Article content

Jim Gordon

Hi, I’m Jim Gordon and you’re watching Market One Minute. Joining us is Andrew Barnes, CEO of Coho Collective Kitchens. Andrew, welcome.

Article content

Article content

Andrew Barnes

Thank you for having me, Jim. 

Jim Gordon

You’re quite welcome, sir. Okay, tell us about Coho and what gaps the company is looking to fill in the food industry.

Andrew Barnes

So, Coho is a ghost kitchen business in a rapidly growing industry. What we do is provide turnkey solutions where food and beverage businesses come together to work together to make their businesses successful. What this means is that we offer shared kitchen space, shared commercial cooking equipment and really the opportunity for these companies to come together and succeed. What we are really trying to do is reduce the barrier of starting a small business. Some of the barriers that I’m talking about can be quite difficult and challenging for a small business to get involved in.

If you’re starting a food business, you need to have a food-safe environment which you’re operating within. That can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up correctly. And the amount of like, red tape and permitting that you have to do to get through to open that facility before you even make your first dollar can be prohibitive for a business to really start. This can really eliminate the need for all of that spending. At Coho, we know though, our success is contingent on our members. So every decision that we’re making, every investment that we make in a new facility, we’re thinking about how is this helping our membership, our future members that are coming online and ultimately to make sure that we’re really secure on the growth plans and food security for the country.

Jim Gordon

And given current trends what does the market opportunity look like in the ghost kitchen space?

Andrew Barnes

Good question. And just as a definition of terms a little bit because ghost kitchen is a new term and it’s used in different ways.

When we talk about ghost kitchens we talk about delivery-only restaurant concepts. What that means is that if you’re going to your local restaurant that you love the most but then you’re sitting at home on the couch ordering it from any of the online delivery platforms, it means that it could be coming from an offsite facility. Restaurants have gotten to be so full with not only the demand from their dine-in customers but now they have this huge new revenue stream that Covid offered, which is the opportunity to open up online delivery. And generating all that activity in one small kitchen has been really difficult.

Article content

To answer your question, the ghost kitchen sector is booming right now. Restaurants are always constantly finding ways to kind of help their business along. Famously, restaurants are a risky endeavour to get in with razor-thin margins, and that’s what some of the work that we’re trying to do to alleviate that. From the industry right now it’s about a $150 billion market within the ghost kitchen space. So restaurants are looking to find ways to tap into that as much as possible while also not putting at risk their existing businesses.

Jim Gordon

This leads beautifully into my next question. Hearing what you just said there, is what motivates you and your co-founders at Coho to expand across Canada?

Andrew Barnes

Absolutely. At the end of the day, it comes down to passion for us. It’s passion in helping those businesses succeed. The reason that we started this business was we knew how hard it was for small businesses to grow. What was really kind of a great thing for us is that there’s this whole new industry opened up underneath us.

We had a successful, profitable business that was doing well, and then Covid hit, and it was actually an accelerant to the business itself. This ghost kitchen world started developing that we were able to tap into. So at the end of the day, what’s really exciting for us is that we walk into each of these facilities and we get to look at the people that are working in those spaces and providing an income to themselves and their families.

One of the really big things that we’re proud of is how big of our membership base represents minorities. We have about 70 per cent, seven zero per cent, of our businesses are women-led businesses. About 70 per cent of our businesses are BIPOC-led businesses. So you can imagine just a different level of kind of diversity within the space of opinions, of ways to get the work done. And it’s really kind of an invigorating, exciting place to be.

Jim Gordon

And Andrew, are there any upcoming key milestones investors can expect to see?

Andrew Barnes

Absolutely. Right now, what we’re trying to do is really deliver on the plan that we had at our IPO and within our first plans. What that includes is opening up as many locations as possible.

Right now, we have over 400 companies on the waiting list right now to enter into our space. That represents about $10 million of annual revenue for us. And of course, the benefit of not only opening those facilities, but helping those companies grow and expand, which is again our mission, is to help our investors forward by continuing to produce that cash flow and making sure that we’re doing so responsibly. There’s this huge opportunity in North America right now. This is a very like, blue sky industry. It’s an area that’s developing quickly. The biggest players are actually operating in Europe and the Middle East right now. And North America is relatively untouched. So what we’re really trying to do is package together all those opportunities and turn this kind of Canadian story into a North American one. 

Article content

Jim Gordon

Okay. And finally, Coho prides itself in being community driven by design. Can you elaborate on what all that means? 

Andrew Barnes

The companies that are operating in this space range anywhere from a single operator that has to produce food, has to do all their marketing, if they have time to complete all their accounting, all of those challenges all the way up to restaurant groups that are looking to expand their delivery network. So you can imagine that the diversity in the ecosystem that operates within these shared kitchen spaces, it can be quite beautiful. One thing that we ask for people to do is to be patient with one another and assume positive intent because it can be high-stress environments in the kitchens themselves. But what we also ask is for them to look after each other. And what that can look like is taste testing recipes, and introducing them to contacts within marketing circles, for example.

And some of the bigger companies, what we’ve really seen is them featuring the smaller companies on their menus. We have one big sushi company that’s doing very, very well now that is featuring a couple of our members’ products in a kombucha product and a dessert product that is able to help them grow forward. So you have this beautiful little ecosystem that operates within each of our kitchens that is really now representing a lot of the small business for food in the province. 

Jim Gordon

Andrew, thanks for joining us. 

Andrew Barnes

Thank you, Jim.

ABOUT COHO COLLECTIVE KITCHENS INC.:  

Coho Collective Kitchens Inc. (TSXV: COHO) is a growth stage, community-driven, commercial real estate and food technology company that provides private and shared kitchen and production space to food companies from start-ups to restaurant groups seeking turnkey solutions and business services.

This story was provided by Market One Media Group for commercial purposes.