Food production and commercial kitchen property loans

Ardent Capital Group brings the same method to every client: execution and strategy, clear advice for smart lending, and long-term growth. That means the right lender, structure and timing, straight advice so you borrow with confidence, and today's deal built toward where you want to be tomorrow. We are specialists in helping business owners secure finance to purchase their own property, and we understand the complex structures that often sit around it, including multiple trusts, holding companies and self-managed super funds. The risk is a lender reading the premises as a plain warehouse and missing what the cool rooms, processing floor and fit-out are genuinely worth, so we take your figures to desks comfortable with specialised sites and build the loan around how a working facility operates. We treat it as the start of a long relationship as the operation grows. Every figure is subject to serviceability, lender appetite and approval.

The building itself is standard commercial security, in the same bucket as a warehouse, a shop or an office, and it is valued on comparable sales and the rent the premises could command. That is quite different from a pub, a motel or a service station, where the lending gears lower because the asset is specialised. What makes a food production building its own piece of work is not the lending bucket. It is that the premises must be licensed for what you make, and that the fit-out is built into the fabric rather than sitting on top of it. Both of those are settled at the front of the deal, and the second one works in your favour.

A production facility or shed typically gears to around 80% as standard industrial security. Add residential or other business security and a cross-collateralised structure can reach up to 100% of the purchase price, subject to serviceability. Your exact number depends on your file, so talk to us.

A large part of it does, and it is well worth understanding. The test is fixture versus chattel. Chattels are not normally included in a mortgage valuation of real property, but fixtures are, and in a food production building most of the specialist work is a fixture. Coved skirting, food-grade wall and ceiling panel, graded and sealed floors, floor drainage and trapped gullies, wash-down surfaces, the grease arrestor and the extraction canopy with its ductwork are all built into the fabric of the building. They are part of the property being valued. Free-standing plant is the other side of the line: an oven, a mixer, a prover, a blast chiller or a packaging line can be unbolted and taken away, so it is a chattel and it is funded on its own facility. The practical result is that this is one of the few asset classes where a serious fit-out is not a write-off in the lender’s eyes, and we put that argument in the submission.

Yes to the first, and yes to the second, and it is a straightforward check rather than an obstacle. A food production premises is registered or licensed with the local council or the state food authority, and the classification depends on what you produce and who you supply. A building licensed for one food activity is not automatically licensed for another, so a former bakery is not automatically a ready meals facility, and a premises licensed for retail sale is not automatically licensed for wholesale supply. Lenders care because the value of the building to you depends on your right to produce in it. We confirm the licence, the classification and any change of use required before settlement rather than after, and where work is needed the cost and the timing go into the numbers before you exchange.

Trade waste is the water your facility discharges to the sewer, and a food production building needs consent from the water authority to discharge it. In practice that means a grease arrestor sized for the kitchen or the plant, a trade waste consent, and a discharge agreement with an ongoing charge attached to it. None of that stops a purchase. It is a known and checkable item, and the reason we raise it early is that the charge is a real cost line that belongs in the serviceability numbers we present to the lender. The grease arrestor itself is part of the building, so it sits inside the valuation rather than outside it.

Separately from the property, and that is deliberate. Free-standing plant is a chattel: an oven, a spiral mixer, a prover, a blast chiller, a packaging or filling line, a pallet wrapper or a forklift can be unbolted and moved, so a valuer does not count it in the value of the real property. The premises carry a property facility and the plant carries its own, usually a chattel mortgage. That keeps the property loan clean, usually improves the rate on it, and gets the whole facility funded rather than half of it. It is worth being precise about the line: a cool room built into the structure is part of the building, while a plug-in cabinet is not.

No, it is normal process and it is worth understanding rather than worrying about. Where a building has been purpose-built for one occupier, a valuer may report it at both its existing use value and its alternative use value, so the lender can see what the property is worth as the production facility it is and what it would be worth to a general industrial occupier. That is a valuer informing a credit team properly, not a valuer marking your building down. The more general-purpose the shell is, the closer the two figures sit. We know which lenders read this comfortably and which do not, and that is part of choosing where the file goes.

Yes, and it is the most common food production purchase we do. You already know exactly what the floor produces, the lender can see a proven operator in the premises, and the rent you stop paying to your landlord is added back when a lender tests whether you can service the loan. Your existing lease is also good evidence of what the property is worth to a tenant, which helps the valuation. If you have fitted the place out yourself, that work is a fixture in the building you are about to buy, and it should be in the valuation.

Four things do most of the work and they are easy to establish early. Three-phase power, because ovens, chillers and packaging equipment need it and retrofitting it is not cheap. The floor loading and the ceiling height, because they decide what plant you can stand on the slab and whether the extraction canopy and its ductwork will fit above it. The incoming water supply and the waste connection, because a production kitchen uses far more of both than a general warehouse. And the existing licence and trade waste consent, because they tell you what the building is already approved to do. None of these are obstacles. They are simply cheaper to know about at the offer stage than at settlement.

