Those entrepreneurial north Minneapolis teens behind Green Garden Bakery are more than three-quarters of the way to raising $200,000 toward a commercial kitchen and expanded instruction-and-demonstration space in the community room of their home base, Heritage Park Apartments.
These young North Siders, including senior-high leaders who met years ago in a neighborhood cooking class, have concocted a business that could approach $50,000 in sales this year. They operate at the intersection of community gardens, vegetable-based cakes, cookies and pastries, environmental stewardship and old-fashioned hard work and hustle.
Last fall, Green Garden won the youth division of the annual Minnesota Cup entrepreneur sweepstakes, earning accolades and a $10,000 prize, plus an extra $1,000 for the best pitch to the judges.
The youth entrepreneurs, led by an executive team of eight that gets paid about $10 an hour for running the enterprise, has outgrown the small kitchen at Heritage Park, which they also shared with others. Increasingly, they were busing to south Minneapolis to rent space in a large kitchen incubator for small businesses.
Several weeks after I wrote a column about Green Garden last November, their mentor was approached by an individual who told her to work with the kids to dream what they would like to do with $150,000. After weeks of planning and consultation with cooks and contractors, Green Gardens produced a plan for a better facility that would allow for wholesale operations, involvement by more youth, and nutrition-and-cooking classes for others in the community.
The benevolent investor listened to the plans and bought in for $150,000.
The teens agreed to raise $50,000 on their own, including $2,500 in a few days.
They just launched a crowd-funding effort to raise the rest of the money on "PieShell" at www.pieshell.com/projects/GGB.
