Cleveland Crops stops cooking, seeks partner to re-ignite the publicly funded kitchen

The pots and pans have gone cold at the shiny new Cleveland Crops kitchen in the St. Clair neighborhood, where the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities trains clients for food service work. But principals say they are committed to getting those burners turned back on.

The question is when, and whether the board will continue to run the Food Innovations Kitchen on its own or with a partner. Cleveland Crop's companion operations, the farm and greenhouse program, are still up and running. The kitchen problem arrives at a stressful time when the federal government is asking disabilities boards across the country to restructure the flow of grant monies.

On Monday, Cleveland Crops officials accepted the resignation of food production manager Zac Rheinberger. He was the second head of the one-year-old, $1.2 million Stanard Avenue facility off E. 55^th Street near St. Clair Avenue. The site, in tandem with a 15,000 square-foot-greenhouse and seven farms, provides job training for 100 board clients, and has helped to boost local food production.

Rheinberger declined to comment.

The 8-10 enrolled kitchen workers have been reassigned, said Marie Barni, communications manager for the board.

"No one was laid off," she said Thursday, adding that the group's farming and community supported agriculture program are "business as usual." Earlier this year Cleveland Crops consolidated its farm properties, expanding into Stearns Farm in Parma while pulling out of the Free Stamp garden next to city hall. The Refugee Response farm group will be taking over that site.

The kitchen is still licensed to pack some food items that don't need to be cooked.

"When Zac resigned, he held quite a few certifications we needed to meet requirements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration," said Barni.

She added that the county board wants a partner to help re-start the program and continue expansion.

"We will always have a management role in the kitchen," she added. "But we realized in the past couple of years that there are a lot of rules and regulations involved. It's a very new area for us and we don't claim to be experts on it."

On Thursday, the county group met with Morgan Taggart, the new agriculture director of the St. Clair Superior Development Corporation. Taggart expressed enthusiasm for the kitchen, but said it may take until fall before her group is done enough of its own planning to make any decision.

Taggart said she first toured the facility two weeks ago.

Cleveland Crops has proved its concept as a commercial kitchen and job-training facility for those with disabilities, Taggart said. Both have a potential place with St. Clair in the Hub 55 project, a marketplace intended to revitalize commerce in the neighborhood, especially food commerce. St. Clair recently received an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop fresh food options and start new businesses.

"It might be a matter of giving Cleveland Crops time to rebuild their team and expand" before St. Clair could partner with them, Taggart said.

Maggie Fitzpatrick of The Refugee Response, a refugee agriculture program at Ohio City Farm near West Side Market, said her group's director was meeting with Cleveland Crops today (Friday, April 3), because they have been considering a kitchen space on the East Side.

The commercial-grade collection of ovens, organic produce washers, dehydrators and other equipment is operated for the county by the nonprofit Solutions at Work(SAW, Inc.), which runs a wide variety of the county's work programs, from Just-A-Buck dollar stores to factory clients. Rich Hoban, SAW's executive director, was not immediately available for comment.

The farms and kitchen prowess of Cleveland Crops were featured in stories this weekin The Plain Dealer and on Cleveland.com, just hours after Rheinberger's departure.

Under Reinberger's tenure, Cleveland Crops signed on production clients such as the nationally distributed 24 Zen granola from Chagrin Falls, and Cleveland Kraut. Some of Cleveland Crops' products -- pasta sauces and flavored kale chips made from it's own farm produce -- were added to farm shares and reportedly headed for a planned Whole Foods store in Rocky River. Such "value added" products are considered a boost to a farm's bottom line, and Barni said the significant remaining supply will continue to be included in the farm share program.

Cleveland Kraut co-owner Luke Visnic hoped to start wider production of his six private label kraut flavors at Cleveland Crops