Detroit chefs and small food businesses looking to rent a commercial kitchen will soon have a new option on the city’s east side.
A shared, commercial kitchen from the E. Warren Development Corp. is set to open in East English Village the first week of June. It will offer unique benefits like local produce for renters to purchase, a compost program, and a service window to turn the kitchen into a pop-up take-out restaurant. The space will be available for new and more seasoned food businesses to rent. Cost will be $27 an hour for the hot food line and bakery, and $18 per hour for the cold food line.
The kitchen aims to fill a gap for local food businesses in Detroit that need a commercial kitchen to operate legally, but don’t have, or want their own brick-and-mortar.
“We started seeing the need of having something in the middle from an incubator kitchen to a brick-and-mortar for food businesses,” said Diana Gomez, E. Warren kitchen manager and founder of food truck Tacos Hernandez.
Other shared commercial kitchens in Detroit, like Eastern Market’s Community Kitchen, are meant for businesses to start or grow, but not long-term.
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Joe Rashid, executive director at E. Warren Development Corp., said affordability is a priority.
“Our goal is to make this a permanently affordable space to help local businesses incubate,” he said.
The 3,200-square-foot space includes three kitchens and a tilted skillet, double deck baking oven, six-burner stove, charbroiler, flat top, service window, and other equipment.
Gomez said the development corporation currently has five businesses on standby to join the kitchen when it opens. The kitchen has a May 14 inspection and organizers hope to open soon after to food business owners.
The project to transform a former Pizza Hut restaurant into the kitchen, broke ground in June and represents one phase of development plans from E. Warren Development Corp. The nonprofit got started in 2017 to help revitalize the district by offering developer assistance, corridor cleaning and maintenance, and community organizing. The organization hosts a farmers market on Thursdays in the summer and a food truck rally on Fridays.
Phase two of the project will turn the parking lot into a 10,000-square-foot building with retail spaces for vendors, community gathering areas and offices for the corporation. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer allocated $2 million for the building in the 2025 state spending plan. The retail building is expected to be complete by summer 2026, said Gomez.
“It’s pretty much everything that someone would need either for mass production, catering, prepping or for any sort of packaging, and a take-out window, so tenants can make food sales directly to customers,” said Gomez.
Two of the future tenants are vendors at the E. Warren Farmers Market and don’t have experience in a commercial kitchen, said Gomez. Another potential tenant has operated a food and catering business for years.
“We’re all a very diverse group, from Chinese food to Black-owned cake bakers to myself, tacos…and we’re happy to get everyone in here and train,” she said.
Another unique feature of the kitchen is that it will wholesale purchase produce from local farmers in Detroit through Keep Growing Detroit which will be stored in the kitchen for tenants to purchase and use. Any food not bought by tenants will be sold at the E. Warren Farmers Market. Last year, the market did not have any local produce vendors which was problematic given the lack of fresh produce in the neighborhood, said Gomez.
But after talking with farmers, Gomez said she realized it was difficult for them to come out to the market.
“It’s a burden for them to come out and sometimes they don’t sell a lot. They’re out harvesting since 5 a.m., so another farmers market in their schedule seems a little bit like too much. So I spoke to our executive director, Joe (Rashid), and I was like, ‘What can we do?’ Can we buy produce and be a third party, selling it, promoting for them? How can we bring that fresh food, and everybody wins?”
The kitchen is also partnering with Scrap Soils and Sanctuary Farms, just down the road, to compost food scraps and waste from the kitchen. In the future, the kitchen will partner with the nonprofit mutual aid group Hey Ya’ll Detroit to offer free community meals at times of the month when food stamps start running out.
Part of the new tenant onboarding will include compost training and education on why it’s important, said Gomez. When thrown into the trash, food scraps create harmful greenhouse gas emissions such as methane, which contribute to global warming. Composting turns food scraps into a nutrient-rich soil amendment that helps create healthy soils and thriving farms locally in Detroit.
The kitchen adds to a growing food scene in the corridor. Baobab Fare, Saffron De Twah, Little Liberia, and La Jalisciense are all expected to open additional locations of their restaurants nearby, joining existing eateries like Morningside Cafe.
Rashid said the kitchen will be a dynamic space for local businesses.
“As well as a way to generate more food traffic on E. Warren to support business incubation to grow the burgeoning business ecosystem that we have on the corridor,” he said.
Applications to rent the E. Warren Development Corporation commercial kitchen can be found here.