About Us
Catalyst Foods was founded to give growing food businesses a manufacturing partner with real industrial capacity and a genuine path in, built by people who have spent their careers in food production and culinary development.
Who Founded Catalyst Foods?
Catalyst Foods was founded by Jim Brooke and Chef Mark Riggs. Jim brings more than 30 years of experience building and leading food manufacturing companies. Mark brings deep culinary expertise, developing restaurant quality recipes that hold up in commercial production. Together they built a manufacturing partner for retailers, foodservice operators, and growing food brands.
Chef Mark Riggs, Co-Founder.
Mark leads culinary development, product innovation, and day to day kitchen operations at Catalyst Foods. His background is in developing restaurant quality recipes and adapting them for commercial scale production, work that sits at the center of how Catalyst Foods helps customers move from a working recipe to a manufacturable one.
Jim Brooke, Co-Founder.
Jim has spent more than 30 years building and leading food manufacturing companies. He directs Catalyst Foods' overall operations, customer partnerships, and strategic growth, and he stays personally involved with new customers from the first conversation.
Why Is It Called Catalyst Foods?
The name reflects the company's purpose: to be the catalyst that helps great food businesses grow. Whether that is an entrepreneur with a new idea, a regional brand ready to scale, or an established company looking for a better manufacturing partner, Catalyst Foods exists to accelerate that journey, not just manufacture the product.
We do more than produce food. We solve problems, remove barriers, and improve processes, so a good idea has a real path to becoming a successful product. When our customers grow, we grow. That is the role we try to play in every partnership, not just the name on the door.
Our Mission
Our mission is to help chefs and food professionals lower the cost and complexity of production, by taking on the laborious, time consuming work of food processing under USDA inspection, so they can spend their time on the parts of the business only they can do.
Work with Catalyst Foods, and the question stops being can we make enough. It starts being what should we make next.
Transparency
Pricing, certification status, and production capacity are things we discuss directly. If a certification is still in progress or an audit result is pending, we say so rather than staying vague.
Leadership
Jim Brooke brings more than 30 years of food manufacturing leadership, and Chef Mark Riggs brings hands on culinary expertise. Both stay personally involved in the business, not removed from it.
Innovation
Recipe development and food science consulting exist because scaling a product is a technical problem, not just a production one, and most good ideas need real problem solving to get there.
Collaboration and Teamwork
Recipe development, food science, and production planning happen together, not in separate silos. A chef's idea and an operator's production plan get built side by side from the start.
Accountability
When we commit to a production forecast or a reserved capacity schedule, we hold to it. Customers plan their own business around what we tell them, so we do not treat that commitment casually.
Commitment to Success
Our facility runs below its maximum output on purpose, so there is room to grow with customers rather than asking them to wait for capacity that was never planned for them.