Four Eleven Kitchen’s Amanda Kidd on Succeeding in Food & Hospitality

When about a hundred people gathered on September 12, 2024, for the grand opening of Four Eleven Kitchen at the Packing House in Cambridge, founder Amanda Kidd said, “Food is one of the things that drops all barriers.” This is something she witnessed first-hand as a child in Washington, DC. As she told the Star Democrat‘s Maggie Trovato last August, the foods made by her neighbors allowed her glimpses into different cultures.

That inspired her to get into the food and hospitality industry. Eventually, she started Beat the Rush food delivery service, and now she has Four Eleven, a shared-use professional kitchen facility and educational engagement space where nascent food businesses (“foodpreneurs”) can develop menus, experiment with dishes, and nurture customers while learning hospitality skills as well as how to comply with food-service guidelines.

The Spy recently met Kidd at Four Eleven to discuss her background and success with the new business.

You’ve been in food and hospitality since you were a teenager. What did you do?

KIDD: I mean, everything from amusement park hospitality, worked at Kings Dominion. So, that’s like the top tier you can get as a teenager. But I mean, worked in, I call them three-star, like Tropical Smoothies, Moe’s, those type of establishments. And then later elevated to Best Western Inn where I worked in banqueting and worked as a hostess, grew my passion and desire for food and hospitality even further by working alongside the chefs there.

How old were you when you decided to get into that? When you knew that that’s what you wanted to do.

KIDD: It wasn’t a “knew that I wanted to do” thing. It was something I’ve always gravitated to. It’s like a safe place, so it wasn’t a dedicated career path, if that makes sense.

Just kind of happened. It was just an instinct.

KIDD: I mean, it was an area that I felt comfortable in.

Why is that?

KIDD: Because I always had a passion for food. So, growing up in the kitchen with my grandparents all the time, whether it was family dinner, holiday dinner, a gathering, we were always in the kitchen, always cooking. So, it was just a place of comfort for me.

Where did you go to school?

KIDD: So, I started at Liberty University and then took a pause, actually ended up going to massage school for a period of time, while working, figuring out what I wanted to do. But then I went back to school, to University of Phoenix online, and then I took some classes here at Chesapeake [College], as well.

Was that after you had a family of your own? Because that’s usually when you do it online, because it’s a necessity.

KIDD: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you’ve owned other businesses in this arena before. Like Beat the Rush.

KIDD: Yeah, so Beat the Rush is a more concierge hospitality side of things, more so than the actual food side.

Why’d you decide to do that?

KIDD: So, started out, had family needs that I saw other individuals experiencing the same thing, and whether it was limited transportation to get the foods and the essential things that they needed in their homes, which is probably a good percentage of Americans these days. But our community here and then also my personal family at the time–my mom was battling cancer. So, she had those same challenges as getting foods, fresh foods, things into the home. So, Beat the Rush was a concept that she and I talked about for a long time based off of what we saw her challenges, other challenges of those that were sharing the treatment rooms with her. You know, they talked about a lot of their challenges.

And so it was always a desire of ours to expand it to where it could help multiple communities, which is still in the works. So, even though we paused for a little bit to get Four Eleven off the ground, because a lot of what Beat the Rush embodied, which was supporting local producers of food, farmers, we found that there was a need. There was a need for the local caterers, local farmers, and being able to produce their foods. They kept getting turned away from the health department for certain items that they needed, that they desire to produce.

Can you explain that?

KIDD: Because they didn’t have commercial kitchen access. And so, Four Eleven Kitchen bridges that gap to provide the commercial kitchen access. So, now they can continue to grow their business and scale it the way that they decided to. But, with Beat the Rush, it was more than just based off of a need. It is a challenge for a lot of small businesses to do all the things in their business.

So, Beat the Rush embodied a department–we were logistics, concierge, hospitality. We embodied a department for that. Some business owners could not fathom creating, having their own departments, not starting out at the gate. So, a lot of people that we serve were startups just like us. So, we believe in community. We believe in collaboration. And so, collaboration allows us to leverage each other to grow.

So, how does Four Eleven Kitchen work?

KIDD: So, Four Eleven Kitchen, we are, I would say a food and hospitality incubator. So, we give the support to the foodpreneurs by providing them assistance with business development, community, and access to commercial kitchen. We also provide access to resources, subject matter experts, industry, connections that can help them to further grow their business; but, even where they are right now, help them to maintain until they get to that place of momentum and ready to really grow and scale. A lot of what people miss is community because, I don’t know if you have any insight of the food industry, but it can be pretty cutthroat and where there’s a lot of competitive behavior. That’s something that I believe has kind of crushed the industry, because it’s so much competitiveness versus collaboration.

And a lot of times, like, we have the two users today: Fusion Eats, they are soul and savory food, but Blue’s Flowers is bakery sweet decadent. So, one can complement the other. And you can have days where you can have pop-up events, where everyone’s able to receive support, and the community can do just like what they do when they go to Wawa. They go to Wawa, they get a burger and a brownie, you’re still getting from two separate vendors, and a lot of people don’t really see that connection. So, bringing that aspect and putting that before the community, showing them, like, there is collaboration there, this is how it works together. So, I believe Four Eleven Kitchen will be that bridge and that barrier-breaking at the same time, breaking the barriers of the mind that “Okay, I can patronize two separate food businesses,” but then bridging the gap to “this is how we do it.” And that’s through Four Eleven.

