The Food Hub is going on spring break, giving our team a brief pause before the season starts to ramp up. Please view and download the spring break schedule!
Collaboration Brings Local Food Boxes to Killington Grand Resort Hotel Employees: Part II
By Kristen Thompson & Tom Brewton
Last month, we told you about our collaboration with up-and-coming food hub Vermont Farmers Food Center (VFFC) to bring local food boxes to Killington Grand Resort Hotel (KGRH) employees. We talked to Heidi Lynch, Executive Director of the VFFC, about their work and the value and impact of this collaboration. We also spoke to Greg Lang, Executive Chef at KGRH, about the impetus and impact of this project at the hotel. Check out the conversation.
Food Hub Special Schedule: November-December 2022
Collaboration Brings Local Food Boxes to Killington Grand Resort Hotel Employees: Part I
By Kristen Thompson & Tom Brewton
This past June, Andrew Graham, Direct Markets Coordinator at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, reached out to Food Connects about an exciting opportunity. Killington Grand Resort Hotel (KGRH) was looking to set up a CSA (community-supported agriculture) program offering local food boxes to their employees. This project promised an exciting collaboration with partners across Vermont.
A Day in the Life at the Food Connects Food Hub Part III: Deliveries
By Kristen Thompson
About a week after following Emma Bliss and Raymond Johnston through the process of picking up orders and staging deliveries for the Food Connects Food Hub, I wander back down the hall from Food Connects’ administrative offices to the Food Hub. It’s around 8:00 AM when I arrive. Long-time Food Hub Driver Tracy Lake is already loading Van 1 with Raymond and Food Hub Warehouse Coordinator Scott Berzofsky.
Today, I’m joining Tracy for the Food Connects Monadnock Delivery Route in New Hampshire. It’s the very end of March, and with the school year still in full swing, we have a busy route ahead.
Culturally Relevant Foods: Bringing Halal Chicken to Our Community
Over the past few months, Brattleboro has welcomed Afghan refugees into our community. We have seen community members rallying behind our new neighbors, providing a variety of support services—it’s been truly inspiring.
Food Connects has been eager to support our new neighbors, as well. Some of our staff members have cooked meals, and our Farm to School team has supported efforts in schools to welcome their new Afghan students. And now, our Food Hub has the opportunity to make an impact as well.
At Food Connects, we value inclusivity in our food system. That means access to nutritious, culturally relevant foods and participation in the food system. We believe that individuals should have the right to self-determination and food sovereignty—the right and access to make decisions over the food they eat. If you haven’t had Afghan food before or do not know a lot about it, there are flavors and cultural differences that are crucial to honor. One significant barrier to our Afghan neighbors accessing and cooking traditional dishes was the lack of Halal-certified chicken.
First—what is Halal?
According to the American Halal Foundation, “Halal (also spelled halaal) is an Arabic word that means ‘lawful or permitted.’ It is a term that is used in the Islamic religion in contrast with the word haram (which means ‘unlawful or not allowed’). These terms indicate which life practices are allowed or not allowed for those who practice Islam (Muslims). While halal refers to much more than just Islamic dietary practices, the term is most often thought of when talking about food, drinks, and other products.”
Second—where can you get Halal products? Well, in the case of chicken, there was a resounding silence in terms of local production. So, when the Vermont Foodbank approached Food Connects about sourcing options for Halal chicken, we were on the case. Food Connects worked diligently with Common Wealth Poultry to create a source for this much-needed chicken.
We had the opportunity to talk with Zach Hebert, Associate Manager of Community Engagement: Southern Region for the Vermont Foodbank, about the project to learn more about how this partnership came to be and its significance for the Afghan refugees. We also talked to Trey LaPorta, Wholesale Manager from Common Wealth Poultry, about the process of certifying their chicken. Check out the conversation below.
Tell us a little bit about how this partnership came about.
