La Cocina

Welcome to La Cocina, San Francisco's first incubator kitchen. La Cocina was founded to serve as a platform for low-income entrepreneurs launching, formalizing or expanding their food businesses. La Cocina provides affordable commercial kitchen space and industry-specific technical assistance to low-income entrepreneurs in order to bring their businesses quickly to a point of self-sufficiency.

La Cocina (pronounced la co-see-nah, meaning “The Kitchen” in Spanish) was inspired by its current home, San Francisco’s Mission District, an ethnically diverse and economically vulnerable neighborhood that thrives in part due to the many small informal businesses that serve the community. As is the case in many cities, food lies at the heart of this community, and you don’t have to look far to find hidden entrepreneurs in the kitchens of many homes.

Recognizing a need to formalize these food businesses—and the opportunity created when you turn inconsistent and illegal home restaurants into sustainable legal businesses—organizations like Arriba Juntos, The Women’s Initiative for Self-Employment and The Women’s Foundation of California and one very special and visionary anonymous donor created La Cocina. La Cocina is both the space—a modern building and commercial kitchen that has been featured in Metropolis Magazine—and the program—an innovative business incubator that supports a growing roster of small businesses.

La Cocina was born out of a belief that a community of natural entrepreneurs, given the right resources, can create self-sufficient businesses that benefit themselves, their families, their community, and the whole city. The food that has come out of this kitchen since 2005 reflects that aspiration and, quite simply, tastes amazing.

To help support our programs, La Cocina also rents commercial kitchen space to established businesses who do not qualify for our incubator program (commercial kitchen rental).

La Cocina operates under the fiscal sponsorship of The Women’s Foundation of California, a 501 (c) (3) organization.

Bienvenidos a “La Cocina.” La Cocina Community Kitchen es una cocina comercial y un programa de apoyo sin fines de lucro para mujeres imigrantes y minorías de bajos ingresos que quieren iniciar o formalizar sus negocios de comida. Ofrecemos acceso a una cocina comercial, a oportunidades para vender su producto, y al apoyo con el manejo de su negocio de comida.

Para apoyar a nuestros programas, La Cocina también alquila espacio a negocios establicidos que no califican para nuestro programa (alquiler de la Cocina).

La Cocina opera bajo el patrocinio fiscal de la Women’s Foundation of California, una organización sin fines de lucro clasificada como 501 (c) (3).