So, one of the things that we also do–and I mentioned the mind. So, we have an initiative called Feed the People. And so, Feed the People is an initiative that embodies education and also actual feeding of people. So, we’re feeding minds and feeding bellies. And so, we have programming that is actually launching this summer that we have cooking classes. And I don’t want to say “cooking classes” in the culinary and certification-type cooking classes, but more of a community engagement, community development-style of cooking classes where people in the community can come together. There can be, let’s just say cookie decorating, learn how to decorate cookies, learn how to–and something fun you can do with your family, your friends, your neighbors, co-workers. Organization groups can come in and do it together.

But then, the other aspect of it is teaching people how to feed themselves. So, giving them those soft skills, showing them that it’s not like you have to go get a degree to learn how to make good food, how to make healthy food, how to make good foods, comfort foods that you love in a healthy way. So, it’s really kind of like playing off of those type of opportunities. And then we have an initiative, a part of that initiative is our urban farm. And that urban farm is going to support the learning aspect–getting in, making the mistakes, learning the intricacies of gardening and farming from different facilitators such as University of Maryland Extension Master Gardeners, local farmers, food educators who we will partner with to provide access to that information.

Where will this urban farming take place?

KIDD: Lincoln Terrace and Douglas Street. Are you familiar with that, off of Washington Street? So, in that corridor there, they actually just started building some new homes back there with Habitat. And then the, I think it’s [Department of Housing and Community Development], are building some homes as well back there. So, it’s a kind of our concept of it piggybacked off of the Habitat being in that community because they were beautifying and making creative spaces there. And so, we actually started with Habitat donating the property to the city, and the city and us are coming into a partnership to be able to occupy that as an urban farm. So, it’s a community effort.

The educational part of it, or helping them with their business plan or whatever. Where does that take place? Like, do you sit down at a desk?

KIDD: Yeah. I mean, depending on their schedules, we would sit down face-to-face and be able to do it, but then we can do it virtually, as well. A lot of the foodpreneurs, they do hold other careers. So, it’s based off of their scheduling and whatever works for them.

How many active clients do you have at the moment?

KIDD: Active we have, I wanna say six, but it can fluctuate as far as, because we have non-member use. So, we have members and non-members. So, in memberships I would say six. But, as far as use, it fluctuates this month depending on rental needs.

Your rental prices, they were pretty reasonable. What I saw on your website, it seemed pretty reasonable.

KIDD: Yeah. We really are trying to keep that low startup for them, depending on where they’re at depends on what tiers they take on, and they’re able to fluctuate through those tiers as they adjust in their business and learn their business model.

You had a quotation from Maya Angelou on your Events page: “Nothing works unless you do.” What does that mean to you?

KIDD: So, we can have a thought and we can have a concept and an idea, but until we actually put our hands to it, until we do it, it doesn’t work. And even when doing it, sometimes we find that there are things that need to be adjusted. But when you stop because of the adjustments, then you stop all of the progress, all of the potential. So, it must continue. The work must continue. You must continue to do it. Even if there’s a challenge, even if there’s a hiccup, something that you didn’t foresee, it’s best to just navigate. You know what you can learn about it to kind of pivot or readjust and then continue on, but it won’t work unless you do.

What would your mom say about your success at this point?

KIDD: Man, so, I believe she would say, “I knew you could do it.” Yeah.

She had a lot of faith in you.

KIDD: Yes, yeah, I believe she could say, I mean, “You can do it.” And she, like, even up until her passing, she kept saying “Start the business, start the business.” I actually didn’t start any of my businesses until two years after she passed.

But she was in on planning Beat the Rush.

KIDD: She was. I mean, she was the prototype, it was because of her life and what she was experiencing. You know, Dad working two jobs at the time, probably three–didn’t know about the third one until, like, later on. Parents do what they have to do to keep the families afloat. And it was always a scheduling, like scheduling to get to the store to then prepare. We had sports and you had other family activities and life happening, and it’s like trying to get to the store. And we were at the very beginning of when Giant started Peapod. So, like, that’s when all that stuff was navigating.

And I was away at school and learned that Mom was sick. And it was like, “Mom, I can’t get you food.” Like, “I don’t know how to get you food.” And she was like, “You should start the business.” I was like, “What do you mean?” Like, that wasn’t a concept to me. Like, start a business. Like, we never talked about starting a business. And I didn’t actually get into business school until after she said start the business. And I was just like, I need to know what she’s talking about because this doesn’t make sense. But she was the prototype. She was the flame, the lighter fluid to the flame. She was all of that. And she’s what keeps me going. My kids also keep me going. My husband keeps me going, and those that have a need keep me going. So, if there’s a need, I’m going to keep going.

You officially opened here September 12th.

KIDD: But we’ve been an organization since 2022. … It’s been several years in the making just to get here. But even prior to that, this kitchen concept, Four Eleven, the name hadn’t been birthed yet, but the kitchen concept had been in our original business plan. So we knew that our foodpreneurs were going to need space to work out of if we were going to continue to have a thriving catering community.

There’s so many caterers, so many different food providers, food service providers, whether it’s meal prepping, whether it’s baked goods, whether it’s food products that we have in our community that we love so much. They need kitchen space, and a lot of it cannot be made in their homes. And the regulations, they have a limitation to what can be prepared in home and actually be sold for retail. So, we feel that that gap of when they hit that limitation and they’re able to then come here and prepare.

What does it feel like to blaze trails and solve problems?

KIDD: It’s, like, you pinch yourself–like, that’s me. Like, that’s what I’m doing. To me, it’s like I’m just waking up and doing what’s inside of me to do. But like, people like yourself that put the title of trailblazer or groundbreaking or things like that–it’s not something that I really think about. So, I mean, it’s definitely humbling to know that I have been given a vision and be able to innovate in a way that can help others along the way. So, it’s really an honor to be able to do it all.

For more information, visit the website.

Thanks to Debra R. Messick (Talbot Spy) and Tom McCall (Star Democrat) for supplementary material.