Jackson County Regional Food Center

About Jackson County Regional Food Center

The Jackson County Regional Food Center provides Appalachian Farmers and small businesses with an opportunity to tap a growing market with locally produced, value added products. The Center offers a central location in Eastern Kentucky where producers, businesses, and entrepreneurs can process a variety of products from hot sauces, to jams & jellies, to baked goods.

The Jackson County Regional Food Center provides a rentable facility for food entrepreneurs to develop recipes and produce value-added food products on a commercial scale.  The center also offers co-packing services, storage, and consulting services as needed by clients, including nutritional analysis.  The center is owned and run by Alternative Appalachian Agriculture of Jackson County, a Kentucky non-profit corporation.

The Jackson County Regional Food Center has a well-designed facility equipped with state of the art, high volume production equipment.  This lets customers efficiently and economically make any size quantity of their product, large or small from the preparation stage through filling and labeling the finished product.

Services include:

• Kitchen Use - Fully equipped licensed kitchen available for hourly rent
• Custom storage for food products – cooler, freezer, and dry storage available
• Recipe and product development
• Consulting to secure certified status for new recipes from the appropriate regulatory authorities
• Food packaging – both hot and cold
• Test batching and pH testing
• Professional labeling and product date coding
• Food safety training
• Bulk purchasing
• Co-Packing Services: we can manufacture and package foods or other products for our clients
• Flexible scheduling
• Honey extraction available to regional bee keepers
• Mobile poultry processing unit docking station
• Nutritional analysis and label development with partners at the University of Kentucky
• Business planning and marketing assistance with partners at the Kentucky Center for Ag & Rural Development