Asheville Local Lab

Background

Leading into this Local Lab, Mechanism identified an intersectional gap: How can small food and beverage manufacturing companies understand how local capital flows and if that flow is aligned with a region’s business and community priorities.

Our project team completed a landscape analysis, identifying over 100 stakeholders in the food and beverage production, support, or financing space in the Southeast region of the US. We focused on organizations that serve diverse food and beverage businesses, including shared production kitchens, technical assistance providers, and food finance groups. We contacted 15 entities and held in-depth listening calls with eight, as well as administered a survey to shared kitchen operators. We identified Asheville, NC (and the 25 surrounding counties) as our first location to launch this Local Lab.

Now our engagement process in Western NC is centering on food and beverage makers and manufacturers and key business resource providers. These two segments of the overall manufacturing ecosystem have the most direct experience with understanding needs, challenges, and opportunities to start, scale, and sustain a business. We also will invite any and all industry and community members who are supporters and champions of food and beverage manufacturers at key and strategic moments in the overall Local Lab Process.

In our landscape analysis and still in our current work, we are finding many common threads in our conversations:

• The difficulty scaling beyond a shared kitchen due to the large funds required to do so

• The struggle of shared kitchens to balance community needs and their own bottom line

• That food production is an important way for immigrants to create income and share culture

• The disconnect between farmers and product manufacturers

• The funding for workforce pipelines for hospitality not being flexible to support food entrepreneurship of workers; and

• The lack of local infrastructure such as co-packaging facilities, cold storage, or affordable distribution channels.

Almost all of these threads tie back to the need for investment (institutional and personal) in this sector as well as policy innovation (financial and municipal).

Goals & Objectives

Our Local Lab process will unearth which of these (or other) challenges the Western NC community feels most pressing, and allow them to take an active role in co-designing a solution.

Community members will:

• Identify challenges and barriers to local production

• Learn about pioneers and creative solutions to local challenges

• Define strategies and initiatives that can benefit and impact local business owners

At the conclusion of this project, Mechanism and Asheville-based partners will generate recommendations for strategies and actions to help start, scale, and sustain more food and beverage manufacturers in the region.

Local Lead

Smithson Mills | Smithson Mills

Working Group

Krista Stearns | Asheville Area Food Guild & Mountain Mural Tours

Kym Verhovshek | NCIdea & NCInnovation

Michael McDonald | WNC Blue Ridge Food Ventures

Amy Murashige | Sugar & Snow Gelato

Jessika Bond | Land of Sky Regional Council

From July 2025 through January 2026, Mechanism will organize and lead a community engagement process to gather and synthesize input from diverse stakeholders. This process will include:

• individual and small group interviews to gather insights from food and beverage manufacturers in and around Asheville and their supporters

• a virtual learning series to bring in national leaders to inform the work in the region

• in-person events to workshop and develop ideas for strategies and solutions

Over time we will update this page with our process, findings, and recommendations.

Local Labs make visible the challenges and opportunities for starting, scaling, and sustaining production ecosystems. Our process allows business owners and workers to work with and alongside each other and a wide variety of industry, intermediary, and community stakeholders, inclusive of a wide variety of identities (age, citizenship, race, gender, employment status, etc). The Local Lab process intentionally brings them all together to better understand and envision the collective benefits and impacts local production can have on a place. Successful Labs co-create, co-design, and build new resources, services, systems, and policies that better support production ecosystems, leading to more thriving and resilient workers, businesses, communities, and places.

Local Labs have three phases: Learn, Design, and Build; however, every engagement doesn’t have to include each of them and each is tailored to a community’s needs.