Resilience Advisor Hat – Local Food Economics

We’re not a distributor; we’re a food hub. And that means that we need to ask for flexibility sometimes, but...we’re also able to give flexibility when it’s needed.

- Rachel Bair, ValleyHUB

Organizational Resilience

All food hubs, regardless of age or size, need to be able to move quickly to respond to new disruptions and opportunities. This nimbleness sets food hubs and other small distributors apart from broadliners that dominate the marketplace.

Food hubs can be attractive to both producers and buyers because they’re able to help sell bumper crops, or source local products when an event, like the COVID-19 pandemic, causes disruptions to national supply chains. Food hubs themselves also benefit from being able to seize opportunities when they arise, like new grant opportunities or small to midsize bids that are not sized for large commercial distributors.

Advanced Planning

Being nimble requires advanced planning. If a funder announces a new infrastructure grant, or a large customer offers capacity-building assistance, your hub will be prepared to jump on the opportunity. In New Venture Advisor’s Building Successful Food Hubs, having advanced planning documents in place for each segment of your operation reduces risk, develops a nimbleness and strengthens relationships with both funders and farmers.

Advanced planning can help weather disruptions or new market opportunities. Elliott Smith from Kitchen Sync Strategies recommends that his food hub clients keep “a wish list of the things that you know you need on hand so that when the next opportunity comes, you already know what you need, what it costs, and where you can find it.”

Strategic Planning

You may decide to formalize this kind of thinking with a strategic plan to help identify priorities and strategic filters ahead of time to inform quick decision-making in the moment. Many organizations engage outside consultants to help write a strategic plan if they have the resources to do so; however, many resources exist if your hub would like to start this process on your own, such as those shown below.

English

Food Resilience Toolkit written guide; Strategic Planning section begins on Page 39¹⁰⁵
Strategic planning instructional video¹⁰⁶

Spanish

Food Resilience toolkit written guide; Strategic planning section begins on page 43¹⁰⁷
Strategic planning instructional video¹⁰⁸

Also see the Common Market’s 2023-2024 Strategic Playbook: A Collaborative Approach to Resilient Farms and Socially Responsible Communities.¹⁰⁹

Value Chain Resilience

Value-chain resilience is the ability for a sector of an industry, such as a regional, statewide or national food system value chain, to react to unforeseen events effectively while sacrificing as little value as possible and then recovering quickly from these events or challenges. Often food systems value chain resilience can be achieved by improving farm to customer pipelines, strengthening and growing operations if possible, and as discussed earlier, setting up advanced plans that incorporate uncertainty and even crisis.

Resilience Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

This Fall we had our highest payroll, 60 employees. I should say our highest since the 2020 payroll when we went 10x higher than our average. That’s an example of resiliency, being able to have infrastructure with excess capacity and space for growth allowing us to literally do 10 times our normal volume over. It ended up only being 4 or 5 months of payroll, but being able to flex that big, being able to onboard over a hundred employees at that moment and hire a team to meet the demand for some of those programs is pretty crazy.

– Haile Johnston, Common Market

Food supply chains, big and small all underwent a test of their resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The impacts of the pandemic on food hubs were varied. Some, like The Common Market, grew drastically to meet increased demand for local food and to supply pandemic food relief projects. Other hubs laid off employees. The majority (63%) of respondents to the 2021 National Food Hub Survey reported that the price of sourcing products increased.¹¹⁰ Regardless of whether the pandemic resulted in business growth or business shrinkage, the need for adaptation was near universal and all but two respondents to the 2021 National Food Hub Survey reported making changes to their operations in response to the pandemic.

Across the field, local and regional food systems leaders, university researchers, and USDA came together to distill the lessons from the pandemic into the Local and Regional Food Systems Response to Covid, to help inform future disaster preparedness and response efforts.¹¹¹ The stories, case studies, and resources included in this resource can support your hub’s resilience planning. Additional resources are available on the COVID-19 Resource Hub on the Local Food Economics website.¹¹²

Operational Resilience

Hiring, Trainings, and Cross Training

The food hub world is still small, and it is likely that many of the people who apply to jobs at your hub will have little, if any, food distribution experience. This may not be a problem. While our interviewees talked about the importance of having access to others with experience through their professional networks, they also agreed that some of their best hires were new to the food hub world. In the words of Common Market co-founder Haile Johnston, “we’re much more interested in raw talent, commitment, interest, and working with somebody to build capacity to be successful over time.”

Applicants from other industries can also bring transferable knowledge and skills that expand your hub’s abilities and expertise. Rachel Bair from ValleyHUB emphasized the importance of looking for “relevant experience, but not necessarily and specifically food experience” for food hub professionals. She credited ValleyHUB’s successful expansion from 3 to 36 institutional customers over the course of one year to their hub-to-school outreach professional, who joined ValleyHUB after working for 17 years as a high school band director. His experience advocating for arts funding within the school system helped him make inroads with school foodservice directors. In Rachel’s words, “he’s learning the food system, but he knows the school system, and we didn’t even know we were missing that until we had it, and it works really well.” Expanding your perspective on what constitutes relevant experience and seeking out employees who bring transferable skills from other industries can diversify and grow the capacity of your hub.

Finding the right person for the job does not end with hiring. Rachel also discussed how ValleyHUB manages “the fit between the person and the job.” Individual job duties and individual skill sets change over time, and sometimes both productivity and worker happiness require flexibility. ValleyHUB will revisit their job structure and “rearrange the work so that the person who comes alive doing that work is the one who gets to do it most of the time.” By taking a people-first approach to divvying up tasks according to strengths and interest, ValleyHUB can minimize burnout even in a demanding industry. In Rachel’s words, “when the work is energizing to the person doing it, that’s the way you avoid burnout when the work is really hard.”

