Local Sacramento area incubator AgStart announced Wednesday that the regional grocery chain Raley’s will sponsor the Raley’s Food Lab at The Lab@AgStart incubator in Woodland.
The Raley’s Food Lab will provide an ideal location for food entrepreneurs to experiment and test new foods and food ingredients in a region renowned for its vibrant agriculture and food innovation ecosystem. The Raley’s Food Lab will be a certified food facility where innovators can develop new food products, ingredients and recipes for taste testing, sampling and small-volume sales. The facility will be fully outfitted with kitchen and food preparation equipment and will be reservable for use by established and aspiring food entrepreneurs. Raley’s will also provide entrepreneurs with mentorship and support to help scale their businesses to prepare to sell at retail.
“Raley’s takes great pride operating our business in one of the richest agricultural hubs in the world. We are excited about what this region represents for the future of food production,” said Michael Teel, Raley’s owner. “The Raley’s Food Lab will support food entrepreneurs, who will lead the way to a better food system. We look forward to discovering new products and helping to bring them to our store shelves.”
“Having access to the Raley’s Food Lab will be instrumental for us, enabling us to produce samples of our ingredients for our corporate partners to evaluate. This will help accelerate our product development cycles,” said Anupama Ranganathan, co-founder and chief technology officer of InnovaNutra, Inc., a UC Davis spinout creating plant-based food ingredients to improve flavor, nutrition and shelf-life. There are very few alternative facilities in our Sacramento region. We previously had to travel several hundred miles to the Bay Area or northern parts of California to prepare samples of our product.”
As a part of the larger Lab@AgStart incubator, Raley’s Food Lab users will also be able to take advantage of The Lab@AgStart’s co-working office space, as well as AgStart’s business mentoring and advisory . When it opens April 1st, the Lab@AgStart will be the largest wet-lab incubator facility in the state of California that has an agriculture and food focus, and the only startup incubator in the state combining both a food lab and comprehensive wet lab facility. “A unique advantage of our facility is that entrepreneurs can prepare a new combination of ingredients and cooking techniques in the Raley’s Food Lab, and then immediately take their creation into the Yocha Dehe Lab to assess it for nutrient content and other health attributes,” said Leanna Sweha, AgStart Program Director. “The Lab@AgStart facility will help startups commercialize new innovations for a more sustainable food system, and our facility itself will emphasize sustainability.”