Zach: A few months ago, back in the thick of winter, when Afghan refugees began arriving in Brattleboro, I had been in close conversations with the Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC) about ways the Vermont Foodbank could support our new neighbors with nourishing and culturally relevant foods. We took some initial actions, such as partnering with the local Everyone Eats program to make familiar meals and preparing welcome boxes full of familiar foods. As our new neighbors began to settle in our community, one need we continued to hear was a demand for halal meat products. To try to meet that need, several staff members at the Vermont Foodbank started exploring regional Halal meat options that met the scale of the need for our communities across the state.
You can read more about the Vermont Foodbank’s work here.
Why did you decide to reach out to Food Connects?
Zach: Food Connects has been a close partner of the Vermont Foodbank for many years. While we haven’t been a direct customer of its Food Hub until the past two years or so, its Farm to School Team has always played a vital role in improving food security within our local community. The staff there have always been close thought-partners and change-makers for our work.
From a purchasing perspective, the Vermont Foodbank has a strong commitment to working with Vermont and regional producers whenever it makes sense, and it aligns with responsible stewardship of our donor’s donations. Having a pre-existing vendor relationship with Food Connects, after they became a Vermonters Feeding Vermonters partner with us last year, made the decision to reach out to Food Connects around sourcing this product a no-brainer for us.
In this particular format of working with Common Wealth Poultry, this partnership came about after some exploratory conversations between myself and Tom Brewton, Food Connects Food Institutional Sales Associate. Tom and I are close friends outside of work, and it is always a nice confluence of “small-town life” when we’re able to come together to create something where both Food Connects and the Vermont Foodbank can play a vital role in supporting our community. After a few initial conversations, it became clear that there was a mutual interest in sourcing some halal meat for the local community, and that Food Connects would be well-positioned to identify the best producer to do that.
What excites you about this partnership?
Trey: We are very excited to be working with Food Connects for many reasons but most importantly, to be working with people who share many of the same values as the folks at Common Wealth Poultry. Especially those around creating a culture of transparency, honesty, and getting everyone the opportunity to have the highest quality food and to know where it comes from. We love working with people and companies that are passionate about the products they produce and distribute.
Why are culturally relevant and appropriate foods important?
Zach: Culturally appropriate foods are important because everyone deserves to have nourishing and comforting food in their lives. Food is so much more than just calories we consume—it emotionally recharges us, provides nourishment, and acts as a facilitator for equally healing moments of connection and conversation. Everyone deserves food that is appropriate for the culture and the dining room where they prefer to eat and build community. In this situation, where our new Afghan neighbors are dealing with so many unknowns as they enter a new part of their life, this feels like an important step in remaining committed to making their meals that much more accessible and familiar.
Why are you eager to help support our Afghan neighbors?
Trey: We love our Afghan and African neighbors because many of them are included in the Common Wealth Poultry family. Our employees come from around the globe, so for them to be creating food that gets put directly into their culture and community brings us so much joy.
How has access to the Halal chicken impacted your lives (or the lives of your community members)?
Zach: While I can’t speak directly to the impact this has had on people’s lives, I know from how quickly our first order moved out of our warehouse that there is a clear need in the community for the halal chicken. The first “pilot” pallet we ordered has already been mostly distributed to our food pantry partners (and from there on to our neighbors). From the feedback I’ve heard, this Halal chicken has allowed families to prepare well-rounded meals for their families. I can’t speak to the specific challenges of our Afghan neighbors, but I know that transportation barriers are a constant challenge for the folks we work with, so I’m sure being able to access this chicken from the same place they are already going for other foods without having to spend precious time and resources searching multiple stores or locations has been a huge relief.
What did the process look like to become Halal certified?
Trey: We started our Halal slaughter specifically to allow our employees to enjoy the products they make every day. We want our employees to be proud of the work they do and to be able to bring it home and enjoy it with their families, which fortunately leads to a whole new community of people we are able to service.
Food Connects is incredibly proud of this great community partnership as a way to welcome our Afghan neighbors and create a thriving and inclusive food culture in our community. We hope that this story will help inspire you to get to know our new neighbors and support their transition into our community.
Are you interested in working with Food Connects to create Healthy Families, Thriving Farms, and Connected Communities? Reach out to us at info@foodconnects.org on ways we can work together.
Photos courtesy of Common Wealth Poultry.
