Jun 24, 2025
By Rick McNary
I first met Diane Kriwiel in 2007 when she, and her husband Mike, were preparing to go to Ethiopia to adopt a three-year-old and seven-year-old brother and sister from a refugee agency. At the time, they already had eight children, so it puzzled me as to why they would undertake the extraordinary effort and expense to adopt two more children. As if that wasn’t enough, they went back to Ethiopia in 2010 and adopted two more unrelated 3-year-olds. They now have 12 children: six biological and six adopted.
However, as I became acquainted with Diane, I understood why: she loves to take care of people, especially those who need a bit of extra help and support. Therefore, it made perfect sense to me when I heard she opened The Shared Kitchen in Wichita, a commercial kitchen designed to help small food businesses trying to get their start.
Through the years, she has managed to turn her love of serving and her delicious baking and cooking into a business. She’s an entrepreneur at heart and knows what it takes to run a successful business.
Diane understands the frustration of people wanting to create a business to sell food they make but who can’t afford the cost of a commercial kitchen and certainly not a brick and mortar. While the cottage laws in Kansas allow for some items like jams and jellies to be produced in a home kitchen, there are stricter requirements for food items such as salsa, pickles and frozen meals.
She built The Shared Kitchen in Wichita to help small food businesses solve that problem by leasing part or all the kitchen on an hourly basis.
“I know there are a lot of people like me who love to prepare delicious food and want to make a business out of it,” Diane says. “But they don’t want the added cost of building a commercial kitchen."
The ROI (return on investment) for small food businesses drops significantly when you figure in the cost of building and maintaining a commercial kitchen. With The Shared Kitchen, it is easier for a business to turn a profit quickly because the initial investment is not as high.
As with any commercial kitchen approved by the Kansas Department of Agriculture, each food business is required to file their own food safety plan and go through the proper procedures for labeling their food. The Kansas State University Value-Added/Product Development Lab helps small businesses follow the right procedures and meet all food safety requirements. The Kansas Department of Agriculture inspects and licenses each business in the kitchen with either a food establishment license or a food processing license. The kitchen itself is also licensed and inspected.
When I began working on the idea in 2011 of creating a practical, local food system that involved all three components of production, processing and distribution, I noticed a huge gap in the processing component.
Small meat processors were slowly disappearing, making it difficult for beef and pork producers to be able to sell their offerings directly to consumers and, for those who wanted to create value-added food items like salsa, pickles or frozen meals, they needed a commercial kitchen and those are still few and far between in Wichita and Kansas.
The Shared Kitchen is a critical component of the local food system for the Sedgwick County Harvest Hub and Diane has created the opportunity and assistance for small food businesses to have access 24/7. It can also be used for one-off events or fundraising or bulk meal preparation.
Diane knows what it’s like to take care of people. She has creatively discovered a way to use her compassion, a keen business mind and the heart of a teacher to help other food entrepreneurs get their start.
To learn more, or to reach Diane, visit The Shared Kitchen website.