From Apple Butter to Bone Broth: How Carver Is Building a Bigger Future for Local Food
With 26 farms waiting for co-packing services and kitchen demand exceeding capacity, Kim Loescher and the Carver Food Enterprise Center are preparing an expansion designed to help local food businesses grow.
The Long Road From Recipe to Business
There's a considerable difference between making something delicious at home and selling it as a commercial food product. Sometimes that difference comes down to paperwork. Lots of paperwork.
For entrepreneurs hoping to move into commercial production, permitting and regulatory requirements can be among the biggest obstacles. Applications, inspections, food safety standards, labeling requirements, and compliance all have to be addressed before a product can move forward.
CFEC helps entrepreneurs navigate those steps, providing hands-on assistance alongside access to commercial kitchen space, professional equipment, training, and technical support. Businesses can test recipes, establish production routines, and learn what it takes to operate in a regulated commercial environment.
This year, Loescher says, some businesses launched, others expanded, and two graduated into their own spaces. Others continued working through the less glamorous but necessary details of building sustainable operations.
"Behind every food business is persistence, recipes refined, forms submitted, equipment learned, labels reviewed, and long production days," she explains.
That persistence is central to Carver's incubation work. A promising recipe is a beginning, but turning it into a viable business requires a dependable place to produce it and someone who understands the hurdles along the way.
When the Kitchen Runs Out of Room
The clearest argument for Carver's expansion might be a single number: 26.
That's how many farms are currently waiting for co-packing services, according to Loescher. Co-packing allows producers to turn agricultural ingredients into finished products without establishing their own processing facilities.
Carver has already been developing and testing products using ingredients that can be difficult to market, including bones, organs, surplus apples, and cosmetically imperfect tomatoes. The resulting work includes bone broth, pet treats, tomato sauce, apple butter, pumpkin butter, and applesauce.
The possibilities are practical. Apples become apple butter. Tomatoes become sauce. Ingredients that might otherwise struggle to find a buyer can potentially become products with new market value.
But current equipment limits how much Carver can produce. The kitchen can process approximately 60 pounds of organs at a time and makes bone broth in 10-gallon batches. With its planned expansion, CFEC expects to increase broth production to 200-gallon batches.
The RFSI-funded project will double food-processing space, quadruple cold and dry storage, and substantially increase cooking capacity. Plans also include larger steam kettles, dedicated shipping and receiving areas, a commercial dishwashing system, and renovated space for offices, classrooms, and a USDA inspector area.
For bakers, the facility plans to expand from one double-stack convection oven to four, with space for a roll-in rack oven. A new 60-quart mixer will join two existing 20-quart mixers. Caterers and food trucks would gain additional cooking equipment, including a 40-gallon tilt skillet and two 40-gallon steam kettles.
The larger facility is intended to accommodate more businesses working simultaneously, reduce scheduling bottlenecks, and provide storage that is already in short supply. Its additional equipment should also help production continue when something needs maintenance or repair.
A bigger kitchen sounds straightforward until you consider how many different businesses need to use it, often for very different purposes.
Where Local Food Finds Another Purpose
Carver's work doesn't stop when a product is ready for sale. The same kitchen also connects local agriculture with schools, food assistance programs, and community organizations.
Through Feeding 500, CFEC rescued and transformed 3,286 pounds of food into healthy meals and products for food pantries and community partners this year.
Through its Farm to School work, local apples, tomatoes, eggs, and other regional ingredients have been turned into foods suitable for school meals. Students and staff have also helped test and refine recipes.
Those programs demonstrate how one project can serve several purposes. A surplus ingredient can become a food rescue opportunity. Developing a recipe can provide experience with food safety and production. A successful school food product can create another potential market for regional farmers.
Loescher sees these connections as essential rather than incidental.
"We do not believe in programs that stand alone. We believe the strongest solutions are connected," she says.
That philosophy extends to workforce training and technical assistance. Carver's work brings food entrepreneurs, agricultural producers, schools, volunteers, and community partners into the same network, where knowledge gained through one effort can inform another.
For a farmer with hard-to-market produce, that might mean another potential buyer. For a food entrepreneur, it could mean a path toward larger production runs. For schools and food pantries, it means additional ways to incorporate local ingredients into the food they serve.
Progress, One Practical Improvement at a Time
During a visit to D.C. Central Kitchen this year, the Carver team encountered a phrase that Loescher says resonated deeply: "relentless incrementalism."
It's the idea that meaningful, lasting change comes from many thoughtful improvements made over time.
At Carver, those improvements might be an updated recipe, a repaired piece of equipment, a successful food safety training, a new partnership, or an entrepreneur getting through another regulatory requirement.
None necessarily makes for a dramatic announcement. Together, though, they can help build the infrastructure that allows local food businesses and community programs to operate more effectively.
That approach also shapes how Loescher thinks about the expansion's success.
Three years from now, she hopes the evidence will be visible in businesses launched or grown, farms finding new markets, products developed, food rescued, meals served, and more local ingredients reaching schools.
She also wants the expanded kitchen to be busy and financially sustainable, generating earned revenue that helps support its services and infrastructure.
The goal isn't simply to install bigger equipment and declare the job finished. It's to put that equipment to work for the people who need it.
For Loescher and the Carver team, the measure of progress will be what local producers can accomplish with the additional capacity. A farmer might find a market for surplus apples. An entrepreneur might finally have enough room to expand production. A school might gain another reliable source of locally prepared food.
Early on, we heard this story directly from Kim Loescher[1]. That gave the story a natural place to begin.
And somewhere in that larger kitchen, an imperfect tomato might find its way into a perfectly useful jar of sauce.
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