Food Hub Special Schedule: May-June 2022
We've created a special summer order and delivery schedule to accommodate Food Hub holiday closures. Download the schedule below!
2022 Food Connects Food Hub Summer Holiday Schedule
Monday, May 30: Monday deliveries will proceed as usual. The Food Hub office will be closed.
Tuesday, May 31 - Friday, June 3: The Food Hub office will be closed, and there will be no deliveries.
Monday, June 6: There will be no Monday deliveries. The Food Hub office will be open.
Pre-orders/Special Orders:
* Bread Orders: Bread orders will be due by 11:00 AM on Friday, June 3, for the week of June 6, as usual.
* Cheese Special Orders: Cheese special orders will be due by 11:00 AM Monday, May 23, for delivery the week of June 6. Bell & Goose cheeses will not be available for this order cycle.
Questions?
Contact Sales@FoodConnects.org
Behind the Scenes: Just-In-Time—How Food Gets From the Farm to Your Shelf
At Food Connects, we are committed to offering our customers fresh, high-quality, source-identified products. Because we desire to cultivate a transparent value chain, the Food Connects team wants to share with you each week’s sequence of events to offer all our customers access to an array of fresh, regionally sourced products.
To maximize freshness and quality, most of our perishable product is received into our warehouse within 24-48 hours before being delivered to our customers. These products are what we classify as Just-In-Time (JIT). Sometimes the product stays in our warehouse just a few minutes before it goes from the farm field or the bakery to the customer—all on the same day!
Generally, most JIT products are received into our warehouse on Tuesdays for Wednesday and Thursday customer deliveries and received on Thursday for Friday and Monday customer deliveries. Rather than purchasing excess and keeping the product in our warehouse for an extended period, we purchase JIT items “to order” based on customer demand for each given order cycle. In addition to ensuring maximum freshness, this model also helps to reduce food waste. On the other hand, we make sure to keep on hand a readily available supply of all our shelf-stable dry, refrigerated, and frozen products.
Food Connects sources products from 36 JIT producers to fill customer orders every week. The fact that we have not one but two weekly order cycles means that we often receive products into our warehouse from the majority of our JIT producers twice per week.
The national food industry generally does not lift up and promote the names of all the frontline workers. Without those workers, our chain grocery store shelves would not stay filled. In contrast, the Food Connects team knows that collaboration and strong relationships are vital to building a vibrant and healthy community. We want to know who is part of getting your food from the farm to the table every step of the way. We celebrate and thank each of those individuals for helping us bring fresh, regional food to our community.
Want to see an example of how we make that happen in practice? Check out the timeline we’ve created! We encourage you to take note of all the people whose actual hands are involved in handling this product.
By Monday at 10:00 AM, John Truncale, Produce Manager at the Brattleboro Food Co-op, places an order including a few cases of red leaf lettuce from Harlow Farm located in Westminster, VT. Our Procurement Specialist, David Paysnick, sends out orders to all our JIT producers by noon that same day, including to Harlow Farm. Then the job passes to the Harlow Farm employees, including Leroy Campbell, Raymond Carridice, and Gerald Berry. Throughout the remainder of that day and into the following Tuesday, they pick, wash, fill, sort, and stage our order of red leaf lettuce in addition to any other fresh veggies that our customers ordered.
On Tuesday, one of our drivers, Bob Blackmer, picks up our order from Harlow Farm and several other JIT producers, including Echo Farm Puddings, Kitchen Garden Farm, and Orchard Hill Breadworks. Once Bob returns to the Food Connects warehouse, members of our operations team, including Scott Berzofsky, Raymond Johnston, and Emma Bliss, receive, sort, and stage orders ready to be delivered to our customers. By Wednesday afternoon, another driver David Pontius delivers the cases of red leaf lettuce to the Brattleboro Food Co-op, ready to be received by their dedicated staff, who will then display the product on their shelves for customers to purchase.
As you can see, it takes a host of people to grow, process, aggregate, distribute, and sell fresh products. Our Just-In-Time distribution model requires significant coordination across every organization and every set of hands to move the product along the value chain.
