The founder story

Sisters Eccie and Gini Newton know what it takes to run a food business in London.

Before Karma Kitchen, they built Karma Cans from scratch into a catering operation delivering over a thousand meals a day. The biggest obstacle they faced wasn't the food, the clients or the logistics. It was finding the right kitchen.

Quality commercial kitchen space in London was, in Eccie's words, completely impossible to find. There was no flexible, professional space that a growing food business could lease without committing to a decade-long tenancy and hundreds of thousands in fit-out costs. No co-working model for food businesses. Nothing built around the way food businesses actually operate.

What started as a solution to their own problem is now London's most serious commercial kitchen operation.

How

In 2018, Eccie and Gini took a light industrial warehouse and transformed it into a set of fully fitted commercial kitchen units, leased to other food businesses.

The idea was simple: provide the infrastructure that food businesses needed to grow, without the cost and complexity of building it themselves.

Eccie has written about the same decision from the other side of the table: should you build a kitchen or rent one?

Growth

Six sites, one major investment round, and eight years of growth.

2018 — First site opened in Hackney. The model proved itself immediately.

2020 — £252m Series A investment raised, one of the largest real estate investment rounds in the UK food sector. Wood Green site opened.

2023 — A landmark year. Sites trebled in size. Bermondsey and Crystal Palace opened, significantly expanding the portfolio's capacity and geographic reach across London.

2024 — Wimbledon opened, completing the current portfolio of six inner-London sites.

Investment

In 2020, Karma Kitchen raised £252m in Series A investment, one of the largest real estate investment rounds in the UK food sector.

The investment was structured to fund the acquisition, fit-out and management of kitchen sites across London and beyond.

More recently, Karma Kitchen secured backing from Crosstree Real Estate, one of the UK's leading specialist real estate investors. That investment confirmed what the founders had always believed: that the infrastructure food businesses need to grow deserves the same serious, long-term thinking as any other class of commercial real estate.

Team

Karma Kitchen has been built by people with deep roots in food, hospitality and property.

The team includes former operators from McDonald's, Azzuri Group, Ola, Hungry Group, Lightspeed and Sevenrooms — people who have run food businesses, managed large-scale catering operations and built commercial property portfolios. People who understand the operational realities of running a food business, not just the property side of it.

That combination is deliberate. A kitchen landlord who only understands property will build you a space. A team that understands food will build you a space that actually works for your operation.

Mission

Karma Kitchen exists because serious food businesses deserve serious production infrastructure.

Not a converted warehouse with a few ovens in it. Not a short-term licence that disappears when someone finds a better use for the space.

A properly built, properly managed, fully supported production environment that lets food businesses focus entirely on what they do best: making food.

Want to see what we've built?

Find your kitchen

Built by people who couldn't find the kitchen they needed