The Incu­ba­tion Model: The National Busi­ness Incu­ba­tion Asso­ci­a­tion defines a busi­ness incu­ba­tor as a comprehensive-assistance pro­gram tar­geted to help start-up and early-stage firms, with the goal of improv­ing their chances to grow into healthy, sus­tain­able companies.

Here at La Cocina, each qual­i­fied kitchen user is a sep­a­rate busi­ness entity. This means that each busi­ness must have its own busi­ness license, insur­ance, staff, busi­ness records, tax returns and so forth. Each busi­ness owner will also be respon­si­ble for com­ply­ing with the city, state and fed­eral reg­u­la­tions con­cern­ing licens­ing, food safety and san­i­ta­tion, taxes, employ­ment, etc.

The cycle of the incu­ba­tor model as applied here looks some­thing like this:

Appli­ca­tion and Enroll­ment
Qual­i­fied Applicants

Pre-Incubation
A 6-month period where pro­gram par­tic­i­pants receive tech­ni­cal assis­tance to estab­lish the foun­da­tions of their busi­ness in the areas of Prod­uct, Mar­ket­ing, Finances, and Operations.

Incu­ba­tion
Pro­gram par­tic­i­pants whose first 6 months have been suc­cess­ful con­tinue to receive tech­ni­cal assis­tance in all of those areas and have access to afford­able com­mer­cial kitchen space to grow their businesses’s sales.

Grad­u­a­tion and Alumni
Pro­gram par­tic­i­pants reach all estab­lished Incu­ba­tion bench­marks and expand their busi­ness out of La Cocina’s kitchen while remain­ing part of the alumni com­mu­nity.