Amplifier Hat – Local Food Economics

Food is the foundation of every supply chain—whether it’s carbon intensity, net-zero commitments, circular economies, or global trade. The reality is, we are out of time. We need a new model that prioritizes value and outcomes, not just volume and efficiency. This shift is critical to diversifying the supply chain, bringing new farmers into the industry, and ensuring that those who steward our land and food system are not left at the margins but positioned for long-term profitability and success.

– Vincent Peak, Share Farm

Amplifying Your Organization

Under the Founder Hat of this Toolkit, we discussed the values that led our advisors to begin food hub work, and how that informed the design of their hubs. Those values aren’t just important at an organization’s founding, and keeping mission and values front and center will inform how you expand your impact as your hub grows in maturity, sales, and resources.

Government Funding as an Amplifier

For example, ValleyHUB in Kalamazoo, Michigan has used government funding to grow their hub’s capacity to serve schools, a notoriously difficult and low margin customer segment especially when there is a commitment to fair pricing to the grower. Doing so, however, reflects a commitment to their mission and the impact they strive to make in their community. In advisor Elliott Smith’s words, “These food hubs are the only businesses standing on this saying: yes, we’re willing to do this in the hardest possible way. We won’t sacrifice the values these hard-working producers bring, and we will scale volume.”

Additional Values-Based Services

Many food hubs also live their values by engaging in work beyond sales. Foodshed is in San Diego, California, where real estate is at a premium, and are working to expand land access for themselves and their farmers. This work is connected to their producer network and supply since, in co-founder Kristin Kvernland’s words, “of our 35-40 core producers, only one of them owns their property. Everyone else is on a tenuous lease.” At the time of our interview, Foodshed was working to sign a lease with the city to have a workspace for the graduates of their farmer training program and was also engaging in advocacy for agricultural easement policy in San Diego.

In our interview with northeast hub Red Tomato, Angel Mendez and Marsha Minor distinguished between their food distribution, which focuses on wholesale grocers and operates more like a business, and what they called their programmatic work, which distributes smaller quantities to charitable food programs and operates more like a nonprofit. Getting local food into wholesale grocers meets the central aim of their mission, which is “more market access and fair prices” for local growers. Angel Mendez also described their knowledge sharing as a testing ground where they “explore, test, and refine new ways of doing business and try to bring that back into part of our day-to-day food distribution.” Red Tomato’s two mission-based approaches to supply chain development support and inform one another. As your hub grows and gains financial resilience, your lessons learned, infrastructure, and programming capacity can all contribute to broader food systems change.

Regional Food Policy

As a food hub operator, you can bring your expertise to other organizations and activists to advocate for policy change. In Vermont, for example, food hubs were an important part of the coalition that successfully organized for Universal School Meals and an incentive system for local food purchases at public schools.¹³⁰ If you don’t know where to start, see if there is a food policy council active near you.¹³¹ Food hub networks or communities of practice are another way to meet organizations and individuals working in the advocacy space. Findings from the 2021 National Food Hub Survey showed that hubs that participated in networks, on average, doubled their sales. The potential is higher to not only increase sales, but also to increase inventory and inventory diversity through the relationship-building each networked hub has with a region of farms.

Amplify Your Values

Grow New Farmers

According to a 2013 article published by Agricultural Marketing Services,¹³² over 81% of foods hubs had some focus on increasing opportunities for local farms and allowing smaller producers to aggregate produce to service larger buyers. Seventy-six percent of food hubs worked almost exclusively with small-to-mid-sized growers. The support of food hubs to grow farmers in turn supports further food system infrastructure, which can mean improved operations [trucks, refrigeration units or warehouse space] across a regional value chain.¹³³

A great example is the Eastern Food Hub Collaborative (EFC). EFC is a growing network of food hubs working together to build cooperative and resilient regional food systems in the Eastern United States. The EFC operates as a high trust community of practice, creating peer learning spaces, developing shared strategies, and facilitating trade between food hubs. The network is made up of food hubs spanning the Eastern United States, connecting more than 1,400 local growers with over $52M in market opportunities. The network convenes and organizes member hubs around shared values including love of community, transparency, sustainable and values-based agriculture, food access, product freshness and quality, fair prices to farmers, and food hub viability.

Branding as Consumer Education

Red Tomato notes that the development of a strong marketing presence has been a huge way to strengthen their brand presence and educate consumers about the hub’s mission. Through their marketing, they spend a lot of time getting people to understand their brand and getting people to understand why they prioritize local farmers. By doing this, they attract consumers that care deeply about similar values, who want to support and sustain local food systems. Read more about The Role of Food Hubs in Local Food Marketing in this USDA Rural Development report.¹³⁴

Farmworkers are Part of Your Value Chain

As your farmer relationships increase, both in sales on the hub side and production on the farm side, farmworkers play an essential role in getting product from the field to your hub. Red Tomato works to train employees, impose sustainable agriculture practices, and enforce food safety standards.¹³⁵ These trainings and protocols work to support safe working conditions for both hub staff and farmworkers. In addition, your supplier farms can ensure a strong and well-trained workforce by working with organizations like the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs (AFOP) and the National Center for Farmworker Health. They have been advocates for farmworkers in the United States since the 1970s. Training, education, and support for farmworkers ensures your value chain is strong from farm to hub.

