For nearly four years, I’ve profiled several south suburban small-business owners in this column. With the COVID-19 pandemic still claiming lives and livelihoods, here is a look at how one of those businesses has been affected in the sixth of an intermittent column series.

Food service industry veteran Fershawnda Green’s Park Forest-based Poppin Plates enterprise was barely a year old when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

But despite the challenge, Green has persevered, assisted other entrepreneurs and is now expanding.

Poppin Plates is a culinary incubator that provides licensed commercial shared kitchen space to help home-based and other emerging food service businesses move to the next level. Its grand opening was in March 2019. A year later, Green found herself worried about the fate of her company, which offers monthly memberships and hourly rates to give aspiring entrepreneurs access to 950 square feet of kitchen space seven days a week.

“Initially my concern was how was I going to pay my bills, how was I going to keep the kitchen afloat,” she said. “In March, when everything shut down, everybody started calling and canceling hours that they had booked for the kitchen.”

Demand for their catering services had dwindled, and they lost their contracts.

“Then by April when we knew that this wasn’t going to be a short-term thing, people started pulling out of the kitchen because they couldn’t afford it,” Green said.

Before the pandemic, her incubator had 15 members.

“It dropped down to two members,” she said.

Green has more than 20 years of experience in the industry, including running her own catering business, serving as manager and general manager at Chicago-area restaurants and as a chef’s assistant at Norwegian Cruise Line. She said her catering background proved extremely beneficial during the pandemic.

“With me being a chef, I was able to pivot directly into catering with food service contracts,” she said.

She landed business at Advocate Trinity Hospital, Advocate South Suburban Hospital and two nursing homes.

“That really helped me out during the crunch of the pandemic,” she said.’

The nursing home contracts came about through networking connections with food service directors.

“They called me to find out if our kitchen was still up and running and said can you cater for 750 people for three meals a day, Green said. “I’m like ‘sure I can,’ and that turned everything around for me.”

Catering contracts enabled her to help other entrepreneurs, whom she contracted with to assist her in fulfilling the meal preparation contracts, she said.

“I was able to bring in some members that had not been able to work,” she said. “They were a big support.”

Among them was DeEbonique Rials, owner of Yummy Treasures Meal Prep in Park Forest, which initially launched as a home-based business. The pandemic delivered a blow to Rials’ family and her business. Her dad, who was her head chef, died of COVID-19, and the pandemic caused business to drop off and become sporadic, she said. Uncertainty over what her business volume would be and fears of COVID-19 prompted Rials not to renew her membership contract with Poppin Plates.

“At that point, there was no money coming in” Rials said. “I wasn’t leaving the house to do anything other than shop for myself. When she called, it was helpful for my pocket and it allowed me to let go of the fear that I was experiencing with being outside.”

Green has four independent contractors working with her, and over the past year that number has spiked to as high as 25, she said.

Her membership numbers are back up. She has provided kitchen space for 25 businesses year to date and hopes to help a grand total of 50 businesses over the year, she said.

She is expanding Poppin Plates thanks to a $50,000 grant from the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association.

The grant funds are part of a $500,000 grant the association received from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for the South Suburban Economic Growth Initiative. The initiative is a collaborative effort to strengthen businesses and communities in the south suburbs with a focus on strengthening south suburban participation in growth sectors and a focus on small business owners, including minority-owned and women-owned businesses.

Green is one of 10 organizations out of roughly 60 that applied to receive a grant, said Kristi DeLaurentiis, executive director of the association. Green is using the grant to expand the incubator program to include another 3,300 square feet of space adjacent to her present site at 64 Lester Road, which she leases from the village of Park Forest.

According to the grant, she will use the additional space to create a food manufacturing center to support minority owned food and beverage business owners. The center will be a site for co-packing, production and research and development.

The grant funds will enable her to develop a pilot program to support two minority owned businesses from the stages of R&D, through processing, packaging to bringing the products to market. Startups will have access to incubator space, capital, skilled workforce and regulatory training, Green said in the grant proposal.

She is working in partnership with the Illinois Small Business Development Center at the growth initiative. The center is a good fit with what she was already doing, she said. DeLaurentiis echoed that sentiment in explaining the association’s grant award decision.

“Expanding into a larger location that could serve more startup businesses made a lot of sense particularly because the south suburbs are already strong in food manufacturing,” DeLaurentiis said. “We wanted to have a complementary program that would help fledgling businesses get off the ground.”

Green has another project on her agenda, providing space for pop-up restaurants to lease.

“If you’re a chef or run a catering company, and your goal is to open your own restaurant, you can come here,” she said. “I have the dining space and kitchen space, so you will be able to run your restaurant whether it be a day, a weekend or a month. You can find out if this is what you want to do” before making a big investment in a restaurant venture, she stressed.

Green loves being an entrepreneur, and the pandemic never caused her to second guess pursuing entrepreneurship.

Last year, her revenues nearly tripled from $85,000 in 2019 to $240,000, and this year she’s hoping to do at least $325,000, she said.

“I am not going back to work for anybody else,” she said. “Even when it got scary, that just wasn’t an option for me. I don’t care if I have to sell salads. I don’t care what I have to do. I thought, we are going to make this work.”

Francine Knowles is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown

fknowles.writer @gmail.com