La Cocina VA Is Driving a Remarkable New Model to Support Communities
Here’s why it matters for companies like Nestlé
by Alicia Enciso, Chief Marketing Officer at Nestlé USA
It’s hard to imagine a more ideal community partner for Nestlé than La Cocina VA, an Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit that provides culinary arts training to people who are unemployed. By providing skills training and job placement services, La Cocina VA is creating living wage opportunities for the unemployed in our community. And the meals students make as part of the training are donated to families in need — more than 21,000 people already have benefited.
La Cocina VA shares our commitment to developing talent and creating shared value. That’s why I’m so thrilled that our new Nestlé USA headquarters is launching a partnership with this incredible organization.
Our support will help La Cocina VA enhance its culinary training program, feed more people, and move the group out of the church basement where it now operates and into a new state-of-the-art facility. The move will triple the organization’s capacity and the number of people it trains.
Food is a major part of the workforce of the future.
La Cocina VA is providing students the skills they need to succeed in a huge and important sector of the economy: food. Food and beverage companies like ours collectively employ 1.46 million people in the U.S., with another nearly 15 million restaurant jobs (and 1.6 million more coming by 2027). La Cocina VA taps into this opportunity with training that spans culinary skills, professional development, English instruction and financial literacy.
The incredible, complex food world around us is changing fast, and the range of career paths in food is as varied as the employees themselves. New areas of work are arriving regularly, from advanced analytics to blockchain traceability. In the U.S., food companies spend $5.4 billion annually on research (with venture capital firms investing another $3 billion to fund innovations in food market and processing technologies). It’s an incredible time to be an innovator in the food world, whether you’re in our Nestlé Culinarium kitchens or just getting started in your own.
La Cocina VA doesn’t just train students to succeed in a growing sector, but also helps them find jobs. The organization has a 85% job placement rate, and graduates’ average hourly rate is double Virginia’s minimum wage.
