Canneries: How to Start a Community Cannery or Canning Center

Canneries: How to Start a Community Cannery or Canning Center

How to Start a Community Cannery or Canning Center

Canneries and canning centers are commercial (or county-run) facilities where you can take your fruit or vegetables and use their high grade commercial equipment to quickly and easily process your foods.  Below is an example of a budget from one community cannery.

I'm gathering information like this to help those interested in starting their own community cannery, so please write me, if you have any information.

And I have a complete list of local canneries and community kitchens on this page.

Cannery Costs:

• Portable canners that members can check out, cost about $800--not the kind of thing that individuals usually want to invest in, but great for a group.

• Fixed, larger canning equipment: no data yet.

• A typical small/medium commercial grade licensed kitchen is reported to cost about $50,000 to set up.

Cannery Regulations

Example: California Cannery Health and Safety Code

Starting a Cannery Guide

The West End Food Co-op of Toronto has developed a local Community Cannery program. They helped to produce a toolkit  to help other groups develop similar programs. 

Here is the Guide to Starting a Cannery.

At present, there appear to be no other resources at all to help startup canneries or community canning centers. Personally, I believe they will slowly make a comeback, as consumers are becoming more concerned about the safety of the food supply and health issues with commercial food products, as well as the persistent high inflation, especially in food costs.

Sample Cannery Annual Budget

From a Virginia cannery for 2006. The figures may be dated, but you can certainly adjust for inflation and scale them up. :

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