From an aggregation perspective, we admit that it would be more efficient for Food Connects to buy fresh products in bulk instead of only ordering enough products to fill customer orders for a given week. However, this process would lead us to compromise on one of our core values: doing our best to offer our customers fresh, long-lasting products. At Food Connects, we refuse to jeopardize product quality and are willing to put in the required time and effort to aggregate and distribute fresh, perishable products on a Just-In-Time schedule.
Behind the Scenes: Driving is more than getting us from point A to point B
If you know anything about food distribution, you know drivers are absolutely critical to the operation. At Food Connects, our Food Hub drivers are our front-line workers—picking up from the people who make and grow our food and delivering that food to co-ops, schools, hospitals, and more. Five days a week, they are out on the road representing Food Connects and, more importantly, our values. As the people who are physically delivering New England food to New England customers, they are indispensable in achieving New England's 30-by-30 Vison. We are grateful for the critical part they play in building a better food system.
So, what is it like to work for an entrepreneurial non-profit Food Hub? And who are the drivers that make our work possible? Meet two members of our driving team, Elisa and Tracy. Their hard work and dedication over the past few years has significantly fostered and shaped the growth of our Food Hub.
Elisa and Tracy have both been with our team for quite a while and have seen us through some major transitions. Fun fact: Tracy has technically been with us for more than 5 ½ years—he worked for the Windham Farm & Food Network (WFF) (which eventually became Food Connects) while he was at Harlow Farm in Westminster, VT.
What is your professional background?
Elisa (E): I started in landscape architecture (residential in CA) and got into edible landscaping, which ultimately helped me transition into farming and urban farming.
Tracy (T): I worked for Paul Harlow, at Harlow Farm, for a while. My daughter is a farmer too—Sweetland Farm in Norwich, VT!
Are you doing other work outside of Food Connects? How do you split your time?
E: Farming takes up a lot of my time outside of Food Connects. I enjoy pickup sports like soccer, ultimate frisbee, and basketball, and also play Settlers of Catan.
T: I’m not doing other work outside of Food Connects. When I’m not driving, I like to cross-country ski and maintain.
Why did you choose Food Connects?
E: I had heard lots of good things on the street about working here. When I started working at Food Connects, I was new to the Brattleboro area. This was an opportunity to get to know people and Windham County—I got to know the roads and culture a little bit more. I also have done a lot of networking with producers and wholesale buyers for my farm.
T: My job melded from one to the other. I went to high school with Paul Harlow and was loyal to Paul and his farm. As I did more and more work for WFF, I even insisted on working for Paul in title only. But eventually, it made sense to be a member of the Food Connects team and I switched. There are good people all the way around, on the staff, on the farms, and on the receiving end.
What do you like about your job? What is hard about it?
E: The hardest part is definitely driving in the dead of winter because of the weather and New England roads—the managers are very reasonable around driving expectations in poor conditions. My favorite thing is that Food Connects is a successful nonprofit as it continues to grow and avoids mission creep—some nonprofits do go beyond their original mission and purposes, and do too much of it. Food Connects has two main enterprises (the Food Hub and our Farm to School Program) and does it better and better each passing season.
T: To reiterate Elisa, winter driving can be tough—but I never feel unsafe. I would have to say that this is probably the most social I’ve been in my entire life—connecting with all the farmers and customers through the region. I like that Food Connects can also be a resource—I can inform my daughter about interesting news and opportunities from other farms.
Have you driven for any other businesses before? If so, how is Food Connects different from a normal driving job?
E: In the past I have driven for farms going to farmers’ markets. It’s similar, but different because when you go to a farmers’ market it is very full when you go and empty when you come back. Plus that it’s just one stop versus constantly stopping to make deliveries. I drove around the San Francisco Bay area which also had a lot more, and often unpredictable, traffic. Here… it might be a cow in the middle of the road and I definitely would rather have that than urban traffic.
What would you tell a potential driver who is looking to work with us? Why should someone want to drive with Food Connects?
E: Good people and good management—the people are really genuine here. It’s also good pay for relatively easy and consistent work that’s reliable. Plus there are great systems in place and good food and discounts on it! If you live in Windham county, it’s close to downtown Brattleboro and centrally located.
