PONDERAY — After a hiatus, the shared-use commercial kitchen at the Bonner Mall reopened Saturday. 

Now known as the Pend Oreille Specialty Foods Incubator, the 1,500-square-foot space is designed to offer local entrepreneurs in the food industry the infrastructure needed to grow their businesses.

POSFI’s origin can be traced to the Sandpoint Business Incubator, which included a commercial kitchen available for business owners to lease time in until the center closed in 2014. Equipment from the kitchen went into storage until a coalition of municipalities and nonprofits secured the necessary funding to create Kitchen Ponderay — a shared-use professional cooking space in the Bonner Mall. 

After opening in 2019, Kitchen Ponderay leased time to tenants until its manager — Washington-based nonprofit Kitchen Spokane — closed its doors, bringing Kitchen Ponderay’s future into question. To preserve the space, Pend Oreille Economic Partnership Executive Director Brent Baker and longtime kitchen user Derek Blumenschein formed a local nonprofit that now oversees the facility.

At the reopening Saturday, Baker emphasized the importance of local agriculture and food production, and noted that with Sandpoint’s limited housing supply, the best way to foster economic development is to give fledgling local businesses the tools they need for success. 

“We want to help established local businesses succeed and thrive and support homegrown entrepreneurship,” Baker said.  

Baker said that the local blueprint for growing a mom-and-pop food business into an economic powerhouse exists in Litehouse Foods. Before the company’s products could be found on the shelf of any grocery store in the country, Litehouse was a Hope-based family business that sold its products at marketplaces in the Sandpoint area in the 1960s. 

In the decades that followed, Litehouse became one the area’s top employers; Baker envisions POSFI’s users following a similar path to success. 

“My goal in being in economic development is to have people outgrow the space and move on,” Baker said. 

Blumenschein, in addition to serving as POSFI’s kitchen manager, is the founder and proprietor of Sweet Heat Co., a business that uses the space to create a variety of pepper jams and jellies Blumenschein sells at grocery stores and markets across North Idaho and Eastern Washington. 

After growing ingredients at his Bonners Ferry farm, Blumenschein makes his products with POSFI’s commercial steam kettle and pneumatic paste filler — tools that are cost prohibitive for him to purchase at Sweet Heat’s current stage of development.

“For me, this is a big difference,” Blumenschein said of the kettle. “Otherwise, it would be eight pots going at a time.” 

Additionally, POSFI’s Panhandle Health District approval enables Blumenschein and other producers to comply with regulations for selling their products commercially. 

The kitchen's reopening is supported by a pair of $10,000 grants from Bonner Soil and Water Conservation District and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Business Development program. According to Bonner SWCD Executive Director Sarah Garcia, the money helped replace aging equipment and repair the kitchen’s walk-in coolers and floors. 

Garcia said she believes POSFI will support local food and agriculture, and that the space will serve as a key stepping stone for business owners expanding their operations.  

“For people who are starting their cottage food businesses and are realizing, ‘Hey, there's a market, I can turn this into a larger step.’ This is that next step,” she said.