Beatty Development Partners with Foodshed
Beatty Development Group and Spike Gjerde and Corey Polyoka’s Foodshed have today announced a partnership formed with the ambitious goal of creating a neighborhood at Harbor Point committed to supporting farmers and growers throughout the Chesapeake region.
Foodshed, the development arm of the family of restaurants from Spike and Amy Gjerde and Corey Polyoka, builds hospitality projects with people who care about our food system. The team is committed to restoring and preserving Baltimore’s local food system by purchasing solely from the responsible producers of the Chesapeake. Baltimore-based Beatty Development Group and Foodshed will explore the idea of building upon this local sourcing model literally from the ground up at Harbor Point.
Beatty Development Group’s Harbor Point is Baltimore’s premiere waterfront development, located between Harbor East and Fell’s Point along the Inner Harbor. The 27-acre mixed-use project will contain three million square feet of office, retail, residential and hotel uses, as well as 9.5 acres of open space.
At Harbor Point, the Foodshed team will apply the principles and relationships that form the backbone of their restaurants. Spike and Corey have already played a key role behind the scenes at Beatty Development throughout the past year, developing their own projects, curating key tenants for long-term leases, scheduling food and beverage programming to activate the site and providing messaging and educational support about the importance of local purchasing.
Together, Beatty Development and Foodshed will attempt to answer hard questions about food and preservation when applied at a larger scale: What does it mean to build a neighborhood centered on agriculture and local sourcing? Can this model be replicated outside of the Foodshed restaurants and generate enough revenue to be successful in the long term? Could this become the model that other neighborhoods and whole cities use to move towards a healthier, more vibrant infrastructure that supports local food?
“Since opening Woodberry Kitchen 10 years ago, we’ve developed a viable model for how a region can feed itself in a way that supports local agriculture while moving away from the consequences of our industrial food system,” said Spike Gjerde, Chef and Co-Owner of Foodshed. “At Harbor Point, we’re building a community that will leverage the benefits of this approach and asking ‘Can we take what we’ve done in our restaurants and apply it to 3 million square feet?’”
“We feel like we have an excellent strategy in place, but this really is a grand experiment,” said Michael Beatty, President of Beatty Development Group. “To my knowledge, there is no other development project in the country that is making this kind of commitment to local sourcing. We’re excited about the potential this holds for the future of Baltimore and the larger Chesapeake region.”
“Rarely does the opportunity exist to think something through from the beginning,” added Corey Polyoka, Director of Operations and Co-Owner of Foodshed. “Often a developer has a building or a restauranteur has a concept; at Harbor Point we have the opportunity to create an environment that embraces what we’ve learned about how a direct sourcing restaurant needs to be physically built, the financials it requires and how guests want to experience it. Beatty Development has been willing to take that direction and apply it to their incredible real estate opportunity matched with their decades of building knowledge that will help the local sourcing ecology grow.”
The first Foodshed/Beatty Development venture set to open at Harbor Point is the Sandlot, an outdoor space that will utilize more than 12,000 square feet along the edge of Baltimore’s famed Inner Harbor by providing locally sourced food and drink, outdoor games, family-friendly areas and a pleasant park-like landscape. The Sandlot is slated to open April 2017. More information will be announced soon.