Once your hub is fully staffed, cross training to create strategic redundancies is another key strategy in building organizational resilience. In collaboration with Kalamazoo Valley Community College, ValleyHUB provides cross training essential to capacity building within their organization. One way that they do this is by regularly pulling different team members onto various projects on a roughly weekly basis and can get more people to contribute and deliberate how to go about completing the project at hand. We discussed cross-training in The Value Chain Builder Hat section and you can learn more about the use of SOP’s related to staffing and nimbleness in the next section.

You can also listen to Episode III of The Food Hub Podcast to hear from our Advisory Panel Operators on organizational hiring and team development.

Exploring Operational Plans and SOP’s

We also have training modules and SOPs for everything that we do. So, there is a lot of things I don’t know how to do in the organization, but I could plug in effectively by reading our SOP and watching a training video, and I’d at least have a sense of how not to mess it up. So, we have created a lot of institutional knowledge around our practices, our systems implementation.

– Haile Johnston, The Common Market

Stable, predictable operations are the foundation for quick action. Make sure you write an organization- wide Operations Plan. This will function as an outline and guide to the functional areas from aggregation [processing, packaging, storage] to distribution. The list of services below, will help guide the areas that fall under the Operations Plan. From the outline of your plan, you can then create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for each functional area of your food hub, to ensure that you and your staff understand how to respond quickly to new market opportunities, navigate changes in staffing, extreme weather, or other unforeseen events.¹¹³

Operational Services

Aggregation
Distribution
Brokering
Branding and market development
Packaging and repacking
Light processing (trimming, cutting, freezing)
Product storage

SOPs will also support your efforts to train and cross train your staff – ensuring your hub’s capacity for quick, nimble action. See sample SOPs from our advisors here.

Also see Running a Food Hub: A Business Operations Guide Volume 2 ‘Food Hub Operations’ chapter for more information on hub challenges, infrastructure, equipment, human resources, roles, and positions.¹¹⁴

Financial Resilience

You can build the financial resilience of your hub by developing varied income sources. Starting with your earned income – funds generated from the sales or distribution of local products – your data can help you identify strengths and challenges within your operation. A Managers Guide to Food Hub Finances – How to Evaluate and Improve Your Food Hub Operations from Iowa State contains instructions and a spreadsheet template to help analyze your data to inform strategic decision making.¹¹⁵

It is likely that you also have alternative income streams from grants, loans, lines of credit or other financial tools to help invest in your mission. Making sure that you have the right mix of funding mechanisms to support your current operations, as well as developing future funding pathways that reflect your strategic plan are major functions of the Resilience Advisor. The following resources, paired with your networks and a firm understanding of your financial data, can help you get there.

Resilient Partnerships

Throughout this toolkit we talked about connecting with other hubs for advice and networking. As those relationships move through the phases outlined in the collaborative continuum, collaboration for mutual benefit is the most mature expression of the engagement. In food hubs, this is often expressed through transactional collaboration, with the goal of transforming food distribution supply chains in their regions or across regions. Our advisory board members all saw fellow food hubs not as competition, but as allies in the pursuit of a more competitive and resilient food system that better serves farmers and eaters. As Haile Johnston from The Common Market stated, “you can’t build a system or rebuild a system or reform a system by yourself,” and food hubs have found multiple ways to make their share of the pie bigger by working together.

Some food hubs collaborate with each other to make larger sales than they would be able to handle on their own. Advisor Elliott Smith from Kitchen Sync Strategies was brought in as a consultant to help form the Northwest Food Hub Network, a collaboration between three cooperative-style food hubs: the Puget Sound Food Hub Collaborative, LINC Foods, and Western Montana Growers Cooperative.¹¹⁶ Each of the food hubs was interested in large institutional markets, but none had the supply to meet such large purchases on their own. Since the network formed in 2020, they’ve sold nearly three million dollars of product, all made possible by trust and relationships.

Vince Peak has found himself on the other side of the equation.¹¹⁷ At Share Farm, they’ve flipped the traditional sourcing model. Instead of farmers growing first and hoping for a buyer, Share Farm secures purchase orders from large institutional buyers and then identifies and contracts with growers who meet the specific sourcing criteria. This approach removes risk on both sides—buyers gain transparency, price stability, and a predictable supply, while farmers secure premium pricing, contract security, and access to high-value markets. By leveraging strategic partnerships with food hubs, agricultural collectives, and farmer-owned cooperatives, Share Farm helps smaller producers aggregate volume, ensuring they can compete at scale without losing their identity or values.

Cooperate with Your State Department of Agriculture

State Departments of Agriculture often play a role in disseminating large federal funding programs, like Specialty Crop Block Grants, to local partners.¹¹⁸ Recently, the Local Food for Schools¹¹⁹ and Local Food Purchase Assistance Program,¹²⁰ operated by Departments of Agriculture, Education and/or Departments of Health and Human Services, have been a major win for food hubs engaged in program implementation. Read more about how states supported their local food systems with these innovative programs in a recent report from the Wallace Center,¹²¹ where you can find spotlights on the following states: California,¹²² Iowa,¹²³ Michigan,¹²⁴ New Mexico,¹²⁵ Ohio,¹²⁶ Oregon,¹²⁷ Rhode Island,¹²⁸ and Virginia.¹²⁹