The former Clover fast food location near Inman Square could become Cambridge’s first commercial kitchen as part of the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority’s mission to spark economic opportunity.
The space would be rented out to food businesses and entrepreneurs who need a commissary space. There’s 8,800 square feet for use at 1075 Cambridge St., Wellington-Harrington (and an additional 3,000 square feet not included in the current deal), where the CRA is negotiating a five-year lease with an option for another five years, board members and staff said Wednesday. Owners do not want to sell, but they have lowered initial lease prices of around $28 per square foot to $24 at an annual rental value of $211,200 with a 3 percent annual increase cap.
“This space is really unique in that it has the ability to have retail businesses in the front,” meaning what’s made in the back can be sold to customers in a restaurant space friendly to walk-in traffic, said Josh Croom, a project manager for the CRA. The address was the Casal Bakery and Cafe Casal before it became a Clover kitchen and distribution center in 2011, and has a loading dock, “tantamount to success for a lot of food businesses,” Croom said.
“A lot of times, these facilities are in the periphery, areas where it’s not easily accessible for a lot of workers. This is not the case,” Croom said. “We’re really, in my opinion, still in the heart of Cambridge, with strong foot traffic.”
In doing the research for the storefronts project, staff found that most customers using Cambridge Street businesses are walking from within a five- to 10-minute radius.
Equipment for pennies on the dollar
In another boost for the concept, the financially troubled Clover chain ran an emergency auction in which the CRA was able to spend pennies on the dollar to buy equipment for use by commercial kitchen customers.
“We purchased $8,200 of equipment, but then the auction company stated that if the buyers of the equipment did not come by a set day, the property would be deemed abandoned and therefore go back to the owner, who’s willing to give it to us,” Croom said. “We got far more than what we anticipated … everything that you see in the building now.”
The equipment would have easily run in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Croom said.
That includes fixtures such as a walk-in refrigerator. “It turns out it’s really hard to buy a $40,000 walk-in fridge and take it apart” when leaving, said Tom Evans, the authority’s executive director. “There was a lot left in place. If for some reason the lease doesn’t work out, we would then have to figure out what we do with the equipment.”
Needed: An architect and operator
The city of Cambridge is a partner in the project and willing to support this project with $200,000 in unused Covid-relief money, CRA staff said.
One expected expense: An architect who will come with ideas on improving the space, CRA member Kyle Vangel said. “It doesn’t necessarily meet the the beauty test – but the bones are there,” Croom said.
The architect’s renovations and equipment would be incentives for customers, but the CRA expects to bring in a subleasing operator that will put together a business plan and run the space, assuming the cost of the rent.
This focus on shared kitchen models isn’t new; in 2011, operator of the catering company Cuisine En Locale, JJ Gonson, tried to lease what was once Marino’s Restaurant in North Cambridge, which closed in 2007, for a commercial kitchen. Commercial kitchens came up in the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority’s 2023 strategic plan, and ties in with goals in the Envision Cambridge development master plan from 2019.
In the CRA version being proposed, in addition to kitchen time, equipment and storage, entrepreneurs coming into 1075 Cambridge St. might get help with advice and development in alignment with the authority’s goal to incubate small businesses, Croom said.
Future commercial kitchen customers
The commercial kitchen would lower the barriers to entry for food entrepreneurs, not unlike the low-cost neighbor storefronts project at 1175 Cambridge St., where the CRA is bringing in retailers and restaurants including a brick-and-mortar cafe called Cini Coffee, Momma’s Grocery + Wine in an expansion from North Cambridge (with a soft-serve ice cream specialty) and the eco-friendly Somerville housewares and bath and body shop Green Tiger & Co.
“We’re serving small, local businesses here in Cambridge that are being priced out. Similarly, there are a number of food businesses that maybe lack formal experience but are forming a concept, an idea. Maybe they have grandma’s meatball recipe or a challah bread recipe that they really want to try out and share with people but they don’t know how, and a shared kitchen helps with that,” Croom said. “Maybe there’s an experienced vendor doing production in their local community. Maybe it’s a community center, a church.”
More potential users, Croom said, are “food entrepreneurs that have experience with brick-and-mortar space but are pretty transient and are looking for additional space to anchor themselves and have access to production space and storage and so on. And there are all these other users that help make a shared kitchen or commercial kitchen run efficiently and maximize the space: restaurants looking for additional prep space, a nonprofit operation that tries to thread the needle with food accessibility, maybe a caterer that uses these spaces for occasions less on a continual basis.”
