Rising to the Challenge: Incubator Looks to Help Women Immigrants Start Their Own Food BusinessHot Bread Kitchen's baking has fueled a game-changing food incubator.

Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez spent much of her career in NGOs, and learned that the food industry held manyopportunitiesfor low-income immigrant women -- if only they knew how to break in. So in 2007, she found a way to open those doors: She'd bake bread.

She createdHot Bread Kitchen, a nonprofit that sells its bread across New York City, and the nation via its website. Proceeds would fund a Bakers-in-Training program, to teach these women how to make artisan bread, as well asjob skillslike English and math. The product took off at retailers like Whole Foods and Dean & DeLuca, and many of the program's 191 women have been hired by New York institutions like Eataly and Zaro's Bakery. "Somebody told me that not a piece of artisan bread is consumed in New York City that hasn't been touched by Hot Bread Kitchen," the CEO says.

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