On any given day at A Prep Kitchen, a youth soccer team might be making tamales for their biggest fundraiser of the year. A church group could be setting up for a men’s breakfast. And somewhere in the mix, a first-time food entrepreneur is getting their permits sorted out with Donita’s help.
This is what a shared kitchen looks like when it breaks the mold.
Not Your Average Kitchen Rental
Donita and her daughter Christina run A Prep Kitchen as a women and family owned operation with one clear mission: help small food businesses become big ones. But from the moment someone walks through the door, it’s clear this isn’t a transactional relationship. Members don’t just get a key and a time slot. They get Donita and Christina.
She’ll help them navigate permits, figure out which health department or Department of Agriculture approvals they need, identify which farmers market is actually the right fit for their product, and map out the next right step for where they are right now. Sometimes that conversation leads somewhere unexpected, including the realization that a commissary business might not be the right path at all. Donita is fine with that outcome too. Helping someone make an informed decision either way is part of the service.
If a piece of equipment would make a member’s life easier and she comes across it, she’ll find a way to get it. The kitchen has added a dough sheeter for bakers, a steam kettle for sauce makers, and a flat top for those who need to grill, all in direct response to what members asked for.
The goal, as she puts it plainly: “We want to help a small business become a big business.”
From the Kitchen to the World: Real Success Stories
That hands-on approach has produced real results:
- Skewers Food Truck, an Armenian food business, grew out of the kitchen into its own brick-and-mortar restaurant in downtown Spokane.
- Hapa Hawaiian Food graduated from a small van to a fully self-contained food truck, popular enough that he no longer needs the kitchen, but sticks around anyway because the food still gets made there.
- BitByte Elixir, a locally sourced hot sauce company, expanded to the point of needing daily production and eventually moved into its own dedicated space.
- Kairos Meal Prep, which started as a two-person operation, weathered some hard stretches, found its footing, and is now the kitchen’s busiest client — in the space every single day.
- Wana Wilo Venezuelan food, who started as a small food stand and now have become a major player in the food scene doing pop-ups at other restaurants and markets and are working very hard towards getting a food truck. They’re almost there!
“The whole idea of our kitchen,” Donita says, “is to help you build and then say goodbye.”
But Donita doesn’t wait for members to find their own opportunities. She goes looking for them. She organized a restaurant week style event at a local business complex, five chefs, a full meal, fifty guests, live presentations about their food and their stories. She coordinated it, managed the logistics, and offered it to her members as a free service. No cut, no angle. Just an opportunity for the businesses she believes in to get in front of new people.
Too Much Demand = Build a 2nd Kitchen
A shared kitchen that actually works eventually runs into a good problem: too much demand. Clients were getting turned away.
Donita and Christina converted an attached conference room into a second kitchen. The two now operate side by side, separated by a single doorway, serving more businesses than the original space ever could. And the vision keeps expanding. Donita has her eye on converting the warehouse into an event space that kitchen members could use at an affordable rate for catered events, parties, and celebrations. Give food businesses a venue to grow into, help them land more work, and build an ecosystem where everyone wins. It would require grant funding, but the vision is clear.
A Kitchen That Belongs to the Community
Here’s where A Prep Kitchen really breaks the mold. Most shared kitchens rent space. This one gives back.
Nonprofits use the space at a discounted rate. The Spokane Valley Warriors, a youth soccer organization, has held their annual tamale fundraiser at the kitchen two years running, packing the space with kids, parents, and enough tamales to make it one of their biggest fundraisers yet. The kitchen has hosted kids cooking classes and adult cooking classes, a church men’s breakfast, and a local food bank and soup kitchen, Nourish that Donita has been helping get off the ground, including lending part of her walk-in cooler while the organization finds its footing.
And the next chapter is already taking shape. Donita envisions formal classes with guest speakers to walk members through financial basics, available funding programs, and building their online presence. The informal guidance she and Christina have always offered is becoming a curriculum. A Prep Kitchen isn’t just where Spokane’s food businesses get their start. It’s becoming where they learn how to last.
Christina puts it simply: “We’re women and family owned. And we support the community.”
She’s the tech-savvy half of the operation, the face many members know first, and the person who keeps the day-to-day running smoothly while Donita handles the relationships and the bigger picture. Together they’ve built something that functions less like a business and more like a community anchor, a place people return to, rely on, and send their friends.
The Software That Changed Everything
For the first year and a half after taking over A Prep Kitchen, Donita ran operations entirely by hand: printed client lists, manually tracked hours, and careful bookkeeping to make sure everyone was billed correctly.
When she switched to The Food Corridor, revenue grew. And the day-to-day got a lot lighter.
“Our kitchen operations are automated now,” she says. “All I’ve got to do is make sure I’ve got the right stuff charged to the client. Other than that, it’s making my life so much easier.”
The impact extended to members too. “The ease of booking made it a lot easier for everybody,” Donita says, “so they really enjoy that.” For a kitchen run by two people with no outside staff, that kind of efficiency isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s what makes the rest of it possible.
It’s All in the Family
When Christina got engaged, the question of who would cater the wedding had an obvious answer — or rather, several of them. Taste of Country Catering, one of the kitchen’s vendors, is handling the food. Skewers is making an appearance too.
For Donita, it’s not a perk. It’s a community.
“People don’t always understand,” she says, “that this kitchen is a total labor of love.”
Everything about A Prep Kitchen, the second kitchen, the education programs taking shape, the event space still being dreamed into existence, reflects that same energy. A genuine investment in the people who walk through the door and the community they feed.
Spokane has quietly become a serious food city, with a scene that’s growing fast and beginning to rival Seattle. What that kind of food culture requires, underneath all of it, is infrastructure. A place where the next idea can become a real business, and where the community shows up to make it happen.
A Prep Kitchen is that place. And it’s been breaking the mold since day one.
📍 A Prep Kitchen
Location: Spokane, Washington
Follow: @aprepkitchen on Instagram
