Reference

Food business glossary

Plain-language definitions of the licensing, kitchen-rental and food-safety terms that come up when you start a food business. 35 terms, each with a short answer you can cite.

B

Base of operation: The fixed, permitted kitchen a mobile or temporary food business works out of — where it preps and stores food, fills and empties tanks, washes equipment and disposes of waste. Often the reason a food truck rents a commissary.

C

Co-packer: A contract manufacturer that makes your product in its own licensed plant, to your recipe and under your brand. You stop renting time and start buying finished cases, usually against a minimum run size.
Commercial kitchen: A kitchen built and permitted for food made to sell rather than food made to eat at home: commercial-grade equipment, sanitizable surfaces, dedicated handwashing and warewashing, and inspection by the authority that issues its permit.
Commercial kitchen lease: A longer-term agreement for exclusive or near-exclusive use of a kitchen space, usually monthly with a fixed term. It is the far end of the scale from booking hours, and the point at which the space and its obligations become yours.
Commissary agreement: The written agreement between a kitchen operator and a renter: what time is booked, what may be stored, what equipment is included, who cleans what, how you are billed, and what happens if you cancel or cause damage.
Commissary kitchen: A licensed commercial kitchen that other food businesses rent time in — usually by the hour or in recurring blocks — and use as the permitted base where they cook, store product and clean up.
Community food centre: A neighbourhood place that puts food access next to cooking, growing and advocacy: a grocery program runs alongside community meals, kitchen classes and gardens, so people arrive for food and stay for everything built around it.
Community fridge: A publicly accessible refrigerator, usually on a sidewalk or in a shared lobby, that anyone can leave food in and anyone can take food from, with no registration, referral or means test.
Community kitchen: A kitchen in a community facility — a centre, church hall, legion, school or seniors’ club — used for programs, group cooking and community meals, and often rentable by the hour when its own programming is not using it.
Cottage food: An umbrella term for food made in a home kitchen and sold legally — usually limited to low-risk items that do not need refrigeration. It describes a category of rules rather than one rule: the limits differ province to province.

D

Dark day: A day or block when a kitchen is closed and its equipment sits idle — a restaurant’s Monday, a bakery’s afternoon, a hall between events. It is the capacity most kitchens rent out first, because it costs them nothing they were using.

F

Farm stand: A small sales point at or near the farm that grew the food — a roadside table, a shed with an honesty box, or a seasonal shop in a barn. It is the shortest route there is between a grower and a shopper, and it keeps its own hours rather than a market's.
Farmers market: A recurring market where producers and food makers sell directly to the public, usually under rules about how much of what is sold must be grown or made by the vendor. For many food businesses it is the first retail counter they ever have.
Food access: Whether the people who live somewhere can actually get enough suitable food at a price they can pay, without an unreasonable journey — a question about distance, cost, transport and dignity, not simply whether food exists nearby.
Food asset map: A map of the physical things a local food system runs on — kitchens, farms, markets, processors, distributors, grocers, food banks and community fridges — recorded with locations so they can be found, compared and planned around.
Food bank: A community organization that collects donated and purchased food and distributes it free to people who need it — some handing hampers directly to households, some operating as warehouses that supply smaller local agencies.
Food desert: A neighbourhood where reaching affordable, nutritious food is hard — usually because the nearest full grocer is far, transit is thin or a car is effectively required. There is no single agreed threshold, so the label depends on the definition in use.
Food handler certificate: Proof that a person has completed a recognized food-safety training course — handwashing, temperature control, cross-contamination and cleaning. It belongs to the person rather than the business, and some jurisdictions require it of the operator.
Food hub: An organization that aggregates, stores, lightly processes and distributes food from a group of local producers, giving small farms one route to buyers who would otherwise order in volumes no single farm can fill.
Food insecurity: Not having reliable access to enough safe, affordable food. Statistics Canada measures it in degrees — marginal, moderate and severe — from what households report about worrying, compromising on quality, skipping meals or going without.
Food premises permit: The document that lets a specific address operate as a food business. The names differ — Food Establishment Permit, Food Establishment Licence, MAPAQ permit — but it attaches to the premises and its operator, not to a recipe.
Food production: On Food Web's map, food production is the sector that grows, raises, catches or first processes food before it reaches a shelf: farms, orchards, apiaries, dairies, fisheries and the processors that turn a raw crop into an ingredient.
Food rescue: Collecting edible surplus food from farms, processors, grocers and restaurants before it is thrown away, and redirecting it to food banks, meal programs and other organisations that feed people.
Food value chain: The businesses and organisations that move food from production to the people who eat it (growers, processors, co-packers, storage, distributors, retailers and food service) together with the relationships that connect them.

G

Ghost kitchen: A food business that cooks only for delivery and pickup, with no dining room and no walk-in trade. Also called a dark kitchen, cloud kitchen or virtual restaurant — the storefront exists inside delivery apps rather than on a street.

H

HACCP: Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points: a written food-safety method that maps a product’s process, identifies where a hazard could enter, and sets a measurable control, limit, check and corrective action at each of those points.
Hourly kitchen rental: Paying for a commercial kitchen by the hour or in booked blocks rather than leasing it. You get the room and its equipment for a scheduled window; the operator keeps the permit, the utilities, the insurance on the building and the cleaning schedule.

K

Kitchen incubator: A shared commercial kitchen that adds business support to the rental — classes, workshops, coaching and mentoring, market access, sometimes co-packing — usually run by a non-profit, college or municipality with a mission rather than a margin.

L

Licensed kitchen: Shorthand for a kitchen holding the permit or licence its regulator requires for food made to sell. What that document is called, and who issues it, depends on where the kitchen is.

P

Prep kitchen: A permitted space used for the work that happens before service — chopping, portioning, marinating, baking off, packing — usually supporting a separate place where the food is finally sold or served.
Production kitchen: A kitchen built for volume output rather than service: batch cooking, packing and labelling the same items repeatedly to a schedule, usually for wholesale, retail or meal-prep customers rather than for people eating in the room.

R

Rental credits: A funded balance held against a renter’s account that pays for kitchen bookings, provided by a partner or program rather than by the renter. On Food Web, approved applicants receive credit applied directly to bookings at licensed kitchens.

S

Safe Food for Canadians licence: The federal food licence described by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Per the CFIA, it is required for importing, exporting, or preparing food that will be sent to a different province — not for trading food within your own.
Security deposit: Money a kitchen holds against damage or extra cleaning and returns when nothing is claimed. On Food Web it is a refundable hold on your card rather than a charge, released automatically unless a claim is filed and approved.
Shared-use kitchen: A licensed commercial kitchen used by several unrelated food businesses on a schedule — each renting time in the same room, with storage, equipment and cleaning shared under the operator’s rules.