Nimbus, a co-cooking infrastructure innovator, announces plans to open a new kitchen location in Chicago this May, marking its multi-market debut just months after doubling its New York City footprint. Founded in 2019 by Camilla Opperman Morse to address the shortage of viable commercial kitchens, Nimbus is on a mission to provide emerging, established, and enterprise food businesses with collaborative and flexible infrastructure to launch, grow, and thrive.
Nimbus’s Chicago location is at 820 North Orleans St in River North and spans over 19,000 square feet. Formerly a culinary school, Nimbus River North houses 17 kitchen units ranging from 400 to 1,600 square feet, 246 feet of commercial hoods outfitted with an array of premium equipment, and a large event space allowing for direct interaction between food business members and the surrounding community. The facility also features a suite of amenities that streamline food production and distribution, including a temperature-controlled room for precision food preparation, packing stations optimized for consumer packaged goods, expansive dry, cold, and frozen storage areas, on-site customer parking, a freight elevator, and a dedicated dispatch room for delivery orders.
“We’re thrilled to be opening these state-of-the-art facilities to a new cohort of chefs and operators in Chicago,” says Nimbus CEO and Founder, Camilla Opperman Morse. “We couldn’t think of a better city than Chicago — which is such a vibrant and innovative food hub — to mark our inaugural expansion beyond New York City.”
Nimbus’s flexible co-cooking format, which provides short- and long-term rentals of commercial kitchens and community event spaces, will provide flexibility and scalability to Chicago food businesses looking to produce and promote their products without committing to expensive and inflexible commercial leases.
“This expansion underscores our dedication to ensuring that premium kitchen spaces are accessible to all food businesses,” says Nimbus Director of Strategy and Operations, Romina Gupta. “At Nimbus, we’re dedicated to providing the infrastructure that allows culinary creativity to flourish.”
With its dynamic rental model, Nimbus caters to businesses across the food service industry and at all stages of growth, including catering concepts, meal prep companies, and chefs running recipe development. This approach stands in contrast to the relatively inflexible rental solutions offered by industry incumbents, which are tailored to established or enterprise delivery concepts only.
