Open Test Kitchen (OTK)
Oakland Bloom’s flagship program, 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.).
OTK is specifically designed to meet chef participants where they are, supporting the specific conditions of poor and working class immigrant, refugee and PoC chefs. In order to help meet chefs’ needs and enable them to fully immerse and benefit from the year-long program, we integrate case management and referrals to direct services through partnerships with a coalition of organizations specializing in: legal status, food security, housing, mental health, language/interpretation support, etc. And provide stipends for participation, childcare and travel support, as well as interpretation across its sessions and workshops.
Program Goals + Services for OTK:
- Monthly and weekly workshops to learn various aspects of food business
- Connections to consultants and experts
- Income generating opportunities
- Hands-on training and real life experience across various commercial opportunities (restaurants, pop-ups, farmer’s markets, cooking demos, etc.)
- Referrals to direct services (mental health, interpretation, legal, etc.)
Collective Ownership
Cooperative Food Business Development
The COVID-19 pandemic has created new realities that are forcing fundamental change. While the pandemic has surfaced deep inequities in the food service industry that have historically and further put poor and working class communities of color at risk, it has also created an opening for new solutions to emerge.
In this context, one of Oakland Bloom’s main goals as an organization is to reimagine and reshape what a healthy and just 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 that embody community principles and values, and operate in ways that hold space for BIPOC and traditionally marginalized communities. This took shape first through our collective restaurant project Understory (2020-2024) for which we were awarded a 2022 James Beard Emerging Leadership Award, and Oakland Bloom’s current work to build a Chef Collective network to co-steward and own our kitchen on 8th St in Oakland, which launched in September 2024 as Open Test Kitchen: restaurant, market and community space.
Program Goals + Services toward Collective Ownership:
- Ongoing back-end support services in: finance, infrastructure development, lease management, legal entity structures, HR, bookkeeping, operations, and more
- Community building and healing work among members for a strong foundation of principles, relationship, accountability and conflict management
- Strategic planning and work sessions for cooperative development that include defining key cooperative principles, operating agreement, etc.
- Cooperative funding opportunities + fundraising support
- Training opportunities for Oakland Bloom chef participants in the Open Test Kitchen program.
Cooperative Restaurant Group (CRG)
Oakland Bloom worked with the East Bay Community Law Center to develop Oakland’s first cooperative restaurant group.
Traditional restaurant groups are exploitative in nature and tend to favor investors in equity and decision making power, while also not giving chefs’ their fair share of equity and agency/ power. Oakland Bloom is working to completely flip this model to create an alternative solution to financing — one that is equitable and fair, as well as dedicated to honoring the hard work of chefs in a way that prioritizes majority chef equity and chef-decision making power. The cooperative restaurant group will also provide a suite of back-end services to participating entrepreneurs that will cover a variety of needs: legal, accounting, financing, business development, etc.
Powered by community investors and members, this model is designed to put power back in the hands of the people and to also give them the dedicated support of a strong business partner.
Program Goals + Services for CRG:
- Non-extractive funding opportunities and capital for small businesses
- Ongoing backend support for recipients
Oakland Chinatown
Anti-Displacement Initiative
This collaboration in Chinatown not only provides opportunities to showcase Oakland Bloom’s immigrant/refugee chefs, but also supports a grassroots campaign against the targeted discrimination and displacement that long-time local businesses are facing in Oakland Chinatown. An important goal is to lift working-class immigrant businesses and end targeting/ displacement of Chinatown Oakland businesses by the County Health Department, support community-based safety initiatives and invite community support to the neighborhood.
Working together with local merchants and organizations, Oakland Bloom has supported media strategies to strengthen place-making within the community and create opportunities for immigrant and refugee chefs. Since 2023, has co-hosted an annual Lantern Festival to bring merchants, emerging chef-entrepreneurs, healers and performers for an evening of celebration and healing in the neighborhood.
COVID-19 Response (2020-2022)
Pay it Forward
In order to provide economic opportunities for Oakland Bloom chefs during the pandemic when other traditional opportunities were more limited, we developed our Pay It Forward program, which connected chefs to opportunities to cook homestyle meals that went towards neighborhood mutual aid/distribution efforts to feed over 7500 meals to our unsheltered neighbors in West and North Oakland.
COVID-19 Response (2020-2021)
Farmers to Families Food Box
We partnered with Gill Tract Farms to directly connect Oakland Bloom chefs to community-based relief efforts for supplies and food security through our Farmers to Family Food Box program — a free weekly CSA produce box delivered directly to our base of refugee chefs and their families.
** NONE of this would have been possible without the help from our amazing and generous volunteer drivers. THANK YOU!
Night Market Series
From 2017-2018, Oakland Bloom hosted small pilot underground night markets in downtown Oakland that were incredibly well-received and sold out with 150 seatings each night and over 2000 attendees over the course of the series.
Oakland Bloom looks to experiment with what a full and authentic night market could look like with the hopes of ultimately creating Oakland’s first hawker center (or food hall) that could act as a training ground and permanent kitchen for up-and-coming chefs from poor and working class communities to develop and hone their food businesses.
