Meet Marlo Bendon | Owner of Proud Mitten Shared Kitchen and Proud Mitten Culinary Concepts

We had the good fortune of connecting with Marlo Bendon and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Marlo, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
Culinary Concepts is an expanded facility adjacent to Proud Mitten Shared Kitchen. The Shared Kitchen facility has been successful with fostering food entrepreneurs that produce Made in Michigan food products. It elevates much risk when starting up and or growing from a very small to medium sized business. Many food businesses to not have the means to get started when they have to build out their own space. Thier focus should be on branding, marketing, mastering their food products and growing via sales. Proud Mitten Shared Kitchen helps clients jump in and start gaining traction in the SE Michigan food market.

Culinary Concepts is a very similar model. We are proud of our “Neighborhood Kitchen” that provides a beautiful teaching facility for like-minded culinarians, chefs, culinary students and more. There are seven full teaching stations for instructors, chefs, and culinary focused individuals to run their programs how they see fit. Culinary Concepts is a hub for culinary arts filling their students with learnings and delicious inspirations with cooking, baking, decorating and so much more! This enrichment space offers a collection of hands-on teaching programs. The chef instructors will host seasonal classes, events, individual custom classes to all ages and abilities.

We have such a lovely close community that wants to share in our motto” Gather, Enrich, Cook. To offer this space so chef instructors can get creative in what they bring to Plymouth without taking on the risk of having their own brick and mortar, while trying to be successful in their teachable offerings.
The collaboration of all the instructors presents a full menu of different programs to our students and attendees.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
My kitchens are very unique. We care about how a person launches and the steps they take to move forward in the Michigan Food Scene. We are there to help, and scale along with our food entrepreneurs and culinarians. We provide leads and introductions to many events and opportunities our clients can work with. It is just not a ordinary commercial kitchen.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I would like to dedicate my shout out to my food business clients and chefs at both of my locations. Everyone is a spoke of the wheel. We truly work well together. I believe we all want to watch each other grow and thrive. Without our open-door policy of being able to share ideas with one another we would not be where we are in the kitchens. We all mentor one another through our good days and bad days. Being open to lend a hand has always been part of what we do. Becoming a kitchen family has made it comfortable knowing we all have each other for support when we need.

I also want to give a shout out to The Plymouth Arts and Recreation Complex. This preserved building has been nothing short of amazing. The Preservationists that had a vision for PARC, have been important to our community and beyond. The staff at PARC are all part of where the building has progressed over the last few years. We are very grateful to be part of it!

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