A Concord woman’s locally sourced meal-kit business will be allowed to move its production to the capital city after it received zoning board approval Wednesday.
Beth Richards, the owner of Local Baskit, said she’s outgrown the Meredith facility where her business produces about 100 meals a week. At her new location near North Main Street at The Concord Center, she hopes to expand the quantity and scope of her business, she said.
“We’re a very involved family and really committed to Concord, so it just feels very nice” to move production there, she said.
Local Baskit’s customers either pick up or receive through the mail a compostable box with recipes and the required ingredients. Among the ingredients, Richards said, are bacons and cheeses from Fox Country Smoke House in Canterbury, seafood from Sal’s Fresh Seafood in Meredith and organic vegetables from Vegetable Ranch in Warner.
“The space is going to be production in the morning – when I’m measuring out my soy sauce and my spices and things – and then the pickup location in the afternoon,” she said.
To get a start, Richards said her 6-month-old business used a commercial kitchen facility in Meredith that she said acted as a “bridge” until she could transition to Concord.
“They really helped kind of bootstrap me and get me going,” she said, adding that she “put a lot of miles on the car” traveling there from her home in Concord.
In her new location at 10 Ferry St., suite 120A, she said she hopes to expand her offerings, which are mostly purchased through subscriptions online.
She also plans to host lifestyle classes, for instance, on nutrition and cooking skills.
“It’s nothing that’s really ever been done before,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to put me into a category.”
As a retail operation in a district that doesn’t permit that use, Richards needed a variance from the zoning board, which was granted after a 20-minute discussion.
Chairman Chris Carley said the planners who outlawed retail uses there likely weren’t considering businesses that were mainly focused online.
“I think they were thinking of big box stores or even a small supermarket, but not something of this sort,” he said.
Richards said she hopes to move into the new location before the end of the year. She’ll look to hire two part-time employees, she said.
More information about the business is at localbaskit.com.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)