Culinary Arts Incubator

Culinary Arts Incubator "Kawin" is a program launched by the Culinary Arts Commission of the Ministry of Culture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in February 2022, to support chefs, entrepreneurs, innovators, male and female owners of innovative projects, investors, and those interested in the sector. It is part of the Quality of Life Program, one of the programs of Saudi Vision 2030.

The incubator offers a program to support entrepreneurs, chefs, and owners of innovative projects in the food and beverage sector to develop their ideas and grow their projects. The Incubator Program includes mentors, trainers, and expert chefs who provide consulting, guidance, and workshops in areas such as team building, branding design, marketing, packaging, pricing, sales and retail strategies, supply chain, food quality, safety, and more, targeting 150 participants in its first stage.

Furthermore, the incubator offers beneficiaries the chance to learn various culinary arts techniques, build comprehensive menus for each of the participating enterprises, and gain hands-on experience with international cuisines. It provides access to a competitive environment featuring local culinary talents and includes a fully equipped experimental kitchen for recipe development and testing. Participants can build and develop complete business enterprises, take part in specialized advisory and consultative sessions in entrepreneurship, and engage in a miniature practical experience to operate a restaurant and test recipes in a real-world setting.

The Culinary Arts Incubator offers space for entrepreneurs to develop their enterprises and products with state-of-the-art facilities, including a production kitchen, a bakery kitchen, and shared workspaces, to help them build and develop innovative culinary concepts and prototypes, test them, and evaluate their costs and market potential, and introduce them to potential investors and financial institutions at the end of the incubation period.

The Culinary Arts Commission aims, through the incubator, to invest in the creative national talents in the sector, provide investment opportunities for both male and female entrepreneurs in culinary arts, raise standards in the sector by developing high-potential startups, and enhance the culinary arts sector by attracting the best global practices in the cultural field.

The Culinary Arts Incubator Program consists of three main stages: the virtual competition stage, lasting three days, and involving the top 150 applicants who are then shortlisted to the top twenty-five participants qualified for the next stage.

Contestants then move to a five-day in-person training camp stage, where the twenty-five participants are further narrowed down to the top fifteen participants who move on to the final incubator stage, which is also in-person, lasting twenty-four weeks, and involves fifteen male and female entrepreneurs.

Participants are evaluated and ranked based on criteria such as the clarity and comprehensiveness of the presentation, business model, project concept distinction, revenue model strength, quality of the founding team, entrepreneurial mindset, and the direct relation between the project concept and Saudi cuisine.

The Culinary Arts Incubator targets chefs, entrepreneurs, and those interested in heritage restaurants, traditional eateries, contemporary Saudi restaurants, mobile food trucks, cloud kitchens, and food product owners.

The organizing committee of the Culinary Arts Incubator requires applicants to be nationals or residents of the Kingdom, at least twenty-one years old, interested in the culinary arts sector, and fully committed to attending the Culinary Arts Incubator Program for twenty-four consecutive weeks.