Coming to your neighbourhood, canning at your doorstep…the Food Flow Kitchen might be a mobile food processing kitchen.

The Food Flow Kitchen is a social enterprise that will provide commercial scale processing for community agencies; it will increase access to affordably priced processed goods like canned tomatoes, provide new access to markets for farm seconds, and create stepping stone training and work opportunities.

The Food Flow Kitchen might be a mobile food processing kitchen. This mobile kitchen could pull up at your agency to process extra donations, train chefs and volunteers in basic canning for room temperature storage, and create community awareness of the issues in the community food sector.

The mobile kitchen could also, as in Mennonite communities, provide basic on-farm processing for farm partners. This would increase access to minimally processed, affordable local food for the community food sector, and provide jobs and training as part of a social enterprise.

This model is almost unique in North America. Mobile abattoirs have popped up in the U.S. in Vermont and other locations. The Food Flow Mobile Kitchen would provide processing for fruits and vegetables, making it a ground-breaking innovation in community food. The North Dakota Department of Agriculture developed a (big!) mobile food processing kitchen recently. In a conversation with Food Flow, Jamie Goode from the North Dakota project recommends that we focus on a smaller unit and one or two methods of processing (hot water bath canning and dehydration, for instance).