Hudson Kitchen Opens at Kearny Point

North Jersey’s first shared commercial kitchen provides food start-ups and aspiring chefs with space to prepare foods, collaborate with fellow entrepreneurs, and grow their businesses.

Hudson Kitchen, an innovative food business incubator and shared-use commercial kitchen, announced its opening at Kearny Point with a ribbon cutting ceremony. Located at 9 Basin Drive, the new facility caters to culinary entrepreneurs throughout the New York Metropolitan area as they launch and continue to grow their businesses.

Hudson Kitchen is one of the largest of its kind in the region, and is the first food business incubator in North Jersey. The innovative shared-use commercial kitchen model provides early-stage food companies and entrepreneurs with access to state-of-the-art, commercial-grade kitchen equipment, prep stations, and extensive dry, cold, and freezer storage.

“The Tri-State region is filled with talented, ambitious food and beverage entrepreneurs that simply lack the necessary resources to commercially produce their products or scale their businesses,” said Djenaba Johnson-Jones, Hudson Kitchen founder and chief executive officer. “Combined with the strict regulations that surround in-home food production, this has created a notoriously challenging environment for starting an artisanal food business. Hudson Kitchen is a place that offers not just the necessary kitchen equipment, but also a family of like-minded entrepreneurs that can help these businesses grow.”

Members have access to on-site food truck parking; co-working space with Wi-Fi; and test kitchen specifically designed for cooking demonstrations, intimate chef dinners, photoshoots, and filming live cooking shows.

The event was catered by Hudson Kitchen’s first member, Portioned, a direct-to-consumer company specializing in chef-inspired meals that utilize the finest ingredients and center-of-the-plate proteins.

Hudson Kitchen joins a community of more than 200 companies that have established operations at Kearny Point, the $1 billion redevelopment of Kearny’s former World War I and World War II shipmaking facility, which has been reinvented as a destination for forward-thinking, creative businesses.

“Hudson Kitchen is representative of our mission at Kearny Point: providing opportunities for businesses of all sizes to grow,” said Wendy Neu, Chief Executive Officer of Hugo Neu. “This entrepreneurial energy helps to fuel the Kearny Point community, and we’re proud to provide an environment in which food production start-ups and other non-traditional operations can thrive.”

Thanks to its industrial heritage and diverse variety of workspaces — from light manufacturing to traditional offices — Kearny Point has emerged as a destination for food-related businesses. Kearny Point houses the operations of companies like Bowery Farms, Oishii Farms, Feed Your Soul Bakery, and Brooklyn Grange’s garden center. In addition to providing the unique physical space requirements that food-related businesses need to operate successfully, the Kearny Point team has taken steps to ensure that the community offers added resources, programming, and networking opportunities to help nurture their operations.

Building 78, the first building to be redeveloped under Kearny Point’s ambitious multiphase redevelopment plan, features creative flex office spaces, along with a co-working facility called Kearny Works and is home to a wide range of creators, innovators and tech trendsetters. Kearny Point will soon unveil its 90,000-square-foot historic craneway structure, called the Annex. Connected to Building 78, the space will consist of new high-tech flex office space for lease starting at 1,500 square feet.

Easily accessible from anywhere in the New York metropolitan area, Kearny Point is proximal to major thoroughfares, including the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway. The campus is also less than five miles from Newark, Jersey City, Hoboken, and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. For those who prefer public transit, Kearny Point is located three miles from the Journal Square PATH station and offers monthly Uber ride-share credits covering the ‘last mile’ of the commute.

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