Starting a Food Hub: Successful Hubs Share Their Stories
Three successful food hubs share their stories about how they formed and their first year in action.
Description
Food hubs hold great promise for a myriad of positive community impacts - economic development and job creation, farmland preservation, environmental sustainability... the list goes on.
But how do you start a food hub?
This webinar brings together the stories of the formation and first year of three different, successful food hubs. Our presenters share some of the best decisions they made … and some of the worst. What types of contacts did they feel really helped their business to thrive? How much money did they need, and how did they get it? Why did they choose their incorporation status? And more...
If you are an emerging hub - in the planning stages - or work with groups who are considering forming a food hub, please watch for inspiration and instruction.
Recording
Presentation Slides
Presenter Bios
Christopher Hartman
Chris Hartman is the Founder and President of Headwater Foods in Rochester NY, the organization behind one of upstate NY’s emerging Food Hubs. Headwater Foods has used direct and wholesale strategies to develop a viable supply chain of local, sustainable foods through their growing network of partner farms. In the five years since Headwater Foods was founded, the organization has grown rapidly and is positioned to be an exciting and effective Food Hub for the Northeast region. Chris has worked as a farmer, an educator, a community organizer and an entrepreneur within the food system. Chris and his team bring a high level of energy, creativity, talent, and commitment to Headwater Foods and the effort to create positive change within our food system.
Sandi Kronick
Sandi got her start in the sustainable food scene as Local Food Coordinator for a 700-member college dining co-op, working with Amish farmers around Oberlin, Ohio. After consulting with Cleveland restaurants to set up local buying programs, she moved to North Carolina and linked up with the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, launching ECO in 2004. In 2010, Sandi was awarded the 40 Under 40 Business Leadership Award for the Triangle area and traveled to Chile on behalf of the Chilean Trade Commission to lecture on the US organic marketplace. She serves as the agribusiness representative on the Administrative Council for Southern SARE, the sustainable agriculture arm of the USDA.
Jim Crawford
Jim Crawford is the owner/operator of New Morning Farm, ninety certified-organic acres in south-central Pennsylvania. Jim has been a diversified vegetable grower for forty-one years, direct-marketing from the start in his nearest big city, Washington, DC. In addition to helping to establish various farmers markets in the city, Jim was a founder and is now President of Tuscarora Organic Growers Cooperative, Inc., a twenty-five-year-old wholesale produce distributor in the Baltimore/Washington market. TOG connects its forty-seven member farmers to hundreds of local retailers and chefs.
