#187 Something for Every Learner - Mike Gabel, Colorado State University, Food Innovation Center

This episode starts our tour of Colorado foodpreneurs and our guide is Mike Gabel of Colorado State University. Mike runs the Food Innovation Center at the Spur campus, a brand new campus located in downtown Denver. The vision began ten years ago with the idea of creating a campus that would be open to aspiring college students – K through 12th grade – to come and observe a day in the life of a veterinarian, a food scientist or a water conservationist. The three big areas of the campus are food and agriculture, human and animal health and water conservation. The buildings are open to the public and all programs are behind glass so the touring groups get a true behind-the-scenes look at each profession. This was an opportunity for Mike to create a Food Innovation Center closely based on Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center, directed by our host Sarah Masoni. The Spur’s FIC contains a commercial kitchen that serves as programming for the public, nutrition classes, events such as chef events, research and development and of course, product development for the foodpreneurs. Also, there are smaller labs; a meat lab and a dairy lab. Sarah Masoni has visited the CSU Spur campus and was incredibly impressed being able to watch veterinary operations in the animal science building and watching people learn to rice horses. Sarah was equally impressed with the architecture of the buildings, especially the water building. There is an historical link; the campus is positioned close to the Denver Stockyards where for a century people have come to buy and sell cattle and the stock show still is in existence. There are around 800,000 people attending this show and provide a perfect audience for Spur exposure to what food technology is being created in Colorado. Saying they “stole the idea from Oregon State”, Mike explains how the FIC utilizes expo events similar to OSU’s FIC events to network with makers to extol the virtues of the FIC and tout the impressive list of equipment, mentors, scientists and connections they provide to help the entrepreneur be successful with their dream. Their last expo showcased 19 different makers and different brands that could be sampled and special times set aside for distributors and buyers to mix and mingle. One of the more fascinating future foodpreneurs is McKay, an eleven (or twelve?) year old maker who is learning to balance school life while scaling a product she has been working on for the last couple of years. Launching an official partnership with Naturally Boulder, https://www.naturallyboulder.org/, has been a boon to pushing Spur’s mission. Naturally Boulder is an organization with a mission to bring together entrepreneurs, investors, brands, retailers and industry experts to make Colorado the best place to launch and scale natural products. This mutual networking and the ability to offer Spur’s huge vault of technical resources to NB’s expertise in regulation knowledge has paid great dividends. Spur’s campus is as open to the public as possible, and keycard access for the 24-hour entrepreneurs is part of that open policy. Many of the programs are bi-lingual, a reflection of the Spanish-speaking population of the area. And you can’t discuss Colorado’s famous foods without acknowledging it’s number one well-know product. Host Sarah Marshall did the research to discover it’s Rocky Mountain Oysters. For the uninitiated, tune in to the interview and find out the answer to this paradox. You can contact Mike at [email protected]. Find out more about CSU’s Spur campus at https://csuspur.org/. Our hosts: Twitter - @sarahmasoni and @spicymarshall, Instagram - @masoniandmarshall.