SPOTLIGHT

FRESH CUT

Alamo Kitchens adds video production studio and embraces catering during COVID-19

MCDONALD’S FRENCH FRIES ARE FINE EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, BUT

Tracie Shelton wants families to know there are plenty of healthy options that taste great, too.

The founder of Alamo Kitchens, a shared-use commercial kitchen for entrepreneurs and caterers, Shelton describes herself as a self-taught “mama chef” who learned to make nutritious food out of necessity.

Her youngest, Theodore, was born with health challenges and initially referred from one doctor to the next, all of whom recommended medications. When the Air Force stationed Shelton’s husband at NATO in Brussels, the family settled into a slower, European lifestyle and for the first time heard from doctors that they should be looking at Theodore’s food as part of his medicine. “We were forced to think about what we put in our body, so I started cooking,” she says, adding that it helped that there weren’t fast food restaurants on every corner there. “I had to learn because I had this baby who needed me.”

The change made a difference in Theodore’s health, and in the family overall, she says. But it didn’t take long after they’d moved back to Texas for them to fall into old eating habits.

A business consultant, Shelton found herself working with food entrepreneurs in San Antonio who had great products but couldn’t sell them anywhere besides a farmer’s market because they weren’t being prepared in commercial kitchens. Shelton already had a desire to share what she’d learned about the power of healthy food so when she saw that others had a need for a commercial kitchen space, she went to work. She enrolled at Break Fast & Launch, a local culinary incubator program, and in 2018 won Launch SA’s Venture Challenge grant to help launch Alamo Kitchens. In 2019, its first full year in operation, the kitchen co-op served 40 different businesses.

Then COVID-19 hit and business for the chefs dropped to near zero.

Shelton dug into her reserves while applying for loans and grants and brainstorming ways to generate business for her fellow chefs. Over the summer, she launched an IFundWomen campaign to create a kitchen studio where the chefs can create how-to videos, host virtual cooking classes and more—all things they’ve seen demand for during the pandemic. For Shelton, who also serves on the Food Policy Council of San Antonio board, the studio gives her the chance to create healthy cooking videos for families that she plans to launch in January. She wants other parents to see that it’s possible to take fresh food from the ground to the table without professional cooking skills. alamokitchen.com—KP