An old Northwest Side factory that made an array of electronic products for the old Zenith Corp. soon will be the source of new food products.

The redevelopment of the 117,000-square-foot facility at 5801 W. Dickens Ave. in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood got the final financing it needed with a $4 million loan from JPMorgan Chase, channeled through the Chicago Community Loan Fund. All told, the project will cost about $25 million.

What is already under construction is a facility to be dubbed Amped Kitchens Chicago, which will offer dozens of kitchens, refrigeration, storage and similar resources to Chicago entrepreneurs ready to take their food concoctions to the commercialization stage.

The facility is the third for Los Angeles-based Amped Kitchens, which has opened two of them in its hometown. One of those was where Beyond Meat—currently one of the hottest U.S. stocks following its May 1 initial public offering—perfected its Beyond Burger. Will the next Beyond Burger come from Amped Kitchens Chicago?

The money from Chase is the first deployed from a $10 million loan fund the banking giant established in December to back retail revitalization efforts in South and West side neighborhoods not benefiting from prosperity in other parts of Chicago. Sourcing the projects receiving the financing is CCLF, and Chief Operating Officer Robert Tucker said the former Zenith facility was ideal for the first—and probably largest—loan from the pool.

“You’re taking an old and relatively abandoned TV factory and turning it into this huge community asset,” he said in an interview.

CCLF expects by the end of this year to commit the rest of the fund to smaller projects in neighborhoods including Austin and West Humboldt Park on the West Side and Bronzeville, Woodlawn and South Shore on the South Side, Tucker said. A “pure retail” project in Little Village on the Southwest Side is likely to be the next project financed, he said.

The fund is meant to provide a revolving pool of low-rate loans. As loans are repaid, the money is lent to other neighborhood developers.

Amped Kitchens is a special project, though. Founders Mott Smith and Brian Albert saw a need for a facility that could help fledgling food companies get their products onto store shelves once they’d generated interest from major distributors like Whole Foods. Many of them were unable to obtain the health and other permits they needed before seeing a dime of revenue in a process that frequently takes well over a year.

“They’d get a little traction, and the health and quality-control requirements they’d have to comply with to fill the first order would basically shut them down before they got started,” Smith said in an interview. “We wanted to provide a bridge from concept to scale.”

Amped Kitchens provides food-makers with already-permitted facilities. They lease the space and can immediately generate revenue from their products. As they grow, they graduate to their own facilities and other entrepreneurs take their place.

It’s not only entrepreneurs who use the kitchens in Los Angeles. Established food-makers also will lease space to test concepts before investing more heavily in them, Smith said.

Chase’s loan was the last piece in what Tucker termed “lasagna financing” (i.e., lots of layers) that’s making Amped Kitchens Chicago possible. CCLF also sourced new market tax credits, which the Treasury Department issues annually for economic development in underprivileged areas.

Both Tucker and Whitney Smith, Chase’s executive director for Midwest philanthropy, said the large size of the initial loan made sense given the multifaceted benefits of the development. It will create more than 200 jobs, it will offer the neighborhood greater access to fresh foods with a ground-floor retail component, and its impact will reach beyond Belmont Cragin. Food entrepreneurs from all over the city will have access.

“I think with the scale of this project, it makes sense,” Smith said.

Smith and Albert always planned on expanding outside of their Los Angeles base, and Chicago was in their sights as a major national food-products base. But then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office contacted them after seeing news of the opening of the Los Angeles facility in 2015. Smith credited the city’s outreach with making Chicago the first expansion city outside L.A. He also lauded 29th Ward Ald. Chris Taliaferro for shepherding the project.

To think it was only two years ago that another nearby building where Zenith once made TV sets caught fire several times, spurring open debate about razing that structure, as well as the one Amped Kitchens is redeveloping. Economic development in the neighborhoods? It’s not happening as fast as anyone would like. But it’s happening.

An earlier version incorrectly reported that the old Zenith factory that Amped Kitchens is redeveloping produced TV sets.