For a full-doc application, most lenders want two to three years of business financial statements and tax returns, personal tax returns for all guarantors, the contract of sale, the lease if you are buying the premises you occupy, and the food licence and trade waste consent for the site. Supply contracts with a supermarket, a distributor or a wholesale customer are worth naming, because contracted volume reads very differently to spot orders. Plenty of food producers do not fit a standard full-doc assessment neatly. Alt-doc and low-doc routes exist, supported by an accountant’s declaration, BAS lodgements and business bank statements, at a slightly higher rate. We work through your income situation upfront to identify the best approach.

Yes, it is possible, and we arrange these. An industrial building sits comfortably inside an SMSF purchase. It is also one of the more intricate purchases in commercial finance, and the detail is what decides whether it works. The fund borrows under a limited recourse borrowing arrangement, so the production facility sits in a separate holding trust and the lender can only come after that one property. From 10 August 2026 a new arrangement can only be used for business real property. A production facility trading wholly as a business qualifies, and it does not matter whether you or a tenant runs it. A site with a residence on the same title generally does not. Your operating company leases the facility back from the fund, in writing, at market rent supported by an independent appraisal, and the rent has to actually be paid. Cross-collateralisation is not available inside super, so the fund needs its own deposit and the 100% LVR structures described elsewhere on this page do not work here. Lenders cap SMSF lending below a standard purchase, generally between 65% and 80%, and want cash left in the fund after settlement. We know this sounds complicated. It is, and that is exactly why we do it every day. Reach out to our team and we will guide you through the entire process. We structure the finance, tell you which lenders will take a production facility as SMSF security and on what terms, and bring in the SMSF specialists and licensed advisers who set the fund side up. You will not be working it out on your own. Get that right and it is a solid, compliant structure.

Then there is no property for a lender to mortgage, and it becomes a different kind of loan. You are buying goodwill, plant, the fit-out and stock, along with the right to occupy under a lease, so the funding comes from your cash flow, from security you already hold, and from equipment finance over the plant. The loan term is also capped by the years left on the lease, so the more time your lease has to run, the longer the loan can be. It matters even more here, because the fit-out you pay for becomes part of the building, so agreeing the lease and make-good terms up front protects that spend, and we help you value what is fundable before you commit. We can arrange this, and we will tell you plainly which parts of it are fundable before you spend money on due diligence.

Often, yes. A decline usually means the file went to a lender whose appetite did not match it, not that the building is unfundable. The two common causes are a credit team treating a purpose-built food facility as a specialised trading asset when the building is standard industrial security, and a licensing or trade waste question raised at valuation rather than dealt with at the start. Both are fixable, and the second is a great deal easier to fix before it happens. Non-bank and specialist lenders assess this property differently and several publish an LVR the majors will not commit to in writing. We will give you a straight answer on whether it is fundable elsewhere.

Going direct means one lender’s appetite and one set of criteria. In food production the spread between lenders is unusually wide: the majors do not publish an owner-occupier commercial LVR at all, several non-banks publish 80% in their product guides, and lenders differ markedly in how they read a purpose-built facility and a valuation that carries both an existing-use and an alternative-use figure. A specialist broker knows which lenders are genuinely writing these buildings this quarter, and how to put the fixtures argument in front of the credit team properly. Presenting a food production facility to the wrong lender is how a fundable purchase gets declined.

Most of the time, no. We are paid a commission by the lender once your loan settles. Where a purchase requires significant preparation, a small mandate fee may apply, and we will always be upfront about this before work begins.

Although we are based in Sydney, we service clients across all major Australian cities, including Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Adelaide, Canberra and Hobart, along with their surrounding regional areas. Wherever your production facility is located, we can arrange your finance.

Although our main speciality is property loans for business owners, we also assist with food production line finance and working capital for food producers. On asset finance, that covers ovens, provers, spiral mixers, blast chillers, cool room plant, packaging and filling lines, forklifts, delivery vans and refrigerated vehicles. On working capital, we arrange business overdrafts, lines of credit and cash-flow funding to carry ingredient and packaging stock, to bridge the gap between supplying a customer and being paid, and to cover wages.

Yes. That is our core ethos, helping you understand the right strategy, structure and clear advice from the very first conversation. Our main borrower profiles are food producers and industrial owner-occupiers seeking finance from $100,000 upwards, and buying the facility you already produce in is very often a first commercial purchase, so it is well within our wheelhouse. We will walk you through what the building will actually value at, how much of your fit-out counts towards that, and the deposit you will genuinely need, before you commit to anything.