Rising to the Challenge: Incubator Looks to Help Women Immigrants Start Their Own Food Business

Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez spent much of her career in NGOs, and learned that the food industry held many opportunities for low-income immigrant women -- if only they knew how to break in. So in 2007, she found a way to open those doors: She’d bake bread.

She created , a nonprofit that sells its bread across New like English and math. The product took off at retailers like Whole Foods and Dean & DeLuca, and many of the program’s 191 women have been hired by New York institutions like Eataly and Zaro’s Bakery. “Somebody told me that not a piece of artisan bread is consumed in New York City that hasn’t been touched by Hot Bread Kitchen,” the CEO says.