RICHMOND, Va. -- HATCH, a Manchester-based shared kitchen space, is offering free training to Richmond-area restaurant owners as a way to support them during the pandemic and show them other ways to make a profit.
The newly-launched Hatch CPG Bootcamp is a course designed to help restaurant owners create a packaged good from one of their menu items.
"A product that they can sell in their restaurants or sell to a grocery store or wherever they want," Austin Green, President and Co-Founder of HATCH, said. "[It is] another way to make money, another line item, another revenue source."
The initial class includes some of Richmond's favorite restaurants like Lehja, Saison, Abuelita's, and Soul Taco.
Trey Owens, who co-owns Soul Taco, said he was learning how to bottle some of Soul Taco's signature sauces to sale in stores.
"Explore a different avenue as far as like income goes, because it's been really difficult to kind of get people to come out and during corona," Ownes said. "Just going in there and looking at all of the equipment and seeing how things work. The nerd in me, you know, is all about it. It's a dope program," Owens said.
"There's a lot of food science involved in putting things in bottles and making them safe," Green said.
Products like Soul Taco's sauce should be popping up in stores later this summer.
"We've worked in restaurants, these are, these are our family, in some ways, in many ways. So we were just searching for a way for us to help them somehow," Green said.