Before Nadine James opened a Jamaican fusion restaurant in Worcester, she reserved time in a church kitchen managed by the Worcester Regional Food Hub. She’d prepare succulent slow-cooked oxtail and fragrant jerk chicken to sell at pop-ups the nonprofit organized, earning a little money and building a following.

Not far from James’s Cambridge Street restaurant, you’ll find another Food Hub success story. Trang Le and her large family transformed one of the city’s oldest dive bars into the Vietnamese restaurant Mint Kitchen & Bar, at 79 Maywood Street. They serve staple dishes from the country’s north, including fish sizzled with dill and turmeric. She, too, leaned on the Food Hub to learn the business of owning a restaurant.

With just five full-time employees and a modest kitchen, the Worcester Regional Food Hub has made a lasting impact on the local restaurant industry, building up new restaurants from scratch and helping to add more diversity to the city’s food scene. Imagine, then, what it could do with a massive upgrade.

Next year, the nonprofit, founded in 2015, moves into new headquarters at historic Union Station. The $4.5-million project, nearly a decade in the making, gives the Food Hub five state-of-the-art kitchens, a retail section for members to sell their products, events and classroom space and vastly more cold and dry storage. The largest of these kitchens can host classes, with some members already expressing interest in running their own cooking lessons. And Union Station gives the community easier access to these resources, says Food Hub Director Shon Rainford.

“We’re moving into the transportation hub of Worcester, where it’s accessible to all: You can take a free bus, you can take the train; there’s a big parking garage and loading dock. We’re in the heart of the city,” Rainford says.

The Food Hub’s wholesale business intends to take advantage of Union Station’s location to shuttle fresh produce in and out, an operation that moved $1.3 million of food in 2023. To combat food insecurity in the Worcester area, the Food Hub delivers produce from Massachusetts farms to 90 different school systems. Kids get access to fresh fruit and vegetables, while farmers get a reliable wholesaler. The Food Hub, depending on the season, works with about 60 farms.

In September, the train station’s former baggage area still appeared a busy construction zone, but the line of hoods for four of the kitchens had gone up, making it easier for Rainford to picture the headquarters—the largest project the nonprofit has embarked on to date— finally complete. When Rainford joined the Food Hub in 2018, it had five members using its kitchen. Today the nonprofit has 110 members, he says, with another 20 preparing to join.

“From a food distribution standpoint, we’re really maxed out, given our current location and the amount of storage we have,” he says. “From a kitchen standpoint, we’re open 24-hours a day, seven days a week and that schedule is pretty full; there are a lot of times when people look at the calendar and have to reschedule an event or push their prep to the middle of the night.”

Food Hub members make use of the nonprofit for assistance with food and beverage safety training and certification, building a business plan and creating marketing and logos. For a small fee, they gain access to the kitchen for prep, as well as a separate warehouse for storage. They reserve time slots for the kitchen online.

“We expect there will be multiple kitchens running at the same time for a significant part of the day once we move,” Rainford says.

A restaurant and food business incubator didn’t figure into the Food Hub’s early days. Then–Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray envisioned more of a wholesale business for the roughly 1,500 farms in Worcester County. And a kitchen component would allow farmers to prepare and package their own food products. But the Food Hub, unbeknownst to its planners, would reveal an unseen need for the city.

“It turned out, yes, there were some farmers interested in using the kitchen space, but it was more this amazing immigrant population in Worcester, saying, ‘I want to make my grandmother’s recipes,’ or, ‘Hey I want to make the food that I was raised with, the food I feed my family, and I want to start a business,’” Rainford says.

This demand led to the Food Hub’s Launching Diverse Food Entrepreneurs program, funded by the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts. The three-month program provides training in every aspect of running a restaurant or food business and pays for participants to get their ServSafe certification. Over a dozen people have graduated from the program, James and Le among them.

“They go through eight weeks with me where we go through business planning, accounting—everything from ‘how do I read a profit and loss statement?’ to ‘what about social media and websites?’” Rainford says.

James, who has lived in Worcester for some 30 years, learned to cook in Jamaica at the age of 9; along the way friends would call her “Miss Unique” because of her singular cooking style. The name stuck years later when she opened Unique Café in March 2021 after running the concept as a successful pop-up. Her restaurant has since moved to another location on Cambridge Street.

James jokes that she didn’t even have a pot to use when she first decided to turn her passion for cooking into a career. The Food Hub’s kitchen cost a small amount to rent and had the equipment she needed. The program walked her through writing a business plan, introduced her to accountants and even directed her to a company that makes signage. Above all else, she says, the Food Hub believed in her.

“You know you have this passion,” she says. “You know one day you want to have this restaurant. And hearing others say that you have what it takes to do it, it caused me to be vulnerable and put myself out there.”

Although she has the same passion, Le didn’t enter the program with the dream of opening a restaurant. She saw how her husband toiled in the industry and didn’t want to enter into such a stress-inducing job. Her cooking felt more personal, so she kept it close to home: She loves feeding people—only as a mom, at churches and for Boy Scouts.

In 2019, the company she worked for closed, forcing her to find work. She signed up for the Food Hub’s program and learned more about the commercial side of food. Still, she didn’t consider it as a career until the next year, while volunteering to feed people homebound during the pandemic.

“That was the first time we made food as a family— outside of at home, of course,” Le says. “My husband helped; my kids helped. Just to get those meals out to people. There were days when we would cook over 100 meals.”

The experience led Le to start catering professionally—using a business license she earned while enrolled in the Food Hub program—for an adult day center housing Vietnamese elders. She reserved timeslots early in the morning for the Food Hub’s kitchen, making braised fish, vermicelli, pho and hearty soups. After a while, she found she needed her own kitchen. Mint Kitchen & Bar opened in April 2022.

“My goal wasn’t to go into a commercial food business, but the Food Hub provided a good way for me to experiment with it and see if it’s something I could do and would want to continue doing,” she says.

With Food Hub moving into its Union Station digs, Rainford expects a jump in interest for the Food Entrepreneur Program, and the headquarters can meet that demand. Those with an idea, though, should reach out now, he says. The Food Hub will never turn down someone’s vision or discourage a dream. More importantly, it leaves the food to the professionals.

“We’re not recipe developers. People come to us with those,” Rainford says. “But we can help them scale those from feeding their family to feeding 300 people.”

worcesterfoodhub.org

This story appeared in the Winter 2025 issue.