Culinary innovation occurs when you match your company’s inventiveness and creative capabilities with the right facility and production infrastructure. Whether you are a chef looking to debut a new signature dish at your restaurant or a company looking to market a new line of consumer packaged goods, you will need to find the right space and equipment to get your new creations off the ground.
Renting out an R&D or test production space allows your company to develop and perfect new recipes and test out new equipment and preparation techniques, without having to divert or distract valuable resources from your primary production resources. For many businesses, the prospect of finding, designing, and building out your own brick-and-mortar facility focused on R&D or pilot production isn’t financially feasible. That is where R&D and Pilot production space rentals come into play, offering unprecedented flexibility and control over your development and pilot production processes paired with more affordable pricing and faster ramp-up capacity.
What Are R&D Kitchens?
An R&D or pilot kitchen is a lot like a laboratory. It is a place where innovation and inspiration meet the resources for turning those great ideas into production at scale. The space should be more than just a creative space for blue sky development of new concepts. A high-quality R&D or pilot production space can bridge your product innovations with the infrastructure required for bringing those ideas to market without undue delay or cost. In a test or pilot production space, food companies should not only be able to perfect new recipes and formulations but also make sure their new concepts scale safely, cost-effectively, and to a level required to meet the demand from vendors and retailers.
To that end, you should expect your R&D and pilot production space to offer the flexibility, resources, and infrastructure to develop and scale your new concepts efficiently, at a reasonable rate, and to the highest quality health and safety standards. Rather than draining your existing resources, a pilot production kitchen rental provides the perfect solution for many companies.
The Essential Elements of an R&D or Pilot Kitchen Space
The goals of an effective R&D or pilot production space are as follows; first, conceive and perfect your new product’s recipe, second, make sure that the new recipe is compliant with relevant food safety regulations and certifying standards, and finally, confirming you can transfer the small-batch initial develop production to large batch production while maintaining the desired quality and consistency. To accomplish these goals, an R&D or Pilot kitchen rental must offer flexibility, access to important production-related amenities, and employ a wide range of features that enhance the chance of success for your new products.
The single most important element in new product development after imagination and inspiration is finding the space to bring your new concepts to reality. Your test or pilot production kitchen must be accommodating and flexible with plenty of on-site storage as you will often be working with a wide variety of ingredients and supplies. Room to work and flexibility to grow are both critical to the test kitchen and having room to store your ingredients and finished products are key.
You must also have access to high-capacity building infrastructure including gas, electricity, and HVAC systems that can support the variety of equipment you may need for your research and development. Research and development rely on precision and control of the test and production environment to ensure quality and consistency throughout the innovation process. Your production space should therefore offer a stable platform to achieve successful product development and roll out.
Storage options are frequently a critical part of the test kitchen environment. A wide variety of refrigerated, dry, and frozen storage often plays an essential role in a successful pilot production space enabling you ready access to the variety of supplies and raw ingredients that are core to new product innovation. A properly-equipped test space or R&D kitchen will also have access to a range of other amenities and infrastructure that support new product development such as packaging rooms, loading docks, and office and meeting areas.
What to Look for in Your Pilot Production Space
A central concern for those developing new products in an R&D space is assessing all of the challenges that come with taking your innovative recipes and formulas from the conceptual stage to the production phase. In order to make a successful transition to larger-scale production, most companies need pilot production space. As many a food maker has discovered, increasing your production level from early research and development mode to full-scale production is not a simple linear repeating of what worked at the initial, small scale. Ratios and ingredients and processes that work in small batches often need to be adjusted and adapted as you ramp up your production.
Ideally, you need an R&D or test environment that can grow alongside your production needs. While you might find a 150-square-foot kitchen suits your initial development needs, as you ramp up into larger runs for pilot and full-scale production, you will find that you need a bigger space to accommodate the increasing demands of your new line. When looking at space rentals, you should always look for a facility that offers the flexibility you will need to scale your products.
As the scope of your production grows, your supply needs and logistics requirements will also need to adapt. What works as a strategy on a small scale might not work on a larger one. Taking a product from benchtop to production scale means adjustments not just of your kitchen or production environment. You also need to rework your logistics to accompany the scale-up of your production. As you look for R&D and pilot production space, make sure the kitchen you have has access to shipping and receiving docks, ample storage for your packaging, ingredients and finished products, and office space for planning purposes.
In order to translate your creativity to production scale, you also need the right tools for the job. A properly permitted pilot and R&D kitchen must include health department-approved finishes and infrastructure to support modern, high-capacity equipment, ample storage options, and opportunities to adjust and adapt your business.
Amped Kitchens Can Help You Scale Your Business Quickly
Not all production kitchen rentals are created equally. Many hourly or incubator kitchens offer space with minimal amenities to accommodate your company’s growth. Amped Kitchens is a comprehensive R&D and pilot production solution that allows you to develop and scale your new product manufacturing supported by a variety of amenities at a fraction of the time and price of most traditional solutions.
We offer a range of R&D and Pilot production space rentals to meet your growing needs, ranging from our economy 150-square-foot space up to units that are larger than 2,000 square feet. And Amped Kitchens offers your business unprecedented flexibility as your production levels grow. To begin with, our production space have can be as efficient as spaces five to ten times the size of a traditional kitchen and when your business outgrows its current infrastructure, Amped Kitchens has a variety of bigger options to accommodate your developing needs.
We also understand how important a robust range of storage options is for your development and pilot production processes. The wide variety of Amped Kitchens offer ample dry, refrigerated, and frozen storage to suit your needs as you move from R&D to fully engaged production.
Amped Kitchens is more than just a great facility to develop and produce your products. We are exceptionally proud of our professional onsite logistics team. The Amped Kitchens’ staff is available to help process your incoming deliveries and facilitate shipping your outgoing products, reducing your time spent and labor costs on logistics. Tenants tell us that the value of the Amped Kitchen’s services are equivalent to two or three employees. All of our tenants have access to office space and conference rooms, allowing you and your team to work on your business strategize about your operations, and expand on your success.
Amped Kitchens offers gold standard facilities with industry-leading cleanliness, efficiency, and productivity. All of our production spaces strictly conform to the relevant local, state, and federal health department requirements guidelines and also offer opportunities to achieve higher level approvals and certifications from regulators like the FDA and USDA and private auditors like Everclean and Siliker as well as a variety of kosher, gluten-free, organic and other certifications that can be central to the approval of your new products.
Pilot Production Kitchen Rentals With Amped Kitchens
With Amped Kitchens, efficient and timely scalability is our primary focus. On average, our tenants are able to save 94% on their startup costs as opposed to the costly and time-consuming process of doing it yourself in a stand-alone brick-and-mortar space. With our industry-leading suite of amenities, brands can launch their operations in as little as three to six weeks and get into production at a fraction of the cost of most alternatives. Amped Kitchens offers production opportunities for rent in both Los Angeles and Chicago.
If you’re looking to expedite your R&D process and cut down on your start-up and pilot production costs, contact Amped Kitchens today to talk about our line of rental options.
