A Taste for Success

Photograph by Bill Graham

Millie’s Munchies started out in 1997 as a struggling baking enterprise run out of Loretta and Al Sharpe’s mobile home in The Plains, Ohio. Now, with the help of the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks, in nearby Athens, Millie’s Munchies generates about $75,000 in sales each year, and the Sharpes no longer need to draw welfare.

The Sharpes are among about 50 small-business owners who use the center’s 12,000-square-foot facility, which includes a kitchen, warehouse, offices, and a specialty-food retail shop.

The center, founded in 1985, provides the businesses access not only to commercial-size cooking and baking equipment, but also to training programs, marketing advice, and help in obtaining loans or venture-capital money.

The center, known as ACEnet, will also pair entrepreneurs with food scientists at Ohio State University, or help groups of small businesses share expenses by, for example, buying packaging items in bulk.

ACEnet aims to improve the economy of rural southeastern Ohio and the Appalachian regions of neighboring states by offering assistance and money to low-income entrepreneurs and to small businesses that may strengthen or revitalize a financially troubled area.

Along with its food-business program, the center focuses on helping new business owners in the technology industry.

The food program, which includes the kitchen incubator, receives part of its $485,000 annual budget from private foundations and local donors.

Nearly two-fifths of the organization’s budget comes from earned income, mostly through rental fees and sales from its retail shop, Marketplace Foods.

Here, Christine Hughes, who rents space from the center for her bakery business, works at the shop.