If La Cocina were a restaurant group, it would have more outlets than many established competitors. In reality, the many food businesses it’s helped launch over the past 20 years are proudly independent, but it is a useful thought experiment to understand the scale of what this Bay Area non-profit organization has achieved.
At its heart is a simple premise: turn minority cooks into successful food business owners. “Recognizing that things take time is important – and we give people a shot,” says executive director Leticia Landa about the key to La Cocina’s success. “There’s so much talent out there, but it’s often the same people who get the opportunities.”
Now in its tenth year, the Basque Culinary World Prize is awarded to chefs and food professionals who use gastronomy to drive social change. It rarely goes to celebrity names – the closest was World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés in 2020 – but to people who transform communities through their work. This year, the jury recognized Landa for “democratizing access to the food industry and proving that kitchens can be engines of social change.”
Support to create thriving businesses
La Cocina was founded in 2005 and offers affordable commercial kitchen space, business training, and access to catering and retail markets for low-income women and immigrant entrepreneurs. In a city where the cost of launching a food business can be prohibitive, the model has become a lifeline and a launchpad.
Many of the entrepreneurs were already cooking before joining – at home, in local community centers or in street markets – but lacked support to formalize the business. “The barriers are all the logistics, including permits, insurance and all the other practicalities,” says Landa. “And then there’s money – San Francisco is an incredibly expensive city, it always has been, so getting access to kitchen space and finding a restaurant to lease has been a very big barrier.”
La Cocina is mainly run on donations from foundations and private donors, with a focus on women because the barriers they face are higher. “We serve people who are low income and we prioritize immigrant women, particularly women of color, but of course immigrant men face barriers too,” she says.
Once through the application process, entrepreneurs are in the program for six years, a staggering amount of time in the world of incubators and one that pays dividends in the outcomes.
“It is just our philosophy. It takes a long time to build a business – most don’t turn a profit in the first five years. There’s not much point in starting a business if it is just going to close,” she says. “We want to create businesses that will generate wealth and jobs, and that takes time, so really being able to be patient and to have sustained resources for entrepreneurs over time is super important.”
Something out of nothing
Over 150 businesses have come through La Cocina – from catering companies and food trucks to packaged food brands and restaurants – among them more than 40 brick and mortar locations, including a tamale factory and an edible insect farm. “A lot of our businesses are open for more than 10 years, which I think is pretty unusual for the food industry. I feel so proud of that,” says Landa.
Some of the graduates have published cookbooks, sharing their stories beyond California, and the model’s impact stretches further too. La Cocina offers consulting and works with organizations as far away as New Zealand, helping them to support entrepreneurs in the same way.
For Landa, the success of a business depends on determination as much as skill. “It’s that scrappiness and entrepreneurialism that make things happen seemingly out of nothing; that’s a big piece of it,” she explains.
Part of the conversation
Landa, herself the daughter of Mexican immigrants who started their own business in the US, found La Cocina almost by happenstance. Having read about the organization while she was at grad school in New York, when she moved to San Francisco to take up a fellowship, she sought out some of the La Cocina graduate businesses in the food market. Later on, at a holiday party, she met then executive director Valeria Perez, who was about to relocate to Miami and invited Landa to join in her place.
She can empathize with the entrepreneurs, having gone to culinary school herself and spent a summer as a line cook at Jeffrey’s in Austin, Texas, during college. “It was 100 degrees, I was on the fryer, making salads, running around – it gave me a real sense of what kitchen work takes,” she recalls. “I stand in such admiration of the people who do it.”
When Landa joined La Cocina 17 years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle’s top 100 restaurants listing included almost no restaurants run by immigrant women “In the last iteration, we had five or six restaurants on the list that had come through La Cocina, and more overall that are run by immigrants or women,” she says. “That’s something that has shifted in the food industry and we’ve been a part of that conversation.”
She recognizes that there is more work to do. In many ways, La Cocina runs counter to a national foodscape that is increasingly consolidated, where main street looks similar regardless of the city – they have the same restaurants and offer the same food.
“We all say we want that diversity, but then it is easier to keep going into the same chains. We can get everything delivered in 24 hours or we can go to the shops. That is ultimately a question we have to address,” she says. “If we just want the most efficient way of eating, we could just freeze French fries and burger patties, but that is maybe not the most delicious way of eating. I do think you have to go a little counter to the current and support your local food businesses.”
If there was always a place for La Cocina, the political uncertainty and rising costs of today mean that the need is even more pronounced. “This is what the American dream has always been: people coming here and starting little businesses,” says Landa. “We need to remind people how important small businesses are to everybody’s happiness and wellbeing, no matter where we are in the world – and that those things are worth championing.”
Tina Nielsen