Amplify Resilience

Documenting operating procedures and cross-training for redundancy isn’t just important for non- management positions. Food hubs also benefit from transparency about the roles and decisions of their leaders.¹³⁶ This is especially true since many food hubs, like other nonprofits, center around one or two passionate founders who have been with the organization since the beginning. For food hubs to have longevity, they need to be able to transition to new leadership when the founder steps down.

Transparency and Transition in Leadership

Angel Mendez is the current Executive Director at Red Tomato, a food hub in the Northeast. He started at Red Tomato as a warehouse manager over 20 years ago, working under founder Michael Rozyne, and has remained at Red Tomato through multiple leadership transitions. The Wallace Center launched a three-part webinar series ‘Innovations in Leadership’ that explores leadership under the topics of emerging, shifting leadership, and network/system leadership. Listen to Michael Rozyne speak about Red Tomato’s transition process from his founding leadership to former director Laura Edwards-Orr.

Now at Red Tomato, Angel Mendez transitioned from key staff to the Executive Director role. Angel Mendez emphasizes transparency both to his staff and to the Board of Trustees. In Angel Mendez’s words, “Nobody’s in the dark.” He feels that “candidness provides a real strong efficacy because it avoids assumptions.” They engage all players in their strategic planning efforts, and they report their progress on each of their strategic goals to the board every month to “continue looking at what we said we signed up to do and where we’re going.”

You can check out more on food systems leadership transition at this article from the Food Systems Leadership Network (you will need a free login to view) and find great information in the additional considerations section of Running A Food Hub: A Business Operations Guide Volume 2¹³⁷

Amplify Your Partnerships

Under the Supply Chain Builder, we learned how food hub networks can help increase markets and support for farmers, buyers, and the hubs that support them. And under the Resilience Advisor, we sought to understand how to strengthen those networks to build a resilient food system. Hubs across the nation are proving their value as a venue for information sharing, professional development, and reaching economies of scale. Now in continuing to amplify our relationships, partnerships, and networks, we can advance the field of local and regional agriculture and together build out the impact of food hubs on the food system.

Advance the Field

The National Food Systems Leadership Network (NFSLN)¹³⁸ Communities of Practice¹³⁹ work in tandem to develop networks and build competencies within food system organizations. The NFSLN, founded by the Wallace Center, aims to build up leaders across levels and geographic locations of the food system though a shared vision. They encourage food systems leaders to work more efficiently, access existing resources, and implement new practices to their work. These Communities of Practice (CoP) bring people with a shared interest together to connect, grow, and problem solve. The current CoPs being offered are Food Safety and Quality,¹⁴⁰ Value Chain Coordination,¹⁴¹ Network Stewards, Farm to Food Assistance, and Community Food Projects.

As of the writing of this toolkit, there is interest in the idea of a national food hub association to help operators connect. Advisor Elliott Smith from Kitchen Sync Strategies has started exploring what a food hub association might look like because he’s seen the value of cross-food-hub connections in action. In his words, “Yes, everybody’s different, and you’ve seen one food hub, you’ve seen one food hub, but like, everybody’s thinking about trucking, everybody’s worried about HR, everybody’s worried about staffing, everybody’s worried about weather. So having a space for those folks to share it would be—would be great, and we’re trying to do some of that.”

This kind of formal collaboration could grow into more expansive support for food hubs and food hub networks. For example, the National Coop Grocers Association provides members with services from start-up consultations, business planning support, advocacy, consumer education, administrative support, business technology, and collective purchasing.¹⁴²

You can hear more from the food hub operators on our Advisory Panel in Episod e IV of The Food Hub Podcast. The operators speak on farmer relationships, educational programs, developing a collaborative network and building demand.

Collaborating on Grants and Other Capital Stacking

As you well know, raising a variety of capital to support your hub is essential. But you don’t have to go it alone. One avenue of collaborative financing is to work with a regional or local fund that supports food and agriculture funding such as the HFFI Food Access and Retail Expansion Fund (HFFI FARE Fund).

Another channel for building capital to expand and strengthen your hub mission may be found in building a relationship with a local Development Finance Agency (DFA). Through various direct and indirect programming, DFA’s act as a conduit for channeling federal investments into local projects and businesses needing capital. At your local level, you may find activities of DFA’s named Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs), private lending agencies or Community Development Corporations (CDCs), or non-profit lending organizations. The Council for Development Finance Agencies (CDFA) developed a white paper on the topic of Food Systems and Access to Capital.¹⁴³ The landscape of federal investments available through DFA’s changes over time, across Administrations, so reaching out to your local DFAs is the best solution to understanding what financing and capital stacking products may be available in your region.

Collaborate with your State Department of Agriculture

Building a relationship with your state department of agriculture, demonstrating your hub’s ability to create market demand and support small, mid-size and other underserved producers, and partnering on the implementation of innovative projects, are all steppingstones to becoming a thought-partner on policy changes to increase the resilience of the local food system. Established relationshipsalso enable partners to act quickly during times of natural disaster or economic disruption, as was the case with the Iowa Department of Agriculture who partnered with Land Stewardship Alliance to award grants to farmers markets and food hubs working to connect Iowa consumers with local food during the COVID-19 pandemic.¹⁴⁴