Designing Spaces and Places for Food Entrepreneurship in Copenhagen
Mia Maja Hansson started the Copenhagen Food Space, Street Food Around the Lakes, and Kitchen Collective. These are the spaces many food entrepreneurs use to get off the ground.
Mia Maja Hansson started the Copenhagen Food Space, Street Food Around the Lakes, and Kitchen Collective. These are the spaces and facilities that many Copenhagen-based food entrepreneurs use to get their businesses off the ground. In this episode, we discuss what each of these initiatives are, the history of food entrepreneurship in Copenhagen, and why it's such an interesting innovation climate.
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 0:52
Hi Mia Maja, and welcome to the show.
Mia Maja Hansson, Kitchen Collective 0:54
Hi, thanks for inviting me.
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 0:57
Of course! So, we like to kick off by asking everybody the same question, which is, when did you first realize, or was there a moment when you realized that you wanted to work within food?
Mia Maja Hansson, Kitchen Collective 1:07
I'm not sure there was a particular moment. The reason why I worked with food is because I'm madly in love with food. I basically live through food. Food is the reason why I wake up in the morning and food is my primary choice for everything. For meetings, social gatherings, everything. So, working with food is the most natural thing for me to do.
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 1:28
That's beautiful. And can you tell us what projects you are involved with and what your role is? So kind of who you are.
Mia Maja Hansson, Kitchen Collective 1:36
My name is Mia Maja. I worked within the food scene inof Copenhagen for the last five years as an entrepreneur. Basically, I'm the Founder, Co-Founder, initiator, entrepreneur of Kitchen Collective which is a shareable kitchen helping food entrepreneurs build up their businesses. I'm also part of a festival called Street Food Around the Lakes., I’m behind a food innovation house called Copenhagen Food Space, and a startup program called the Greater Copenhagen Startup Program.
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 2:15
Yeah, you're a busy lady. I know that. You have been around a long time in the scene and kind of saw it from the beginning. So, maybe you can give us a little bit of an idea of when you started these projects, what the community was like, the food tech community. I think it was around 2014 that you started these and then how it's grown today. What are the differences you've seen?
Mia Maja Hansson, Kitchen Collective 2:37
Yeah. So, when I started Kitchen Collective, I did it because I was missing something from the gastronomic landscape in Copenhagen. I saw from traveling around that the gastronomic scenes in other countries are very open. You can have gastronomic experiences in food courts, pop-up restaurants, and street food kitchens. And you didn't see that in Copenhagen five years ago. The only way to have a gastronomic experience was to go into a restaurant and sit down at a table. And I wanted to change this.
Mia Maja Hansson, Kitchen Collective 3:18
So, a lot of other initiatives are happened at this point. It was at this point that Copenhagen Street Food opened on the Paper Island, which became a very, very popular street food market in Copenhagen. And it was also at this point when the municipality of Copenhagen eased the regulation for selling food. It had actually been illegal in Denmark until 2008 to sell food on the street. So, it wasn't even possible. And from 2013 to 2014, they eased the regulation and made it possible to sell food on the street, actually for free. But where others were working with creating the urban environments that they wanted to see with food, I had the opposite approach. I went directly to the producers, the new entrepreneurs in this food field. My feeling was that they had ideas and a vision for a food scene that we couldn't even imagine. And instead of creating the food scene that they should work in, I just wanted to help these people and get them what they need in order to create this new food scene. And so I engaged with these new food entrepreneurs and then I realized that because food was about to move from the restaurants to the street or to an event format what people, or what food entrepreneurs, basically needed, was a kitchen. A certified kitchen because it's not allowed to sell food without preparing it in a certified kitchen.
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 4:58
Wow. And then that also evolved into the Copenhagen Food Space, right? Which is, maybe you can explain the split because they're kind of connected, but they're also their own separate entities if I'm understanding correctly.