Kitchen Party
Four Nova Scotia food startups find pooling their resources can lead to success

RYAN DESROCHES is discovering there is indeed strength in numbers.

In the summer of 2015, DesRoches, founder and CEO of Halifax-based Bandha Bar, which makes natural, gluten-free energy bars, leased a 1,000-square-foot kitchen facility in the city to make his energy bars. It was a key moment for his threeyear- old business. He says most startup businesses in the food sector have to rent out kitchens of established restaurants and make their products on weekends or nights when those restaurants are closed. Having his own kitchen allowed DesRoches to make the bars whenever he wanted.

But the space was larger than he needed, so he quickly partnered with another entrepreneur in the food industry, Ainsley Umlah of Greens of Haligonia, to share the kitchen space. Word spread that the arrangement was working well for the partners, and soon two other Halifax-based food business owners were sharing the kitchen space: Rawthentic Chocolate and Mermaid Fare. “It’s working out as kind of a startup incubator model, which makes it unique,” says DesRoches, who adds there is room for one more partner at the facility.

Cooperation and partnerships are hard to come by in the competitive food sector. But DesRoches says having four small startups under one roof allows them to share employees, processing and packaging equipment and they can often co-distribute their products, which range from energy bars, to raw chocolate and specialty edible seaweed. Marketing and sales synergies have also been created.

DesRoches insists the number one benefit the kitchen sharing arrangement has produced doesn’t even have anything to do with time management or dollars and cents. “We feed off each other’s energy,” Des- Roches says. “We eat together, work together and experience the highs and lows of running our businesses. We’re also able to tap into each of our networks and mentors.”