Letter to Secretary Wilbur Ross - Rochester Has All The Right Ingredients, It's Time To Get Cooking

Letter

I write to express my strong support for Rochester Downtown Development Corporation's (RDDC) grant application to the Economic Development Administration (EDA) to construct and equip The Commissary: Downtown Kitchen Incubator in the City of Rochester.

The Commissary Downtown Kitchen Incubator would enable existing and start-up entrepreneurs to launch new food-based businesses in downtown Rochester. Together with wrap-around incubation and business support services, the Commissary will provide a pathway to establish and grow new local businesses by solving one of the biggest impediments to creating a successful food start-up: the high cost of creating a licensed commercial kitchen. Food businesses and restaurants experience a very high failure rate often related to the high cost of creating a commercial kitchen, which increases the debt load significantly for fledgling restaurant and food businesses.

The Commissary would feature a shared commercial kitchen with fourteen kitchen stations, one show kitchen, and shared-use dry and cold storage areas available to food entrepreneurs to use to prepare products for sale. In addition, the Commissary Incubator will provide tenants with specific expertise in the food industry which many of Rochester's existing entrepreneurial support services lack. Within the first year of operation, the Commissary anticipates supporting the indirect creation and growth of thirty food businesses and 60 jobs and fifty food businesses and 100 jobs in its third year.

Additionally the Commissary: Downtown Kitchen Incubator will not only be a launching pad to grow new businesses but it will be a key anchor in the revitalization of downtown Rochester by creating new street-level activity along the City's Main Street Corridor. Physically, the Commissary will be located in the heart of Rochester's new Downtown Innovation Zone which is aimed at bolstering Main Street and Downtown Rochester into a hub for new high tech, business, and entrepreneurial activities alongside new mixed-use developments with places to live, shop, eat, do business and more. The EDA, in fact, has been a vital partner in setting the stage for the creation and future success of the Innovation Zone through past grant awards make to projects located in the Innovation Zone including the Rochester Institute of Technology Center for Urban Entrepreneurship (CUE) and the Midtown Rising site which is now home to new businesses and commercial development, and the NextCorps (formerly High Tech of Rochester) Accelerator. EDA's support now of the Commissary will not only leverage these earlier EDA investments but provide the impetus to push Rochester's economic and downtown development results to even new heights.

I strongly recommend this project for EDA funding and appreciate your consideration.

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