Misc Morsels

Sheep graze at Reister Farms.

“FoodHub is a giant rolodex,” said Rachel Reister of Reister Farms Lamb, who joined FoodHub in 2010. “When we started looking for customers on the site we put in how many miles we wanted to travel and what buyers we were looking for and got a huge list of prospects. Then we looked at their menus and made a key list of clients who we shared common values with and wanted to sell our products to. The first restaurant we called responded.”

According to our research into how to make money using FoodHub, Rachel’s approach to prospecting is a winning formula.

Rachel and her husband Jake started Reister Farms Lamb after college and, having come from farming families, entered into the business fully aware of the challenges that would come along with it.

“We adopted a lot of sustainable methods for our farm,” Rachel said. “They were practices we believed in, but we realized that if we went the traditional route for selling our animals we wouldn’t make any money.”

Jake and Corbin Reister with one of their working border collies.

When the Reisters started direct marketing they sold nearly 100% of their product through farmers’ markets. Now, that number is closer to 10% as the Reisters have shifted to a direct to wholesale model and work with clients who buy product year-round, many of whom they found with FoodHub. Last year, Rachel said, they attributed more than $35,000 in sales to direct connections they made using FoodHub, or referrals from FoodHub clients.

“I would be at a loss without FoodHub because it saves us so much time,” Rachel said. “And no one likes to make a cold call. That’s the most intimdating part of marketing a product. FoodHub warms up a cold call for us because at least you know they’re engaged enough in the industry to put up their information. It helps me determine where my most valuable time is spent.” (more…)

This is a repost from the Ecotrust blog, which is designed to inspire fresh thinking, spark innovation, and encourage investment in natural economies. Read more stories about Ecotrust’s work, and that of our partners and friends, at blog.ecotrust.org.

ThisFish Pacific Coordinator Chelsey Ellis and BC Minister of Agriculture Norm Letnick announce new funding for promotion this week. Photo Courtesy of ThisFish.

Our friends at Ecotrust Canada have been working on ThisFish, a web-based seafood traceability program, for several years now.  Participating fishermen affix a code to each fish they catch and upload information about that catch to a website. When consumers get their seafood, they can use their mobile devices to trace the code back to the fishermen.

With close to 30 seafood harvesters,  and several large trade groups and retailers now partnering with ThisFish across Canada, the app is now gaining more acceptance. British Columbia officials delivered funding this week to promote it and make it more widely used across the province. (more…)

Amanda Oborne, Ecotrust’s new Director of Food and Farms.

Ecotrust President Astrid Scholz has announced that Amanda Oborne will take over as Ecotrust’s Director of Food and Farms.  Oborne, who heads Ecotrust’s FoodHub initiative, was introduced as the new Food and Farms director at Ecotrust’s Local Hero Awards last week.

“After a national search that yielded an impressive candidate pool, we were pleased to discover that the best candidate was right here in our midst,” Scholz said.

Oborne joined FoodHub as sales and marketing director in 2010 and took over as director in 2012. She has helped build the online wholesale marketplace’s membership to 4,500, spread  across six Western states.  Fast Company named FoodHub one of the top 10 most innovative initiatives in food in 2011, and the site has become an asset for large institutional buyers – particularly schools – looking to source food from regional producers. It has also opened up new markets for rural producers: 20% of members are located in rural counties, and FoodHub allows them to quickly find and connect with urban buyers. (more…)

Now a month hence, I find myself still thinking about Organicology, the bi-annual immersion in organic agriculture and gathering of its dedicated practitioners hosted in Portland in early February.

We at FoodHub took our whole team to the conference this year – it’s one thing to sit behind a computer creating tools and technology to facilitate commercial success in local food systems, and entirely another to meet the farmers, agronomists, researchers and innovators who are literally and figuratively “in the weeds” devising solutions for communities to feed themselves in a way that renews the resources upon which we all depend. In other words, we went to “get schooled”!

And schooled we did get. For two hours we listed to mycologist Paul Stamets hold forth on how mushrooms of different types have been shown to remediate toxic waste sites and oceanic oil spills, and saw evidence that mushrooms have helped cure breast cancer. You can get a flavor yourself by watching Stamets’ 2008 TED talk, “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World“.

Curt Ellis, co-creator and co-star in the groundbreaking 2007 film King Corn (worth watching if you haven’t seen it!), talked about his latest project, FoodCorps. Like a Peace Corps for the sustainable food industry, FoodCorps trains a network of volunteers nationwide to connect kids to real food in hopes of helping them grow up healthy. The application process is highly selective, based on potential for long-term leadership as much as current passion and experience. Apply before March 24^th!

And finally, Tom Philpott, food and ag blogger for Mother Jones and cofounder of Maverick Farms, held us rapt at 8:30 on a Saturday morning to learn about fracking. I was confused at first about why Philpott, a noted commentator on all manner of food system issues, spent his entire time at the microphone talking about fracking, but I had to admit I didn’t know much about the topic at all before I walked into the ballroom bleary-eyed and in need of coffee that morning.

