WeWork For Chefs: How One Coworking Incubator Fuels Food Innovation

On a busy Brooklyn avenue there’s a looming, brick structure that’s equal parts regal and raggedly worn. It used to be a factory for the drug-maker Pfizer; now dozens of young food entrepreneurs take the elevator to the second floor where they swap recipes at Foodworks, a coworking space that’s also an incubator, test kitchen, and commissary for emerging food and beverage brands.

Inside the 10,000-square foot office, there’s a common room where many of the chefs share ideas. Further in, 10 unique kitchen stations await the future of gourmet meats, snacks, and cocktail mixers.

It looks less like a Martha Stewart set and more like the gritty outtakes of Willy Wonka’s factory; It’s all metal and fluorescent lights, with dozens of cauldrons bubbling and pots simmering vast amounts of soup, jam, or paste. There are convection ovens filled with hundreds of samosas, skillets frying chips, and industrial food processors serving as white noise machines. It’s quite possibly the best smelling– and most distracting–coworking space you’ll ever experience.

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