A local group is engaged in “active talks” to acquire Fork Food Lab from its New York-based parent company and save the kitchen incubator in Portland from an impending closure.
The group, spearheaded by Bill Seretta, president of The Sustainability Lab and chairperson of the Maine Food System Innovation Challenge, is in negotiations with both Pilotworks, the New York-based company that acquired Fork last summer and recently announced it would close the kitchen incubator at the end of September, and the owners of the East Bayside building in which Fork resides.
Seretta told Maine Startups Insider that he’s pulled together a group of interested parties that want to see Fork Food Lab stay open and be available as a resource for Maine’s food and ag-based entrepreneurs.
He’s hopeful a deal will be reached, but cautioned that the talks are still preliminary and that a lot still needs to happen before anything could be finalized.
“There’s a lot of moving parts, and a lot of things have to happen before we even have a reasonable agreement,” Seretta said. “We’re trying to move as fast as we can, but unfortunately we don’t have control over the timetable as it winds through lawyers and leases and all the other commitments sitting out there that need to be cleaned up [before a deal could be reached].”
And even if a deal is reached, that might not be the largest hurdle.
“That, in my mind, is the easy part because then we have to raise some money to take it over,” Seretta said.
The plan, if a deal is reached and financing is successfully lined up, would be to operate Fork as a nonprofit.
Pilotworks, which acquired Fork in 2017 for an undisclosed sum, last month announced that it planned to close the Portland kitchen incubator at the end of September. Pilotworks CEO Zach Ware told Maine Startups Insider at the time that the decision to close Fork, which it was operating as a for-profit entity, was a hard one, but necessary because they determined that “operating sustainably was not feasible long-term.”
Seretta, who is a serial entrepreneur and a former professor of social entrepreneurship at Hampshire College, is not surprised the Pilotworks couldn’t make it work.
“I think [operating it as a nonprofit] is the only way the program will survive,” he said. “If you look at the most successful programs out there, whether in Vermont or Massachusetts, they’re all nonprofit.”
Fork is a “cornerstone” of southern Maine’s food and agricultural ecosystem, Seretta said. He’s had an ongoing relationship with Fork since 2015, a year before it officially opened, when it won what was then known as the Maine Farm, Fish & Food Innovation Challenge.
“Our mission has always been, ‘How do we expand local products?’ You expand local products by increasing demand, and you increase demand by creating a host of business opportunities,” Seretta said. “And Fork is a big piece of that puzzle. It’s not the solution, but it’s a piece of a really interesting puzzle of how food systems develop in local and rural areas. If you want to see local foods being used, you have to build infrastructure to sport that. You won’t see it otherwise.”
If a deal to acquire Fork is reached, he said the goal would be to bolster and expand Fork’s services and get it to a break-even point, “so it can operate as long as there’s demand for it.”
How much runway there’s is for that demand in Portland is unclear, Seretta said.
“I’m of the school that when you set up a service-type business, you should operate as long as there’s demand for it, not as long as you can make money from it,” he said.
Neil Spillane, one of the original founders of Fork and one of the owners of the building, confirmed that talks were underway with Seretta to save the kitchen incubator. An email to Pilotwork’s Ware asking about the ongoing negotiations was not returned before the end of the day Friday.
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