T: Good people. Plain and simple.
Any fun stories to share with us about being on the road?
E: I wasn’t joking before. A literal cow crossed the road and I had to wait!
T: It can sometimes be scary with the snowstorms but I grew up around heavy equipment and respect the machinery.
Are you or someone you know looking for a driving job? Apply today!
Food Hub Special Schedule: November-December 2021
To accommodate holidays and Food Hub holiday closures, we have created a special November and December Order and Delivery Schedule. This includes an added route to Burlington and Montpelier and special cheese orders! Download the schedule below!
2021 Food Connects Food Hub December Schedule
Monday customers, see schedule below.
DECEMBER:
Friday 12/24 - Friday 12/31: CLOSED, no deliveries.
But how does this change the special cheese orders?
Orders due Monday, 12/13 for delivery week of 12/20
Plan ahead for Christmas & New Year’s Cheese Platters!
Orders due Monday, 1/3 for delivery week of 1/10
What about bread?
Bread orders are due by Friday, 12/17 for delivery on Wednesday, 1/5/2022, and Thursday, 1/6/2022.
MONDAY CUSTOMERS
DECEMBER:
Wednesday 12/22: Orders due for Monday, 1/3/2022 delivery.
Friday 12/24 - Friday 12/31: FOOD HUB CLOSED.
Monday 12/27: No deliveries this week.
Monday, 1/3/2022: Only inventoried products are available for delivery—check with your sales representative.
Questions?
Contact sales@foodonnects.org.
2021 Food Connects Food Hub November Schedule
Monday customers, see schedule below.
NOVEMBER:
Wednesday, 11/17: Orders due early for Thanksgiving week deliveries.
Monday, 11/22: Special delivery day to replace Wednesday, 11/24.
Tuesday, 11/23: Special delivery day to replace Thursday, 11/25.
Wednesday, 11/24-Friday 11/26: CLOSED, no deliveries.
MONDAY CUSTOMERS
NOVEMBER:
Wednesday, 11/17: Orders due for BOTH Monday, 11/22, and Monday 11/29.
Wednesday, 11/24 - Friday 11/26: FOOD HUB CLOSED.
Monday, 11/29: Only inventoried products are available for delivery—check with your sales representative.
Bringing Local Food to Schools
It’s National Farm to School Month, and our Food Hub is excited to celebrate our partnerships with local schools. Did you know that we deliver regionally grown food to more than 30 schools in our area? Each new school we work with means more students have access to local and nutritious foods.
Since July 2021, K-12 schools have purchased nearly $100,000 in local products from Food Connects—that’s more local dollars going back to our community and farmers! Vermont public schools alone totaled over $70k, $43k of which came from Vermont producers.
The Windham Northeast Supervisory Union’s (WNESU) Farm to School Cafe is a major contributor to this success. Over the summer, Harley Sterling, the School Nutrition Director for WNESU, and his team made weekly food boxes for hundreds of kids, ensuring all students had access to food throughout the summer. Stay tuned for more about this project! Or check out their holiday highlight or Cafeterias Unknown feature.
Other than these great stories, we’ve introduced some new, school-focused products to schools.
The Bread Shed: “Humble Whole Wheat Loaf”
At 54% whole wheat, this product meets USDA regulations for the National School Lunch Program.
We distributed samples to schools and sold over 200 loaves since the start of the school year.
Miller Farm: 8 oz bottles of whole milk
Since late August, Food Connects has already sold more than 600 bottles to school.
The bottles work well in private schools and as a special feature or part of “a la carte” sections in public schools.
If you haven’t heard already, there is a new local food purchasing incentive for schools in Vermont. “Act 67 created a pilot program that would temporarily establish a tiered incentive for public schools to purchase food from Vermont’s farmers: buy 15% local products, receive 15 cents back for every lunch served. The law also creates 20% and 25% tiers.” This means that the more local food purchased and the more students served, the more school nutrition programs benefit. And our Food Hub is ready to help by providing a plethora of quality Vermont products through our wide network.
