What is Oakland Bloom

Oakland Bloom is a 501c3 nonprofit that supports poor-and-working class immigrant, refugee, and BIPOC chefs to start their own food businesses through its flagship business training and incubator program, the Open Test Kitchen. Alongside our incubator program, Oakland Bloom also works to develop cooperative food business restaurant + finance models that prioritize community safety, people power, worker rights, and pathways to ownership. In this way, we aim to radically shift the historically exploitative and toxic nature of the food service industry to one that is healthy, equitable and accessible for traditionally marginalized communities.

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Introduction to Our Programs

Open Test Kitchen (OTK)

Open Test Kitchen is a year-long food business incubator and training program that combines commercial food training and consistent access to commercial opportunities for supplemental earned income (catering, events, teaching gigs, chef demos, pop-ups, etc.).

Cooperative Restaurant Group (CRG)

Cooperative Restaurant Group will be an alternative solution to food business financing — dedicated to honoring the hard work of chefs in a way that prioritizes majority chef equity and chef decision-making power. It will also provide legal help, accounting, financing, business development, etc.

Collective Ownership

One of Oakland Bloom’s main goals as an organization is to reimagine and reshape what a healthy food service industry could look like. We aim to work towards advancing equity, accessibility, and worker rights through the development of cooperatively owned food businesses and strong collective networks that embody community principles and values, and operates in ways that hold space for BIPOC and traditionally marginalized communities.

Why Our Work is Important

Through our Open Test Kitchen program, Oakland Bloom works with poor and working class refugee and immigrant chefs passionate about starting their own food businesses. Our chefs come to us with tremendous talent, passion, and heart. They also face harsh realities of different barriers-to-entry, exclusions, and traumas, alongside complicated systems in the U.S. that control access to resources and services.

The majority of chefs in our network are women of color, mothers, and sole providers for their households; many are not English proficient and may face additional barriers due to their immigration status. Oakland Bloom’s work is designed specifically with these realities in mind, to support pathways to business ownership for our base of chefs in a way that is accessible.

COVID-19 Impact

How our base of refugee and immigrant chef communities have been impacted:

Loss or reduction of Employment
Limited or No Access to Government Benefits
Loss of Childcare

COVID-19 Response

How Oakland Bloom responded:

Assess immediate needs and respond
Food Security & Income Generation that is accessible and convenient for chefs
Pivoting our Open Test Kitchen program to provide economic opportunities for OB chefs during the pandemic when other traditional opportunities are limited.
Launched and incubated our first cooperatively run, worker-led restaurant, Understory Oakland