Update: The Hive is Buzzing!

For a tourist town like Nantucket, the seasonal cycle can feel Sisyphean. Rolling from summer to winter to summer again is an uphill battle, especially in the food industry.

“This community is so seasonally driven, that we have folks who kill themselves in the summer to make enough to get through the winter,” said Karen Macumber, owner of the Nantucket Food Group and overseer of the island's newest sustainability venture, The Hive. “It’s not a particularly quality way of life; it impacts family, and we feel like we can break that cycle here.”

The Hive, Nantucket’s first and only shared kitchen facility, officially opened its doors in September of 2024. In its first few months, the project has brought in more than ten local makers and is on track for a busy, successful summer season, with several makers soon to join the space, once their applications are approved. 

The Hive and Nantucket Food Group offer six fully equipped professional kitchens — each specialized for slightly different use; state-of-the-art equipment including large-scale production technology; massive dry, cold, and freezer storage spaces. They’ve also been working on marketing projects for their members. 

Once the 2025 season starts, Karen hopes to hold events on the front porch space, events that her members are catering, pop-ups, tastings, and demonstrations in the demo kitchen.

“Anything we can do to give our members more exposure,” she said. During the off-season, The Hive team put together their takeout program, and put in high-tech cold and hot food lockers in the lobby of the Amelia street building.

Now, customers can order online from any of the members participating in the takeout program, based on their weekly menus, and pick up their meal no-contact, using a code. The food stays hot or cold in the temperature-controlled lockers until the customer can pick it up. The Hive’s management recently put together a cohesive online programming site, where customers can search all makers’ offerings for the week and order ahead of time. 

“If someone is catering in the summer, nothing’s to say they can’t be participating in a meal takeout program, making their best barbeque sauce into a product that we can package here and try to sell locally in the winter. There should be multiple ways to make money throughout the year in a way that will give them a better quality of life,” Karen said. 

“[And] It gives the local community the opportunity to have a new way of having food when all the restaurants are closed in the wintertime. Nothing against Stubby’s, but maybe something a step a little closer to restaurant-type food that someone can enjoy in their own home, and at the same time people support locals.”

Alongside the meal programs, which they hope to expand to a subscription service as they amass some regular diners, Karen and Tom Pearson have been working with makers to come up with plans for how business owners can use the space. In addition to being a home for small businesses like Noemi’s Dumplings, The Hive has also provided a space for caterers and an opportunity for private chefs who typically use home kitchens to expand and experiment. 

Chris Arms, owner of local catering company 8 Arms Chefs, has been using the space since November. He does private chef work, as well as catering, and cooks for The Hive’s takeout program. One of his weekly meal offerings is the fan-favorite roast chickens that Annye’s Whole Foods used to make just down Amelia street. 

“You have to have a commercial kitchen space to operate as a catering business. The private chef world is one way you can get around that, but once you get into doing it for public consumption, all the licensing comes into play,” Arms said. 

The process of getting licensing from the Health Department, finding a suitable kitchen and working through the paperwork while also trying to stay afloat as a business can be overwhelming, and sometimes fatal for small businesses, Karen said. Before moving to Nantucket, she worked in the Boston tech industry. On island, she started the Center for Entrepreneurship to help local businesses get started — of these, she realized, an astounding majority were food-related. Remain Nantucket had already been considering starting a shared kitchen facility, and once their visions aligned, the project began. Back in 2022, Remain bought the old Keeper’s restaurant building, and began renovations then.

Karen, who runs the Nantucket Food Group and oversees operations at The Hive, specializes in helping small business owners, or those who are curious about starting.

“Especially out here, where it’s always evolving as an island of food, this will be one of those places where people can come to enjoy or realize a dream,” Chris Arms said. 

Karen’s focus is giving chefs a facility to cater out of, or to create large batches of products, like salsas, sauces, or other original recipes that can be canned or bottled, packaged at The Hive in sustainable packaging, and sold wholesale to local businesses.

Tom, who has worked in local restaurants for years, is working on collaborating with local farmers to help with the cost, labor, and equipment towards packaging, storage, or whatever else small farms need to help with post-harvest processing, and maintaining a consistent year-round income. 

“It’s evolving almost every week; there’s always something different and new. It’s cool to be the grassroots of this place,” Chris said. “Every time I go in there, I see something new going on. It will be an ever-morphesizing kind of thing, which is cool because that’s the way food is.”