Rising to the Challenge: Incubator Looks to Help Women Immigrants Start Their Own Food Business
Hot Bread Kitchen's baking has fueled a game-changing food incubator.
Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez spent much of her career in NGOs, and learned that the food industry held many opportunities for low-income immigrant women -- if only they knew how to break in. So in 2007, she found a way to open those doors: She’d bake bread.
She created , a nonprofit that sells its bread across New like English and math. The product took off at retailers like Whole Foods and Dean & DeLuca, and many of the program’s 191 women have been hired by New York institutions like Eataly and Zaro’s Bakery. “Somebody told me that not a piece of artisan bread is consumed in New York City that hasn’t been touched by Hot Bread Kitchen,” the CEO says.
