Ingredion Partners with Food Business Incubator

Ingredion Incorporated, a leading global provider of ingredient solutions to diversified industries, including ingredients from potatoes, has announced a partnership with The Hatchery Chicago, a non-profit food business incubator.

The partnership is part of the Ingredion for Emerging Business initiative, launched to help emerging food and beverage companies turn innovative ideas into on-trend, scalable, food and beverage products, according to the companies.

Ingredion’s partnership with The Hatchery Chicago connects the company with the local food and beverage start-up community, “while helping to empower entrepreneurs with Ingredion’s customer-centric innovative ingredient solutions, deep food and beverage product development expertise, market insights and new Emerging Business e-commerce platform,” the announcement reads. Ingredion will work with The Hatchery Chicago to offer classes, webinars and a mentorship program to Chicago-area entrepreneurs.

Evan Hyman, director of Emerging Business at Ingredion, says: “It is an avenue for us to help start-up companies emerge faster and reach their full potential with innovative food and beverage products in demand by today’s consumers.”

The mission of The Hatchery Chicago is to enable local food and beverage entrepreneurs build and grow businesses through three major areas of need: access to production space, financing and resources. The Hatchery recently broke ground on a 67,000sqm facility in the EastGarfieldPark section of Chicago that will house between 75 and 100 food entrepreneurs.

Natalie Shmulik, CEO of The Hatchery Chicago, says: “Our goal at The Hatchery Chicago is to provide entrepreneurs with all the resources they need to best navigate the food and beverage industry. (…) By partnering with Ingredion, we will be able to better serve our network of entrepreneurs, who will greatly benefit from the company's longstanding knowledge of on-trend ingredients, product and formulation development and a long history of working with smaller companies.”