Did you know School of Food is helping build a local food business ecosystem in Baltimore? Learn more about our history and how we are changing the local landscape for food and beverage small business development.

Our History

School of Food began as the educational arm of Humanim‘s first culinary social enterprise (our sister company!) – City Seeds. Utilizing Humanim’s model of workforce development and job creation through social enterprise, City Seeds, a Humanim social enterprise, was launched in 2015 with the expressed purpose of creating good jobs for Baltimore residents with barriers to employment in the culinary field and implementing a targeted training strategy (yours truly!) to increase the number of successful food businesses owned by low income residents within Baltimore City.

What began as a workshop series led by industry experts and business leaders soon grew into a year-long curriculum, taking current and future food business owners through the complete journey of building a food business.

Our Impact: It’s an Ecosystem

School of Food creates opportunities for local, minority and low-income food & beverage entrepreneurs through business training, technical assistance, and by developing pathways to procurement and purchaser network development for our students. By leveraging City Seeds local procurement and Humanim’s network of community and business partners, we support an ecosystem that not only trains and mentors entrepreneurs, but connects them directly to opportunities to sell their products locally.

Learn more! Download our latest Impact Report.

Today

Today School of Food’s business training program operates in two cities: Baltimore and Washington D.C. (in partnership with Union Market) – with plans to expand our training model to more cities in the near future. Beginning in 2018, School of Food moved to the Baltimore Food Hub in East Baltimore, a community development initiative led by the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition to provide workforce development and employment opportunities for the local east Baltimore community and beyond.

In addition to our business training classes, we now offer corporate and public cooking classes for cooking enthusiasts and community members alike, at our brand new teaching kitchen at the Hub.  Our corporate and public culinary classes go toward supporting our community and small business job training and development.

Who is Humanim?

Humanim is a Maryland non-profit social impact organization whose mission is to support and empower individuals who face social or economic challenges – by building pathways to equity, opportunity, and independence. They do this through 40+ programs in the areas of human services, youth services, workforce development, and social enterprise.

Humanim’s Social Enterprise Division not only creates jobs, but creates economic opportunity for ancillary business development for community members. Their business strategy has been to operate within industry clusters and to grow deeply within each sector, maximizing both business and social impact opportunities along the supply chain. You can learn more about Humanim’s social enterprise division here.