ST PAUL, Minn. — Breaking into the food industry is a lot harder than just having a winning product. Nestled inside a quaint blue house on Saint Paul's Grand Avenue is a world of opportunity for Minnesotans with culinary dreams.
The shelves in Seasoned Specialty Food Market are lined with products crafted by local, small-batch food producers. Many producers got their start with The Market Entry Fund.
Kayla Yang-Best founded the nonprofit in 2019, at a time when she noticed a lack of diversity in the field.
"We work to advance equity and inclusion in the local food supply chain. It was a very homogenous scene in the local food movement," Yang-Best said. "It's really hard to get into store shelves, it's even harder if you're a person of color. Cause you don't necessarily have the interactions or the relationships to just call up and say, 'Hey would you try my food? Can I get on your shelves?'"
The Market Entry Fund became a multi-purpose support system. There's funding through a microgrants program, which distributes 10 grants of $5,000 each year.
"We also partner with them on finding the right technical and business solutions they need to start, but then also to scale later on in their business cycle," Yang-Best said.
There's also emotional support, which came just in time for Junita Flowers, the CEO of Junita's Jar.
"There's a lot of isolation that comes with being an entrepreneur," Flowers said. "There's even more isolation being a Black woman building a food business."
Being a grantee from The Market Entry Fund and attached to Seasoned gave Junita a pipeline to build relationships and longevity.
"We would have our products sold here at Seasoned, but Kayla would offer opportunities for us to come in, have sort of tasting stations and so as customers are coming in throughout the community, we were able to meet customers, allow them to sample our products," Flowers said.
And at Seasoned, entrepreneurs get a hundred percent of what the consumer pays for their product.
"So it's just this wrap-around effect, where you buy something that you enjoy, but you're actually investing in the community so that we all win," Flowers said.
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