Mixing Up Detroit Youth Entrepreneurship

Small Batch Detroit is a youth-powered food business that offers real-world employment and career opportunities (starting at $12.50 per hour!) for Detroit Food Academy high school students and recent graduates. We are in the process of moving into our own production facility, and we are raising funds to purchase a 60 qt Hobart mixer that will allow us to scale our operations and service hundreds of retailers throughout the state with our signature product, Mitten Bites. The investment in the mixer will enable us to double our capacity and offer more high-paying jobs and leadership opportunities to our students.

Much love from all of us here at DFA. We could not do this work without your support.

You donate. Eastern Market matches. We buy a Hobart Mixer. Everyone gets Mitten Bites!

A landmark 2013 report by Measure for America found that in many areas of Detroit, over 30% of young Detroiters are neither working nor in school, the highest rate in the country. This rate is five or six times higher than in many of the surrounding suburbs. The cry for reconnecting our youth has been met with several national programs, which offer offer a mixture of vocational training, work experience, education, and youth development. DFA cooks with the same blend of ingredients, but we engage students while they are still in school, emphasize youth leadership, and surround them with supportive networks to ensure lasting success. Our place-based focus on social entrepreneurship contextualizes learning with real-world relevance. Rather than rely on didactic knowledge transfer, we call on more powerful motivators such as project ownership, peer acceptance, community connectivity, and earned wages to inspire disconnected youth to care and become change agents in their communities. AND IT WORKS! Students not only report better health outcomes and familiarity with cooking and nutrition, but they also report greater pride in being from the City of Detroit and greater hope in their futures and in their abilities to achieve the goals they set.



As these students grow as holistic leaders and activists, they become uniquely positioned to transform themselves, their peers, and their surroundings. We are so grateful to be a part of their journeys, and we hope you will join them too.