Thanksgiving, Christmas, even New Year’s Eve can be a bonanza for caterers and specialty food outlets – but only if they have the capacity to meet demand.
If a catering kitchen rental isn’t a part of your peak-season playbook, chances are good the holiday bonanza is going to pass you by. An answer is at hand – the Partake Collective locations in Long Beach and Glassell Park.
It is a rare bakery or specialty food outlet that has a kitchen capable of handling peak volumes of food four or five times that of a normal day – a viable business isn’t going to have that much extra space going to waste most of the year. On the other hand, limiting orders to what the small kitchen can handle means watching Thanksgiving or Christmas profits pass you by.
The same goes for caterers. More servers can be hired to handle multiple New Year’s Eve parties, for example, but there’s only one way to increase cooking capacity – rent a kitchen.
Finding the right kitchen for holiday surges is important to the bottom line as well. A prep kitchen might work for preparing canapes, but a commercial-style kitchen with multiple ovens and burners is necessary for a Thanksgiving dinner for 50 with all the trimmings.
Renting a kitchen, then leaving it idle, is almost as bad as having your own large kitchen sit silent for most of the year. The ability to rent space for the few hours or days necessary to handle the surge is key to optimizing the bottom line.
Partake Collective checks all those boxes. In Long Beach, there are 25 kitchens in several configurations, from bare bones prep areas to fully equipped hourly and commercial kitchens. There’s also plenty of food storage for both ingredients and finished products.
The central location in downtown Long Beach (456 Elm Ave.) makes it easy to get to just about everywhere – your store or the location for the big party. The four-story space is designed specifically for ease of moving raw ingredients and finished products.
Partake’s second location, 格拉斯尔公园, follows the same concept. The brand-new space is expected to fully open in time for the 2025 holiday season with 18 kitchens, food storage and other amenities. Its location (at Eagle Rock and Verdugo in northeast LA) is between the 2 and 5 freeways, again providing easy access to much of the Los Angeles area.
It Works
Meet Laurie Gray. For the last nine years, Laurie has worked to establish and build Laurie’s Pie Bar in Long Beach.
Laurie has had a brick-and-mortar store on Pine Ave. in downtown Long Beach for most of those nine years. A wide variety of fresh-baked pies come out of the store oven daily, and are sold, whole, by the slice and as Cutie Pies – single servings delivered in a jar.
Laurie has expanded to dessert catering for special occasions, corporate events and more. But whole pies for takeout remains her bread and butter, so to speak.
“We’ve grown a lot over the years,” Laurie said. “We are at the level now where we can’t keep up, especially during the holiday season… Our oven can only handle 30 pies at a time.”
All of the Pie Bar’s pies are made from scratch with fresh ingredients. That type of baking requires good timing, especially when you’re trying to get a large volume of the product done in a short time.
Thankful for Thanksgiving
What’s Thanksgiving dinner without pie for dessert? Incomplete. And that’s seen in a big way at Laurie’s Pie Bar.
“We’re up to orders for 1,000 pies in two days,” Laurie said. “Our oven holds 30. So now we use Partake’s high production kitchen. It has several ovens, a walk-in cooler… We have to get everything done in a couple of days, and this allows us to do it.”
Laurie said that in addition to the capacity to get all the pies done, the Partake kitchen saves money. The savings is in labor costs – bakers aren’t waiting around for one batch of pies to be done in order to put another batch in the oven.
Partake’s flexibility in scheduling kitchen use and the quick availability of the facility has made it easy to get holiday work done, Laurie said. As her catering business grows, she said she might start using Partake kitchens for that, as well.
Laurie added that she’s happy to be able to support a business that’s in the neighborhood, too. The Pie Bar is just a couple of blocks from Partake.
“I knew Adam (Carrillo, Partake’s President and CEO) before I opened the shop,” Laurie said. “I watched Partake get built. It’s a part of the community.”
Free tours are available by appointment at both Partake locations. For more information, go to partakecollective.com.
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