Richard Lander: Mission Kitchen – London’s unique food incubator

Richard Lander: Mission Kitchen – London’s unique food incubator

Where do London’s small-batch spices, artisanal sauces and speciality ice creams originate? We’re talking about products you find at street food markets, on supermarket shelves and slipping into the supply chains of caterers and restaurants.

For many food and drinks businesses they start – or at least start to grow  –  in a modern, if somewhat functional two-storey building in the heart of New Covent Garden – the fruit and veg market that made its historic move some years ago from the real Covent Garden in the heart of the West End.

It’s there that you will find Mission Kitchen, an incubator for micro food and drink businesses that can claim to be a genuine London success story for its social impact, diversity, job creation and grassroots economic growth.

Indeed Mission Kitchen is a London project down to the smallest ingredient grown there. Set up in 2021 with grant funding from Sadiq Khan’s Good Growth Fund, it continues to report to the Greater London Authority (GLA) on a regular basis to keep its mission (pun intended) on track.

Charlie Gent, co-founder of Mission Kitchen, explains that the initiative’s goals are to “reduce barriers to entry for start-up businesses in a very fragmented industry and foster community”.

Gent and his co-founders Paul Smyth and Chris Lumsden worked together on a number of shared workspace projects across several business sectors before coming up with the idea of Mission. Most of these spaces were temporary, but Mission – 16,000 square feet leased for 20 years – is by far the biggest in scale and ambition.

And while similar spaces exist in the Netherlands and elsewhere in this country, Mission is unique in Britain. “It was crazy there wasn’t such a space here given the size of the food industry here,” Gent says.

Interestingly, in the light of the seismic changes right now affecting London’s other historic food markets at Billingsgate and Smithfield, the foresight of the New Covent Garden authorities played a key role in getting Mission off the ground.

“They initiated a strategic review 10 years ago to look at how things might change going forward and to reimagine the market for the 21st Century, from establishing a hub for businesses to redeveloping some of the older buildings,” says Gent.

Visit Mission on any work day and you’ll find a microcosm of London’s native food scene on display, from solo entrepreneurs renting a shared kitchen space to test recipes for a few hours a week, to fully-fledged businesses in small-scale commercial production.

It runs on a membership basis, with about 100 businesses signed up at any one time. These will move up the membership food chain (pun intended again), topping out as a full-time production kitchen.

Mission Kitchen also offers co-working offices, mentorship programmes and buyer introductions – all of them critical ingredients for early-stage food ventures. Other users of the space include new restaurants trying out dishes while their own premises are being kitted out. It’s thought that the legendary beef cheek and Guinness suet pudding at Soho’s Devonshire restaurant transitioned from concept to spectacularly tasty, gooey, unctuous reality within these walls.

Screenshot 2025 01 31 at 10.15.21

For start-ups, the ultimate goal is to get out of Mission into the real world. The key indicator of success is demand for its products being so great that the business can no longer produce enough within Mission, and needs to either relocate to larger premises or to outsource production to a diversified foodstuff company.

“For us, the measure of success for a member is that they outgrow us and leave the building,” says Gent. A prime example is ManiLife peanut butter, which has graduated from Mission to  a 15,000 square foot factory outside London supplying supermarkets such as Waitrose, Sainsburys and Ocado.

Others to have flown the Mission nest include Araw Filipino ice cream and Yep Kitchen, which now creates its Sichuan chilli sauces from a unit in Acton Business Centre.

Those three – and there are many more – underline the ethnic diversity of London’s food scene, unparalleled in the west outside of New York, not to mention a growing trend among  young Londoners to come home from travels and replicate the exotic flavours they sampled abroad. Both ManiLife and Yep are passion projects started by travellers creating passion projects after spending time in Argentina and China respectively.

Gent would like to open more Mission Kitchens around Britain, but without the heft of New Covent Garden and the GLA it’s a costly and complicated path to convert such hopes into reality.

Similar places do exist around London and the rest of the country, but too many of them find it easier and more lucrative to rent themselves out as “dark kitchens” serving the likes of Deliveroo and other pantomime villains of the hospitality industry.

Gent himself has never ordered a Deliveroo – why would you, he argues, when it will arrive overcooked and lukewarm. Instead, you’ll be more likely to find him at his Nine Elms neighbours Brunswick House and Darby’s or closer to home at Imone, which serves New Malden’s burgeoning Korean population.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Richard Lander on Bluesky.

Categories: Culture

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *