An old Northwest Side factory that made an array of electronic products for the old Zenith Corp. soon will be the source of new food products. The redevelopment of the 300,000-square-foot facility at 5801 W. Dickens Ave. in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood got the final financing it needed with a $4 million loan from JPMorgan Chase, channeled through the Chicago Community Loan Fund. All told, the project will cost about $25 million.
What is already under construction is a facility to be dubbed Amped Kitchens Chicago, which will offer dozens of kitchens, refrigeration, storage and similar resources to Chicago entrepreneurs ready to take their food concoctions to the commercialization stage. The facility is the third for Los Angeles-based Amped Kitchens, which has opened two of them in its hometown.
One of those was where Beyond Meat–currently one of the hottest U.S. stocks after its May 1 initial public offering–perfected its Beyond Burger. Will the next Beyond Burger come from Amped Kitchens Chicago? The money from Chase is the first deployed from a $10 million loan fund the banking giant established in December to back retail revitalization efforts in South and West Side neighborhoods not benefiting from prosperity in other parts of Chicago.
Sourcing the projects receiving the financing is CCLF, and Chief Operating Officer Robert Tucker says the former Zenith facility was ideal for the first–and probably largest–loan from the pool. “You’re taking an old and relatively abandoned TV factory and turning it into this huge community asset,” he says. CCLF expects by the end of this year to commit the rest of the fund to smaller projects in neighborhoods including Austin and West Humboldt Park on the West Side and Bronzeville, Woodlawn and South Shore on the South Side, Tucker says. A “pure retail” project in Little Village on the Southwest Side is likely to be the next one financed, he says.
The fund is meant to provide a revolving pool of low-rate loans. As loans are repaid, the money is lent to other neighborhood developers. Amped Kitchens is a special project, though. Founders Mott Smith and Brian Albert saw a need for a facility that could help fledgling food companies get their products onto store shelves once they’d generated interest from major distributors like Whole Foods. Many of them were unable to obtain the health and other permits they needed before seeing a dime of revenue in a process that frequently takes well over a year.
