Hello Edgeryders,
After the really lovely night yesterday at the first Culture Culture event i wanted to share with you an issue i have on one of my projects, and maybe look if in the Edgeryders community there are people or projects that maybe could connect to our story. In short: we have between 90 and 140m2 over in a durable food hub for fermentation or circular food related projects, and we need to fill it before september 
The long story:
In 2017 i opened a shop around fermentation called Fermenthings that evolved into a more education and production centered project that is taking around 600m2 in a 8000m2 space called Be-Here near Tour & Taxis
The plan is to open by september a total concept around fermentation (that can go from Beer, Cider, Natural wines to Miso, Kimchi, Hot Sauces, Bread or even Kombucha leather, vinegars or Bokachi): a space that welcomes professionals, hobby’ist and consumers of fermented products. For that we have three subparts in our space connected to three values:
An experience room / Education
We will give 50m2 to create a space where projects related to fermentation can give courses, workshops or tasting events. Where you can have access to the ever growing library and buy small batch products from our own production space or from local producers that also take part in the education part.
A test kitchen / Zero Waste
With the testkitchen, a 90 to 140m2 we want to give space to starting producers and our own experimentation to grow professional and test new products out. This strongly linked to a zero waste mentality (using the unsold products from the bio market next door, or looking at how the waste of one product can be fermented to become another product)
Fermenterie / Local
So when we opened our shop, we saw that there was still much improvement in the variety of products offered on the market linked to fermentation. So we decided to start with 90m2 for a fermenterie, where we first will produce Kombucha, but want to facilitate the production of different products on a long term. We want to localise the production of different kind of ferments so we don’t need to order from far away, what was the reality for a lot of the products we were having at the shop.
The challenge:
Well at the moment we have a group of people filling in the fermenterie and experience room already, but our test kitchen became a bit empty after one of the projects had to stop their activity for unknown time. So we are searching for project related to Food, zero waste, circular economy that want to share the space with us within this activity. From may till september we are already in the space creating it, so if anybody knows project that would be perfect for this kind of opportunity i would love to meet them. Time is a bit running out and we would love to find a solution for this. It’s a quit “total concept” in which we really believe, but need to grow our team in order to succeed in every part of it
Thanks for reading through, hope you found it interesting.
Have you spoken to ZeroWaste Belgium? What about the cooking collectives at La Serre, no one wants to take this on?