Kickstarter

The Good Karma Kitchen: "Where happy people make good food"

Hi foodies!  My name is Brynn Waite, and I'm the proud owner of brynn&amie Good Karma Foods, a small company that produces all-natural granolas, baking mixes and snacks on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  The Good Karma Kitchen, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, is where the magic happens.  I share my kitchen with two amazing women, both of whom are also small business owners dedicated to making delicious foods.  The kitchen has become a family where we encourage each other, taste each other's products, and share wit and wisdom.  There's nothing else like it on the Outer Banks.

As our businesses have begun to grow, we now find that unless we replace our crazy collection of used residential refrigerators and freezers with larger, more efficient commercial ones, we just don't have the capacity to store the ingredients we need.  We're all still working just to make enough to pay ourselves, and there's just no money available to take on a project this big.  That's where YOU can help!

Here's how it all started...

Last summer I realized that I needed a lot more space and kitchen time in order to start expanding my business, so I decided to try to open my own incubator kitchen and invite other women to share it.  

I rented a 700 square foot raw space at the back of a small shopping center and set to work transforming it from an empty shell into a fully functioning commercial kitchen.  When I say "raw space", I'm not kidding!  I spent weeks cleaning and sealing concrete floors, and installing base molding, shelving and washable walls. I had some help with the painting, and hired electricians and plumbers to install all the equipment.  I was lucky enough to get a micro loan from the North Carolina Rural Development Center, but that only paid for about a quarter of the cost.

Soon after I completed the kitchen, I welcomed my close friend Crystal Swain into the space.  Crystal makes organic ice creams (including an amazing deep chocolate vegan version) under the name Enlightened Palate, and all-natural paletas (fruit-based popsicles) that she sells at her new store, ZenPops.

Finally, this spring, I invited another friend, Chris Carroll, to join the Good Karma family.  Chris, dba Sweaterbox Confections, makes the most fabulous baked goods and candies and brings expertise and wit to the kitchen. Up until now, Chris had been producing all of her products out of her home kitchen, but she has decided to focus on building her business into a full-time venture.

We now have a fully functional incubator kitchen for 3 woman-owned businesses, except...

Our solution for refrigeration has been a motley conglomeration of used household refrigerators and freezers, but we're bursting at the seams.  Now that Good Karma Foods is being carried in some Whole Foods stores, and ZenPops has a retail location, we are all ramping up production (that's a good thing!), but we're in desperate need of commercial refrigeration equipment.

All of us at the Good Karma Kitchen have had multiple careers over the years, but we find our passion is in making really good all-natural foods in the hope that we will be able to support our families in doing so.  Your investment in the future of our growing companies would enable us to do what we love.  Namaste.