Cook! is young local company dedicated to bringing wholesome, delicious gourmet meals delivered to your home. Cook! makes simple meal kits that can be prepared in 20 minutes.

Cook! offers different meal plans including a detox program as well as gluten and dairy free meals.  The menu is filled with whole foods like quinoa, and veggies from – even organic grilled turkey breast and miso grilled salmon with soba noodles.

How does it work?

First, you select the Meal Plan that best suits your needs. Then, the meals arrive in a kit at your doorstep.  Finally, you take it home and cook up a gourmet feast in 20 minutes or less. Each kit contains pre-portioned, individually packaged ingredients and step-by-step cooking instructions. You simply follow along as you add each pre-measured ingredient. It’s like being an organic gourmet chef.  Visit their website at: www.cooksf.com

The Secret Force Behind Oakland’s Rise as an Artisanal-Food Incubator.      — By James O’Brien

“A small non-profit is turning Blue Bottle-like companies into the healthy heartbeat of Oakland”

For several years now, Oakland restaurateurs have been setting tables in great spaces all over town. But lately, artisan food manufacturers have also been clustering to the city like granola in honey.  Numi Tea and Blue Bottle Coffee were among the first, and recent arrivals include Hodo Soy Beanery, which is pushing fresh tofu, and Linden Street Brewery, which is helping to reanimate the Embarcadero. Many of these food-focused companies have been guided to profitability by a little-known nonprofit called Inner City Advisors (ICA).

ICA links promising small businesses on the verge of growth with grade-A local mentors, like former Scharffen Berger COO Jim Harris and several Clif Bar execs—people who have “been there, done that,” as ICA’s executive director, Jose Corona, puts it. The nonprofit’s portfolio includes software firms and toolmakers, but it’s increasingly dominated by dynamic food busi­nesses, such as Blue Bottle, Numi, Brown Sugar Kitchen, BTTR (pronounced “better”) Ventures, which grows mush­rooms, and Premier Organics, a maker of nut butters.

“They have a crystal ball for small businesses,” says Santiago Cuenca-Romero, president of Premier Organics. With ICA’s assistance, the company made key decisions, including which of its four founders should fill which leadership roles, and whether to develop a private label. Since hooking up with ICA, Premier Organics has added 20 new employees, raised its revenues above $3 million, and, after years in West Oakland, taken over part of the vacated Mother’s Cookies plant in East Oakland. In fact, the best news about ICA businesses is that in a city with 16 percent unemployment, they’re creating jobs in areas where they’re needed the most, such as East Oakland and over on the Emeryville border.

This year, in an environment where it’s nearly impossible for small businesses to pry loans out of banks, ICA is developing its own debt-equity fund and hopes to begin lending soon. For now, all ICA asks—insists on, really—is that the companies it helps agree to give something back to the community. That mandate hasn’t been a problem, says Corona. “We have some companies whose sole drive is to beautify their neighborhood—to plant trees, do volunteer days, or reinvest in some way.” That’s 21st-century Oakland for you: Even its food industry is cool.

To see the article on the San Francisco Magazine website, visit: http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/culinary-cabal

We are pleased to welcome these new companies to the ICA Portfolio!  

• Brown Sugar Kitchen
• Bttr Ventures
• D-Unique Tools
• Clinica la Luna e el Sol
• Prather Ranch Meat Co.

It’s a common lament among small companies: The amount and type of financing entrepreneurs are able to raise seldom match what they actually need.

That’s especially true for startups that may not be quite ready to put a multimillion-dollar venture capital investment to work. “Our companies are looking for $500,000 to $1.5 million,” says Jose Corona, executive director of Inner City Advisors, an Oakland (Calif.) nonprofit that helps prepare small companies to win equity investments. “But funds are making minimum investments of $2 million to $3 million.” Other small companies would prefer debt, but in the current credit environment, they’re considering selling equity.

Now Corona and two other advocates for inner-city and minority-owned companies are tackling that problem. In a terrible fund-raising climate, they want to launch investment vehicles that will provide small amounts of early-stage equity, later-stage financing, and, in some cases, debt. “These funds will help companies get the financing that is right for them and not get pigeonholed by the first people who are interested,” says Deborah Shufrin, a senior vice-president at the nonprofit Initiative for a Competitive Inner City in Boston, which works to promote inner-city economic growth.

Corona aims to raise $25 million. Eugene Todd, a former investment banker, has a target of $40 million. Both will make initial investments of $500,000 to $1.5 million, and both will rely on nonprofits to help them find high-growth entrepreneurs. Corona’s fund will work with Inner City Advisors, while Todd is partnering with Cleveland’s JumpStart. JumpStart mentors about 80 companies, most of them technology-related, but CEO Ray Leach says that only 8 to 10 of them will typically find financing in a year. That leaves plenty of promising candidates for Todd’s fund, like Cleveland’s M.O.M. Tools, developer of a manfacturing tool that lasts six times as long as its competitors’. “They’re in the process of raising capital,” Leach says, “and they’ve struggled.”

Tim Ferguson, founder of Next Street Financial, a Roxbury (Mass.) financial advisory firm, is taking a different approach with his $100 million fund, which will provide slightly larger companies with $2 million to $5 million in debt-based financing. “In this particular space, there’s less interest in equity because people don’t want to give up control,” Ferguson says. Next Street will manage Ferguson’s fund and advise its portfolio companies.

Todd is looking to large banks to invest in his fund. Because getting that money can involve up to a year of due diligence, he’s also approaching local and regional banks and corporations “who know us, think this is a good thing, and have seen us in the community.” Todd has raised $7 million and will begin investing once he reaches $10 million–by March, he hopes. Corona is first approaching high-net-worth individuals and may later pitch to pension funds, banks, and foundations.

Working against them all is the perception that funds backing a social good–in this case, boosting inner-city and minority-owned companies with the potential to create jobs–aren’t profit-focused. Explains Corona: “Once you say you’re a social fund, everyone jumps into thinking you’re wasting their money.” Instead, “We’re telling [investors] we’re looking at inner-city companies as an emerging asset class. It won’t be market-rate, but we’ll give a good return on investment and a great social return.”