Hot Bread Kitchen
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|
Website |
www.hotbreadkitchen.org |
Sector Group |
Retail and Tourism |
Fund Relationship |
Pauline Brown, Brett Traussi (Dinex Corporation), Dan Leader (Bread Alone) |
Description |
The majority of foreign-born women in the U.S., limited by domestic responsibilities, acculturation difficulties as well as lack of education and language skills, find it difficult to secure high-paying jobs. In order to remove these barriers to fair-wage employment, Jessamyn W. Rodriguez leveraged her experiences and knowledge of immigration-policy, along with her passion for baking, to launch Hot Bread Kitchen, a non-profit that offers job training and business incubation in the culinary industry to foreign-born and low-income women.
To fund the costs of its training programs, Hot Bread Kitchen operates a revenue-generating bakery that produces a line of international breads and a food incubator, HBK Incubates. Both ventures are housed in La Marqueta, a city-owned marketplace in East Harlem, at 115th Street and Park Avenue. Hot Bread Kitchen produces over 20 types of artisanal multi-ethnic breads inspired by its bakers such as handmade corn tortillas, lavash crackers and Moroccan flatbreads. All of their products are competitively priced and sold through NYC greenmarkets, co-operative food markets, and retailers in the New York area. To date, Hot Bread Kitchen has provided thousands of hours of paid on-the-job training and classroom instruction to its bakers who come from countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Mali, Haiti, Mexico, Morocco and, at full capacity, expects to train 80 women per year. In February 2011, New York City Investment Fund provided debt financing to Hot Bread Kitchen. NYCIF's loan supports Hot Bread Kitchen's mission of improving the economic security of low-income and immigrant women and the launch of the City's first food business incubator in Harlem. |