In 2008, the Center published a policy brief which urged city economic development officials to support the creation of additional kitchen incubators in the five boroughs. The piece, authored by Mark Foggin, argued that kitchen incubators give food entrepreneurs something that's often impossible to find in New York: a licensed commercial kitchen at affordable rates. Yet it revealed that there are only four of these shared facilities in the five boroughs, serving a total of 60 entrepreneurs—a fraction of the demand in a city that boasts a growing number of entrepreneurs who are trying their hand at food manufacturing and catering, from high-end chocolates and gourmet pickles to empanadas and Indian sweets.

We are gratified that city policymakers ran with the ideas in our piece. Today, the Bloomberg administration and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced the opening of a new kitchen incubator in East Harlem. Today's opening comes on the heels of the recent opening of the Entrepreneur's Space, a commercial kitchen incubator in Long Island City that the Queens Economic Development Corporation helped to revive.