Food Starter shutting down due to lack of funding

It’s the end of the line for Food Starter.

The Toronto-based non-profit organization, which helped food entrepreneurs commercialize and scale the development of their products, has run out of funding and is closing its doors.

Food Starter, which launched in 2015, provided a 20,000-sq.ft. shared food-safe production space, as well as consulting services and training programs for entrepreneurs.

In an article posted on CBC.ca, Food Starter executive director Petra Kassun-Mutch said funding from the province dried up in the fall of 2017, but things were looking promising recently, with the possibility of partnering with universities or colleges.

Those efforts were fruitless in the end, she told CBC. And despite increased funding from the city and various efforts from other supporters, Food Starter was not able to secure more funding from other levels of government or corporate sponsors, and ultimately had no choice but to shut down.

Kassun-Mutch was unable to do an interview with Canadian Grocer before press time, but said in an email, “managing the closure is full on and top priority.”

According to CBC, Food Starter told clients the last day for processing at its facility would be Dec. 21 and that its 160 tenants would have to vacate as early as Dec. 31.

Richa Gupta, founder and president of Good Food For Good, has been involved with Food Starter since 2013, when it was known as Toronto Food Business Incubator and had a much smaller facility.

Although her business manufactured just a small amount of products at Food Starter’s facility, Gupta told Canadian Grocer the impact on many other food start-ups is “humongous.”

“Starting a food business is very different than starting, let’s say, a tech company, because of all the regulations that go with it,” she says. “It’s not something that you can build out of your house and sell. You need to be producing in a commercial, food-safe environment to be able to sell it to the market … And if there are not spaces like Food Starter, there is no place for to manufacture their goods.”

While many companies will be impacted by the closure, Gupta believes entrepreneurs are resilient. “There is always a way out, there is always a solution that comes,” she says. “It’s just another struggle in the entrepreneur’s life, which has a lot of challenges. And you learn to figure a way out.”