Startup Profile: Karma Kitchen

By Mirianna la Grasta | @mirilagrasta

Karma Kitchen is a London-based early-stage cloud kitchen startup. The company turns industrial spaces into commercial kitchens, co-working spaces and storage. They plan, build, equip and manage the spaces for each client, with everything from essential equipment to community managers and kitchen porters, offering solutions like shared kitchens, private kitchens and office desks. The company’s goal is to create workspaces that fulfil the wide range of needs that a food and drinks business might have.

The Story Behind Karma Kitchen

Karma Kitchen was founded in 2018 by Karma Cans co-founders and sisters Gini and Eccie Newton, who came up with the idea after building two kitchens for their lunch delivery company, which had been running since 2014. The two, who were working on making and delivering fresh healthy salads for London offices, understood the need for a kitchen space where businesses could get operations right from their early days, leaving founders with more time, space and finances to grow and transform their venture. Karma Kitchen was then born with the goal of allowing businesses like Karma Cans to scale and grow.

Karma Kitchen’s Clients And Services

Their shared kitchen space in east London is home to several companies, startups, virtual restaurants, and actual restaurants cooking their meals for delivery. Among their past customers are Island Poke, who have used the shared workspace as an offsite production kitchen, Neal’s Yard café 26 Grains, who needed a better place to produce fresh pastries and café delights, and nut butter startup Pip&Nut, who used the cloud kitchen for films and product shoots.

What Has Karma Kitchen Been Up To?

The company has so far raised £252 million in Series A funding from investors, which surpassed the £3 million Series A target that the Newton sisters initially set out to achieve. They now plan to use the funding to grow throughout Europe and open more sites across the UK. Karma Kitchen is also currently running a “Relief Programme” to help and support supermarkets, virtual delivery concepts and food-packing businesses during these uncertain times. For the programme, Karma Kitchen partners with hotels to provide an emergency kitchen to those companies working around the clock to produce and deliver food during the pandemic.