Two Vineyard Haven business owners have announced plans to turn the Tisbury Farm Market into a commercial kitchen. 

Daniele Dominick, owner of the Scottish Bakehouse, and farmer Jefferson Munroe, who operates the Good Farm, purchased the former grocery store this month from Miles Jaffe and Sherif Nada for $390,000. An upstairs apartment will also be rented out. 

Since 2008 the building was run as a market by Elio Silva, who rented the building. Mr. Silva still operates Vineyard Grocer.  Ms. Dominick and Mr. Munroe are planning to convert the space into a commercial kitchen that they will share, and possibly rent out to other businesses. The open-floor plan kitchen will eventually accommodate three to four stations for different businesses.

Mr. Munroe will use the kitchen to package poultry and meat, and Ms. Dominick plans to move her catering and wholesale business to the kitchen.  The space, which is yet to be named, will advertise retail hours once a week or so, and in the future may increase its retail operations. 

“We're putting in a commercial kitchen, shoring up where it needs to be shored up, and slowly over the course of the years renovate the entire building,” Ms. Dominick said. “We'll do the necessities at first, get the kitchen to board of health approval level and that's it initially.”

Ms. Dominick and Mr. Munroe have been friends for six years, ever since Mr. Munroe started selling fresh chickens in the Scottish Bakehouse parking lot. Two years ago they began thinking about creating a pop-up restaurant together, but then decided to change directions and the plan to create a shared commercial kitchen space was formed.

Mr. Munroe will continue to process his chickens at the Tisbury Meadow Preserve but will use the kitchen for preparing cuts, both for poultry and pork. He currently uses Ms. Dominick's kitchen at night when it's not in use. With more access for processing, Mr. Munroe also plans to raise more chickens.

“My land access situation is amazing but it's not a very good spot to have a lot of traffic rolling through,” he said. “This is a much better location for this sort of thing.”

Mr. Munroe hopes to be distributing his Island-raised turkeys for Thanksgiving.

Ms. Dominick will move her wholesale business and catering operation to the kitchen as well. The space at the Scottish Bakehouse is “overloaded” right now, she said.

“By removing the catering out of my kitchen up there will relieve so much pressure in that kitchen,” Ms. Dominick said.

The two are also excited about the possibilities they can create for other small businesses just starting out.

“I think a lot of people who are food entrepreneurs on the Island, I feel like this would be an intermediary step for them,” Mr. Munroe said. “To go from throwing dinner parties for friends to I want my own catering company, there's a gap when you're going to want to try a space.”

Ms. Dominick said she routinely gets inquiries to use her kitchen space at the Scottish Bakehouse but has to turn people away. She said people are already expressing interest in using the new space.

“It's very exciting,” Ms. Dominick said. “It's really starting to sink in now that we can actually think about it.”