Since the start of September, Vermont public schools have purchased over $14k food from Food Connects. Between already established purchasing practices and the new local purchasing incentive, $11k of these sales are from Vermont producers—totaling over 75% of purchases. Some of the farms and producers that are seeing sales to local schools include:
Eggs from Maple Meadow Farm in Salisbury, VT
Apples from Dutton Berry Farm in Newfane, VT, and Green Mountain Orchard in Putney, VT
Pears from Champlain Orchards in Shoreham, VT
Yogurt from Green Mountain Creamery in Brattleboro, VT
A variety of veggies from Harlow Farm and Allen Brothers in Westminster, VT, in addition to Milkweed Farm in Guilford, VT
We also have a new partner in Karen Russo, Director of the Child Nutrition Program at Orange Southwest School District. Karen started ordering from Food Connects at the start of the 2021-22 school year, and her passion to feed her students nutritious and local foods has been evident from the start of our partnership. In her first month of deliveries alone, she has purchased a wide variety of fruits and veggies, including local apples, pears, carrots, corn, peppers, tomatoes, and so much more! In partnership with their Farm to School Coordinator, they will be making kale chips to serve over 400 kids across all of their elementary schools.
We’re so excited that the school year is off to a great start. We can’t wait to see where our partnerships and local food purchasing incentive take us this school year!
Wrapping Up Our Summer Season
To say that summers are busy in the Food Hub is an understatement. With fresh produce at its peak and new items coming in every day our “just in time” delivery services are in high gear—constantly adapting to what’s in demand, what’s available, and what the weather has decided to bless us with an overabundance of. All that said, this year’s summer at Food Connects has been even busier than what we’ve come to expect!
We have lots to highlight from this summer but our biggest news is that summer sales hit over $465,000! For comparison, this represents a 67% increase over the summer of 2020. And just two years ago, in 2019, we sold $562,000 worth of food the entire year.
Month number / This year sales / Last year sales / Change year-over-year (e.g. 0.67 = 67% increase).
Over the past few months, we’ve significantly expanded our delivery and sourcing routes. We extended a route to southeastern New Hampshire to access food hubs like Three River Farmers Alliance and Organization for Refugee and Immigrant Success, as well as key customers like Sweet Beet Market, and Warner Public Market.
This new route connects us with our New Hampshire Food Hub Network partners and presents us with lots of exciting potential to expand our sourcing reach into New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts, and to export more products to greater New England.
We expanded to the north as well with new routes up Interstate 89 towards the Montpelier/Burlington area. These new partnerships strengthen New England food resiliency and take us one step closer to the 50 by 60 New England Food Vision.
And how do we get there? With new vehicles of course! In August, after an extremely long, COVID-fueled auto parts delay, we finally received a brand new 20-foot Hino diesel-electric hybrid box truck. The truck is outfitted with dual temperature zones so that we can run refrigerated, frozen, or both at the same time. The truck is now our most advanced, versatile vehicle, and is an emblem of our ongoing efforts to improve the sustainability of our distribution operation. It will give us the flexibility to access new markets and new products—all while increasing fuel efficiency!
Lastly, we are so excited that the Vermont Way Foods (VWF) team hired Matt Landi to drive market growth in support of VWF’s mission to grow and distribute food the Vermont Way, catalyzing a more sustainable and equitable food system for all Vermont farmers and food makers.
New Markets for New England Cheese
New England cheese! Cheesemakers in Vermont and around New England are renowned worldwide and for good reason. Tucked away in remote corners and valleys, our little region’s specialty creameries put out some of the most innovative and complex cheeses you’ll find anywhere. No, New Englanders may not generally be the most adventurous in the face of a habanero chili, but when it comes to cheese, “milk’s leap toward immortality,” the inhabitants of this region appear to be positively daring.
Unfortunately, 2020 squeezed New England cheesemakers. Restaurants and institutional food service—both major income sources for specialty cheesemakers—suffered huge losses in the face of pandemic fears, as did the classic cheese counter model (such as the cheese department at your local Co-op or Hannaford) with its focus on custom cut-and-wrap sales. Consumers shifted their purchasing toward pre-packaged cheeses and away from big-box grocery stores, towards smaller, local outlets and home delivery services. As a result, many cheesemakers lost their main markets. Those who could do so responded by retooling for pre-cut and pre-wrapped sales.
