July 2, 2018. Neil Heinen shares excitement for developments in the Madison Public Market planning, highlighting incorporation of neighborhood and community input
WISC Editorial Agenda 2018: Madison’s Public Market
Category: In the News
Wisconsin State Journal: Know Your Madisonian: Former UW-Madison employee, longtime Public Market advocate sees project close to reality
May 11, 2018. For more than 20 years Anne Reynolds made a career out of assisting cooperatives from nationally recognized brands, such as Ocean Spray, as well as local outlets such as Willy Street Co-op.
Although she retired as executive director of UW-Madison’s Center for Cooperatives in January, Reynolds remains busy with her involvement in the Madison Public Market project. She leads the city’s Public Market Development Committee, which is guiding development of the $11.8 million project planned at the intersection of East Washington Avenue and North First Street.
Reynolds, 64, also sits on the board of directors for the Madison Public Market Foundation, which is conducting private fundraising for the project and was recently selected to be the market’s operator when it opens as early as 2020.
Wisconsin State Journal: Food Innovation Center can boost availability of local foods in region
September 24, 2017. If a vibrant Market Hall filled with vendors, events and music delivers the pizzazz to the Madison Public Market, the adjacent Food Innovation Center offers enormous potential to increase the availability of local foods throughout the region, supporters say.
The three-story, 15,000- square-foot food-processing facility and training center for food-based workers will be attached to the market.
The innovation center will include food processing and storage capacities to meet the needs of vendors in the market, but also include larger-scale food-processing opportunities focused on getting more local food to bigger buyers, city business manager Daniel Kennelly said.
Wisconsin State Journal: From momos to children’s books, cultural diversity at heart of Madison Public Market
September 24, 2017. Using her grandmother’s long-lost recipes, Singapore native Josey Chu spends more than eight hours making each batch of salty peanut myonya and other sauces.
Angel Torres and Leticia Flores, natives of Mexico, grow corn at a cooperative in Verona and use the grain to make organic tortillas at a community kitchen on the North Side, selling them at local farmers’ markets.
After her mother died from cancer, Madison native Jasmine Banks began to research the ingredients we put into our bodies and started making personal care products for herself and others and, with the encouragement of friends, now sells them on a small scale.
The city hopes these local entrepreneurs and 27 others will help forge the heart and soul of the coming, $14 million Madison Public Market.
Wisconsin State Journal: Meet the entrepreneurs being groomed for the Madison Public Market
September 24, 2017. If the 30 entrepreneurs in the Madison Public Market’s MarketReady program are any indication, the market will be a crossroads of cultural diversity.
The program is offering this group of local chefs, bakers, artisans and specialty retailers extra support as they prepare to grow their businesses into the market, which is expected to open in 2019 at the corner of East Washington Avenue and First Street.
Here’s a snapshot of each of the 30 entrepreneurs and their big — or small — ideas. Most of the photos were submitted by the entrepreneurs for MarketReady.
Cap Times: East Madison program behind Off the Block salsa looks to sell pizza at Public Market
July 31, 2017. Last year, a Madison summer program worked with teens to make frozen pizzas from scratch to help them build business and cooking skills.
Before the pizzas, Malia Green hadn’t had much experience cooking. She’d only really ever made boxed brownies and mac n’ cheese, she said.
But months spent perfecting the pizza dough gave her new skills, and now she’s excited about the program’s next step: A job program that includes expanding to a full-blown business operating out of Madison’s future Public Market.
“(That) would make me feel proud, because we started from what little we had and we’re starting to make it bigger,” she said.
The pizza project has been a cooperative effort between University of Wisconsin Extension, UW-Madison’s PEOPLE program and Mentoring Positives, a nonprofit in the Darbo-Worthington neighborhood that serves at-risk youth.
For years, Mentoring Positives has produced Off the Block salsa, now sold in Metcalfe’s Markets. It started as a fundraising effort and, as the name suggests, a way to keep kids off the streets.
It was originally made with tomatoes and peppers grown by neighborhood teens in a community garden, although it has since outsourced production.
Last summer, PEOPLE interns and three middle-school students at Mentoring Positives tackled a similar project by creating a recipe for pizza and writing a business plan to market it.
Will Green, Malia’s father and founder of Mentoring Positives, saw the pizza’s potential and Donale Richards, an intern with UW-Extension, stayed on through the school year to continue helping the middle school students perfect the recipe.
This summer, the project is funded by a SEED grant from the city of Madison, which will allow the same three students from last summer to create a “mini mass production” of 200 pizzas to help figure out cost models, Will Green said.
The pizzas will debut at the Peace Walk in the Darbo-Worthington neighborhood on Aug. 24, but the bigger vision is to bring the pizza and salsa to the Public Market and grocery stores like Metcalfe’s, Will Green said.
Wisconsin State Journal: MarketReady program offers aid to potential vendors of Public Market
May 17, 2017. The opening of the Madison Public Market is still more than two years away, but a program to encourage entrepreneurial minorities, veterans, low-income residents and LGBTQ people to be part of the market has been launched by the city.
Thirty people will be accepted into the MarketReady program that offers consulting services, referrals to financing, mentoring opportunities with other small business owners and micro-financing. Fifteen of the 30 members will also receive $3,500 grants to help with training and small start-up costs. At the end of the two-year program, five of those 15 will be awarded $14,000 toward building out their space at the market, planned for the corner of East Washington Avenue and First Street.
