Since launching in 2009, Crop Circle Kitchen in Jamaica Plain has kickstarted over a hundred exciting new food ventures in the Boston area. Clover Food Lab, which has grown to seven trucks and five storefronts, is one familiar graduate of this bustling “shared-kitchen and food business incubator.”

Now, in partnership with Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation, CCK is taking Boston food innovation to the next level with CCK-Pearl, a 36,000 square-foot Dorchester facility that was once a hot dog factory. CCK-Pearl is meant to be a step up from the original location, where new food businesses can scale, thanks to more space and larger equipment.

“Going to Costco for raw ingredients isn’t the most cost-effective.”

Financing a new space that’s roughly nine times the size of the Jamaica Plain location took a lot of work – demonstrating a market for all this additional space was especially challenging. But according to Jen Faigel, executive director at CCK, the fact that the organization was getting up to 10 new inquiries a month about getting a space at CCK was a strong signal of high demand. Faigel says the $15 million CCK-Pearl project, which soft-launched this past May, fell off schedule by just a few months.

To date, a quarter of the ventures nurtured by CCK have grown big enough to operate independently, whether through retail, co-packing, or other wholesale manufacturing arrangements. And now with CCK-Pearl, there’s capacity to do so much more.

Throughout this summer, CCK-Pearl has taking care of housework – i.e. testing the grounds for all the equipment, making sure cleaning, recycling, composting schedules make sense.  And of course, all this work is to facilitate the young and thrilling food ventures trickling in. There are already a few businesses that have moved over from the Jamaica Plain location to CCK-Pearl, such as Alex’s Ugly Sauce, 88 Acres, and Just Add Cooking. Another potential client is a company that caters for public schools.

Faigel says CCK-Pearl started with two food trucks earlier in the summer, but now hosts six – some of them, like Fresh Food Generation (Latin/Caribbean/West African-influenced foods), Walloon’s (fancy french fries), and El Diez (Argentinian grill) have only recently hit the road. From brewers to yogurt drink makers, potential new admits to CCK Pearl fall on a wide spectrum. Faigel expects to hit full occupancy of 40 businesses over the next year.

Beyond providing space, equipment, and mentoring to new culinary ventures, a huge part of this new era for CCK is figuring out how the organization can make the most out of its unique model of housing (and growing) a ton of food businesses under one roof. This means adding a robust training component. Through a partnership with local non-profits Inter-Rise and Boston Public Market, and JVS, CCK will offer 12-14 weeks of classroom training this fall, an “MBA-lite” of sorts. The sessions would combine fundamental business subjects like accounting and marketing with food-specific topics like food-labeling, safety, recipe reliability, and efficient use of ingredients.

Over the next year, CCK will consider bulk-purchasing.  “[CCK’s food startups] are often so small that they’re not able to get competitive pricing – going to Costco for raw ingredients isn’t the most cost-effective,” explains Faigel in a phone interview. The incubator also wants to reach out directly to larger retailers like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s and introduce them to the impressive breadth of businesses it works with.

But first things first. There’s an official ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate CCK-Pearl’s completion on Monday, September 8 at 1 pm. Mayor Marty Walsh will be there; so will plenty of food samples.

Images via CCK-Pearl/Jen Faigel