Thankfully Philpott started with an explanation: fracking is a process of channeling a toxic mix of chemicals and water deep underground to be blown at porous rock formations in order to release natural gas (watch an illustrative two minute video here on National Geographic). What I came to understand is that food and ag are intertwined in the fracking debate in important ways: most obvious perhaps is the potential contamination of land and groundwater by toxic fracking liquid, but as important may be conventional agriculture’s insatiable appetite for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer made using natural gas. Get schooled yourself by reading Philpott’s excellent food and fracking article.

Hearty thanks go out to Organically Grown Company, Oregon Tilth, Organic Seed Alliance and Sustainable Food Trade Association (note: free FoodHub membership required to view member profiles) for co-hosting Organicology and making top quality speakers and content so readily accessible! School has never been this delicious.

Dear FoodHub Members and Friends -

FoodHub will turn three years old in early 2013 and now serves 4,200 total Members! As we close the year, I’d like to share some key results and thoughts about FoodHub’s future…

FoodHub is growing

Developing the FoodHub membership has always been a chicken-and-egg problem – do we work first to recruit sellers so that buyers have something to buy? Or do we focus first on buyers to improve the likelihood of new sellers making sales?

The answer (of course), is that it takes two to tango. We’re thrilled to see how balanced the community has grown – the ratio of buyers to sellers has been roughly 50:50 since its earliest days. The current breakdown of FoodHub membership is:

• 40% buyers
• 38% sellers
• 20% associates
• 2% distributors

Some of those ~1,600 buyers represent huge spending power – foodservice contractors like Bon Appetit Management Company, distributors like Food Services of America, retailers like Whole Foods Markets and healthcare facilities like Providence-Portland Medical Center.

Buyers are buying!

Only 33 Sellers gave us an estimate this year of sales generated as a result of connections made on FoodHub on the annual Member Survey, but even in that small pool the results are significant: $108,000 went into the collective pockets of those 33 regional producers that wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been using FoodHub!

Those sales drive economic development in the local communities. In Ecotrust’s recent report, The Impact of Seven Cents, funded by Kaiser Permanente Community Fund at the Northwest Health Foundation, it was demonstrated that the purchase of local foods has a 1.86 economic multiplier. This means for every dollar spent on local food products, successive rounds of spending lead to another $.86 of spending, for an overall increase of $1.86 dollars to the local economy. So that $108K generated via FoodHub last year may well represent more than $200K in economic activity in the region. Not bad for just a handful of transactions!

With spending comes jobs. FoodHub sellers who responded to this year’s Member Survey reported employing 23% more full-time and 38% more part-time staff in 2012 than in 2010, and adding an aggregated total of 353 jobs to the region in those two years (113 of those in designated rural counties). While those jobs are not necessarily correlated directly to FoodHub membership, we take it as a very good sign in this economy that our sellers are growing!

FoodHub is a tool for farm to school

FoodHub functions as support staff for school foodservice directors because, while they may have a mandate to execute a farm to school program, many don’t know the farmers in their area. With a couple of clicks they can access a list of producers right from their desks, sort them by proximity to the school, then easily fire off messages to get bids.

Or they can do what Gitta Grether-Sweeney from Portland Public Schools did: “We posted a request on the FoodHub Marketplace for 200 lbs of radishes for our Harvest of the Month special and got responses from farmers right in our district! Doesn’t get any fresher than that.”

There are now 184 school-based Members (both K-12 and Pre-K) on FoodHub, representing a total of more than 1,400 individual school sites feeding more than 672,000 students. Carrot stick anyone?

There’s more where that came from

We’ve learned a lot from our work with schools that is transferable to other institutions. It’s not easy for foodservice directors to source locally given all their constraints – tight budgets, set menus, small staffs, and binders full of standard operating procedures that don’t accommodate the inherent variability of local, seasonal or sustainably produced food.

But those institutions – hospitals, universities, corporate cafeterias, and yes, schools – have the volume and spending power to change the regional food system game.

How can FoodHub Sellers get positioned to access the sizeable institutional market? Get GAP certified, learn “wholesale-ready” packaging rules, work to extend the season and improve the consistency of staple products, and maybe even invest in equipment to peel and chop produce to capture higher margins.

Associates: There is plenty for us who support the development of regional food systems to do! Significant infrastructure needs to be developed to grease the wheels for regional transactions:

• Well located aggregation facilities (physical food hubs, co-ops and distribution centers) that offer cold storage and minimal processing need to be developed.
• Distribution partners willing to devise creative, financially viable solutions for moving smaller quantities from more locations need to be engaged.
• Technical and financial assistance to support family-scale producers who want to access institutional market needs to be provided.
• Support for foodservice directors who are willing to stretch the boundaries of their operational constraints to make way for local food needs to be rallied.

All these needs point to the future of FoodHub too. How can we leverage the technological platform and human network to push those vital endeavors forward?

If this spurs ideas for you about projects, collaborations or opportunities to work together, let’s find time in the new year to talk. And in the meantime, thank you, as always, for your continued engagement in the FoodHub community. On behalf of the entire FoodHub team, we wish you relaxed holidays, delicious food, and a healthy and prosperous new year!

Cheers,
Amanda
FoodHub Director