Richard McCracken is happy to say, “Amplified Meal Prep has a new home now.”
He and his wife Molly are the owners of their first brick-and-mortar business, Memphis Kitchen Co-Op, at 7946 Fischer Steel Road in Cordova.
The 6,500-square-foot building, which also houses their healthy food business, Amplified Meal Prep, has space for people like themselves, who don’t have room in their homes to make food in quantity.
“I just want to help people,” Richard says. “I wanted to open a community kitchen where people can rent from us. But I didn’t want to be like, ‘Here’s the key. You owe us $700 the first of the month. See you later.’ I want to be able to help people do what we did. We wanted to have a place where we can help you start a business from A to Z.”
Somebody might say, “I have an Aunt Sally, and she makes the most amazing peanut butter pie in the world.”
So, Aunt Sally decides to sell her pies, but she finds it’s $2,500 a month to rent a kitchen. Then she needs an oven and a kitchen mixer. That’s $12,000. She also needs other kitchenware, which could be another thousand. She says, “Oh, my God. I just can’t do it.”
“That’s where we come in,” Richard says. “We offer any equipment you need. I’ll buy it for your use. You come in. Pay us rent.”
Their commercial equipment includes eight convection ovens, eight standard ovens, four 10-burner stoves, two flat-top grills, a 30-quart and 60-quart mixer, food processors, a 24-by-14-foot walk-in cooler, a 32-by-7-foot walk-in display cooler, 50 prep tables, 120 storage shelves, and 40 feet of vent hood space.
The McCrackens “will sit down with you if you have any concerns — how to price food, food costs, where to go for your business license, Department of Agriculture certified aspect of agriculture. We help you with all that.”
They also provide help getting the word out online. “We have an in-house marketing group, Ruby Red Media, that does individual or group social media [and] handles email and stuff like that.”
Memphis Kitchen Co-Op rent is based on time, space, and need, but it’s less than most commercial kitchens, Richard says.
Unlike other commercial kitchens, they will include a store. “We’re going to sell all our tenants’ products in there. People can walk in and buy 30 or 40 different companies’ products.” They also will have a website, where people can order Memphis Kitchen Co-Op products. “We deliver or you come to the store and we have it ready for you in a box.”
Renters can range from bakers and food truck owners to people who prepare school lunch programs. “Anybody who wants to start up a new business, we’ll help them get going.”
Richard also plans to till a 14-by-120-foot patch of grass next to the building for a community garden.
Richard, who wrestled for 20 years, and Molly opened Amplified Meal Prep three years ago. Customers can order healthy comfort food or build custom meals according to their specific diet plan.
They were “camped out” in another commercial kitchen, but, Richard says, “We ran out of room.” The couple couldn’t operate out of that space anymore. “So I started looking in November of last year for a commercial building. All of a sudden this popped up.” Molly originally thought the building was too big, but Richard told her, “We’ll grow into it.”
Memphis Kitchen Co-Op is “a testament of hard work. And I really want to get our message out there that people like me and Molly, who worked our full-time jobs for two years and Amplified two years — that’s what you have to do. Now look at us. We have, essentially, a million-dollar building for four years. It’s centrally located, smack dab in the middle of everything. It’s 15 minutes from Downtown, 15 minutes from out east, and 15 minutes from Germantown.”
For information on Memphis Kitchen Co-Op, go to memphiskitchenco-op.com.
