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St. Paul food market helps people break into the food industry
The St. Paul market offers local, small-batch food. Many of the producers got their start with The Market Entry Fund.
ST PAUL, Minn. — Breaking into the food industry is a lot harder than just having a winning product. Nestled inside a quaint blue house on Saint Paul’s Grand Avenue is a world of opportunity for Minnesotans with culinary dreams.
The shelves in Seasoned Specialty Food Market are lined with products crafted by local, small-batch food producers. Many producers got their start with The Market Entry Fund.
Kayla Yang-Best founded the nonprofit in 2019, at a time when she noticed a lack of diversity in the field.
“We work to advance equity and inclusion in the local food supply chain. It was a very homogenous scene in the local food movement,” Yang-Best said. “It’s really hard to get into store shelves, it’s even harder if you’re a person of color. Cause you don’t necessarily have the interactions or the relationships to just call up and say, ‘Hey would you try my food? Can I get on your shelves?'”
The Market Entry Fund became a multi-purpose support system. There’s funding through a microgrants program, which distributes 10 grants of $5,000 each year.
“We also partner with them on finding the right technical and business solutions they need to start, but then also to scale later on in their business cycle,” Yang-Best said.
There’s also emotional support, which came just in time for Junita Flowers, the CEO of Junita’s Jar.
“There’s a lot of isolation that comes with being an entrepreneur,” Flowers said. “There’s even more isolation being a Black woman building a food business.”
Being a grantee from The Market Entry Fund and attached to Seasoned gave Junita a pipeline to build relationships and longevity.
“We would have our products sold here at Seasoned, but Kayla would offer opportunities for us to come in, have sort of tasting stations and so as customers are coming in throughout the community, we were able to meet customers, allow them to sample our products,” Flowers said.
And at Seasoned, entrepreneurs get a hundred percent of what the consumer pays for their product.
“So it’s just this wrap-around effect, where you buy something that you enjoy, but you’re actually investing in the community so that we all win,” Flowers said.
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MINNEAPOLIS — Editor’s Note: This video originally aired Sept. 25, 2024.
Halloween is approaching and it’s time to get scary at The Market at Malcolm Yards.
The Twin Cities Paranormal Society will read ghost stories on Sunday to get Minneapolis residents in the mood for spooky season. Guests are welcome to bring food and drinks from The Market into the event.
Thomas Troupe, the co-leader of the Twin Cities Paranormal Society, visited KARE 11 News at Noon to share more about the event.
Tickets are $15 and will grant listeners a 1.5-hour ghost story experience. There are two sessions Sunday night starting at 4 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Click here to purchase tickets.
Elections officials across the state are wrapping up mandatory testing of ballot tabulator machines.
BLAINE, Minn. — The third floor of this town’s city hall is off limits to the public, except when it comes to showing constituents the vote counting equipment is working.
Blaine City Clerk Cathy Sorensen Thursday hosted the public accuracy test for her city’s vote-counting machinery and invited news cameras to come along for the ride.
“The public accuracy test is a great way for anyone from the public to come in and just see for themselves that the machines are working how they are supposed to work,” Sorensen told KARE.
It’s more than just a show-and-tell event. The public accuracy test is part of state law. Every vote tabulating machine in the state has to be tested before each election, and those tests must be open to the public.
Sorensen’s staff had already tested all 32 of their vote scanners before Thursday but re-tested three of them to show the media how the process works. The exercise serves the dual purpose of ensuring accuracy and building public confidence in the integrity of the election system.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, who accompanied Sorensen for the accuracy test, said any machine that fails the exam can’t be used on Election Day.
“They try to trick the elections equipment, to make sure it’s up to snuff for Election Day,” Simon explained.
“They’ll do things like put stray marks on it, they’ll crease it or fold it, they’ll overvote or undervote, or do things they’re not supposed to do, all to try to trick the machine to see if it catches it.”
One of the ballots rejected by a tabulator in Blaine’s test had part of its unique location code scribbled over with ink. That code is designed to ensure the ballot came from the correct precinct.
“It’s a way to make sure that somebody doesn’t bring in a ballot, on their own on Election Day from home,” Sorensen explained.
“So, those ballots are printed and those sequence marks are unique for that precinct. It would be very difficult for somebody to know that code. The sample ballots you can print don’t have real codes on them.”
Under normal circumstances, the media can’t get anywhere close to the third floor where the tabulator machines are stored. It takes a special badge to get on the floor, and there’s a series of locks that can’t be opened with a master key.
It’s even tougher to access the secret location where absentee ballots are stored waiting to be counted.
“Even getting into the actual election cage there’s an old school padlock that only election officials have, and again it’s just one more layer to make sure we have that chain of custody and that confidence no one was able to access without one of us,” Sorensen said.
The machines themselves are also protected from online tampering.
“We have a rule in Minnesota; no connection to the Internet during voting hours, 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m,” Simon said.
“We have these public accuracy tests on the front end, and then remember on the back end we have good old-fashioned paper. We’re a paper ballot state. We don’t touch finger on a screen, we actually vote the old-fashioned way.”
Simon said those ballots are stored for two years and can be used to settle any challenges to the machine count.
“Could be a dry September to dry October, back to back,” Brennan Dettmann, a meteorologist at NWS Twin Cities, said.
CHANHASSEN, Minn. — Rain has been more than difficult to come by recently – it’s been almost nonexistent.
The National Weather Service Twin Cities reports that it has measured barely a trace of precipitation, marking another stretch of dry weather.
“Could be a dry September to dry October, back to back,” Brennan Dettmann, a meteorologist at NWS Twin Cities, said.
“There’s been periods of normalcy, but certainly has been a lot of record-setting conditions that we’ve seen this past year,” he continued.
This past year has seen many records added or broken. December to February was the warmest winter on record. March to May was the 10th warmest spring.
Last month was both the warmest and driest September ever in Minnesota.
Those trends also include a shift from the heavy rains we saw over the summer to dry conditions right now.
“We’re not alone in Minnesota and Wisconsin, but certainly, yeah, it has been a quick uptick from what it’s been from the spring and early part of the summer,” he said.
The U.S. Drought Monitor shows 97% of Minnesota under abnormally dry conditions.
That’s why NWS Twin Cities issued a red flag warning for nearly all of Minnesota Thursday.
“With the drought, you know, there hasn’t been any precipitation in a while, things are just generally dry,” Dettmann said. “So you get something to spark, it can very quickly spread with the aid of those gusty winds pushing in, you know, any fires that form. So that’s the main reason for having the red flag warning.”
If you’re looking for relief, don’t count on it coming anytime soon.
“Expecting it to stay dry into the end of October,” Dettmann said.
With little precipitation coming soon, expect to see these reminders of fire danger continue – whether there’s a warning or not.
“You’ll likely see that continue into the end of October and November, as long as there’s no major precipitation that falls during that time frame,” Dettmann said.
