News October 2026 · Providence, RI
Every fall the people who run shared kitchens across the country get together for three days to compare notes. This year the Shared Kitchen Summit was in Providence, and CCK was on the program.
Built to last
Our breakout session, Built to Last: Designing Operational SOPs That Improve Retention and Run Your Kitchen Consistently, was a joint one with Liz Buxton, Director of Operations at the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center. The premise is simple: a kitchen with sixty-plus members only works when the rules are clear enough to follow, fair enough to enforce, and written down somewhere the members can actually find them.
We walked through the systems we use every day at 9580 Main — the onboarding and offboarding checklists, how we navigate New York State licensing for new members, and the two tools we built because we kept answering the same questions: the License Finder, which tells a new food business which NYS license actually applies to them, and the Recipe Check, which screens a recipe for whether it needs a scheduled process review before it can be sold.
The best SOP is the one a brand-new member can follow at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday without calling anyone.From the session
Two more Golden Whisk nominations
The Summit is also where the Golden Whisk Awards are presented — the shared-kitchen industry's own awards. CCK was nominated in two categories this year, Shared Kitchen of the Year and the Innovative Marketing Award, which brings us to four nominations across 2025 and 2026. We're a three-year-old kitchen in a converted cafeteria in Clarence, so being on that list twice in a row is something our members should take a lot of the credit for.
Four Golden Whisk nominations in two years
- 26Shared Kitchen of the Year — nominee
- 26Innovative Marketing Award — nominee
- 25Two nominations in the 2025 cycle
- 26Breakout presenter, Built to Last (with Liz Buxton, Western MA Food Processing Center)
If you run a food business and want to see the tools we talked about, they're free and live on our Resources & Guidance page. No email required.
Sources: 2026 Summit agenda · Golden Whisk Awards