Building Futures

La Cocina was born out of a belief that a community of naturally talented 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 our kitchen since 2005 reflects that aspiration and, quite simply, tastes amazing.

La Cocina has focused, since then, on the project of small business incubation, with a vision to increase inclusivity in the food industry and offer equitable opportunity for living-wage work and asset generation. Working-class women of color and immigrant women, many of whom are skilled cooks, have traditionally experienced a comparative lack of opportunities in the formal job market, including in the formal foodservice industry. Being excluded from the mainstream job market and the formal food industry has prompted many low-income women to start their own, informal food enterprises.

In 2023, La Cocina made the decision to transform its Municipal Marketplace from a food hall featuring seven businesses to a second incubator kitchen to supplement the resources we provided from our original Mission District kitchen and support our entrepreneur community more deeply. This change in format was our response to the economic reality and the many ways that the pandemic and remote work reshaped the city, and in particular the Tenderloin and downtown.

Our strategic goal is to strengthen and deepen our core focus and to expand our impact. We will continue to provide economic opportunities for immigrant and women-of-color-owned small businesses and spaces for people who want to eat with purpose and transform the food economy with us. We will also share our work, through consulting and storytelling, in order to continue to change the conversation about what’s possible for women of color and immigrant-owned food businesses anywhere.