Community kitchens in the pipeline

A Cork local authority is to become the first in the country to provide industrial-sized kitchens to help fledgling artisan food producers cook up more business.

Cork County Council is to build three 2,000sq ft (185sq m) kitchens, one each in North, South, and West Cork, and rent them out by the hour.

Ger Power, the council’s head of finance, said the local authority held talks with small-scale food producers and discovered they were being hampered because they did not have the capacity in a normal household kitchen to produce what they needed for markets.