Networking for a Better Food System
In February 2020, a month before that unpleasant turn of events, Richard Berkfield and Alex McCullough from Food Connects had traveled to Upperville, Virginia. They joined nine other East Coast food hubs in a gathering that was the brainchild of Tom McDougall, owner of 4P Foods, a food hub based in Warrenton, VA, and serving the Washington, D.C. area. Food hub representatives from as far north as Maine and as far south as South Carolina converged to tackle one big question: How can we work together to serve our producers and customers better?
All of us dreamed, independently, of taking part in creating a resilient, decentralized food system, one based in sourcing from family-run farms and food businesses, in promoting food produced with social and ecological integrity, and in celebrating our regions’ foods in a spirit of collaboration and sharing.
Out of this convening, the Eastern Food Hub Collaborative (EFC) was born. Local Food Hub, 11-year-old Charlottesville, Virginia-based nonprofit with a long history running programming for food distribution and food access, is now organizing this collaboration. The EFC connects a still-growing roster of 14 East Coast food hubs, 600+ producers, and tens of millions of dollars of aggregate annual sales in a shared mission to scale a new paradigm of food for the East Coast.
As a group, we intuited that we’d always source first from our own local and regional producers within our respective hubs. And we could do that while also providing customers access to unique products from other places up and down the East Coast. And, conversely, at Food Connects, we could do so while introducing other regions to the special foods that only New England can offer.
What better way to show off New England than with cheese?
Connecting Cheese to Networks, and People to Cheese
Tom from 4P Foods declared on the first day of our convening in Virginia that 4P wanted to sell New England cheese. Richard and Alex drove home with a mission and a lot of work to do. That summer, with the guiding hand of Beth Lewand, former cheesemonger extraordinaire and Food Connects’ then-new Sales Associate, we launched our Specialty Cheese Catalog. At that time, the catalog acted as a testing ground to build supply relationships, learn about products, solve inbound logistics, and start figuring out new ways to supply customers with great cheese.
It turned out that the pre-cut cheeses that cheesemakers had emphasized since the COVID-19 crisis suddenly worked very well for much of Food Connects’ customer base: for farm stands, CSAs, small independent stores—and for home-delivery food hubs like 4P.
In coordination with buyers Justin White and Devon Byrne from 4P, Food Connects shipped its first pallet of cheese to Virginia on May 12, 2021, as a pilot run. Would the cheese make it through the 500+ mile trip? Would customers buy it? Would they come back to buy more?
We’re proud to announce a resounding “Yes” to all of the above! June 24–just last week!–marked our second and even larger cheese pallet shipment to 4P Foods. Stacked high with boxes from Grafton Village Cheese, Jasper Hill Farm, Smith’s Country Cheese, Narragansett Creamery, Parish Hill Creamery, Champlain Valley Creamery, Blue Ledge Farm, and Vermont Shepherd, this pallet represents Food Connects’ commitment to leveraging our unique location in the heart of New England to build a meaningful, brand new market outlet for our region’s cheesemakers.
In all, since the Specialty Cheese Catalog’s launch in August, Food Connects has sold more than $136,000 of specialty cheese. We’ve delivered cheeses to retail outlets, restaurants, and institutional food service programs in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. We’ve sent countless boxes of cheese to other Food Hub partners around New England, including the Three Rivers Farmers Alliance, of Exeter, NH, and Farm Fresh Rhode Island, of Providence. Both of them source cheese through Food Connects to add to their home delivery programs. Even if in a small way, we’re proud to have contributed to supporting our cheesemakers through a uniquely difficult time.
We hope that this is just the beginning. We started with a small selection of producers to avoid overcomplicating logistics and over-diluting sales to our emerging market. As demand for cheese grows within our networks, we will continue expanding our product selection. We aim to build a strong, diverse catalog that brings together the best that our region offers, opening new doors for eaters up and down the coast looking for a gustatory experience they will never forget. And, of course, one that builds real, long-term markets for cheesemakers across New England who work to keep this ancient craft alive, thriving, and profitable now and into the future.