthly orientation session for new clients that includes tours as well as meetings with free business coaches and representatives from the health department to make sure everyone starts off on the right foot. Contact our kitchen manager Trish Robertson at [email protected] for dates and to RSVP.
