Between a 1,000 square foot cooler and freezer and a smaller 300 square foot cooler, it would be safe to assume we have enough space for all the delicious food we can get. Nope! We’re excited to share that our storage space for cold and frozen regionally-produced foods is expanding. But this time, we’re growing up—vertically, we mean!
This May, after months of planning, Food Connects is installing pallet racking in our cooler to increase its storage capacity.
In December of 2019, we unveiled a community-funded 1,000 square foot cooler and freezer. We knew this space would allow us to provide our wholesale customers with a wider variety of locally-produced foods and increase our capacity to build market channels for more producers in our region. Little did we know that this space was preparing us for tremendous growth in response to a global pandemic.
In 2020, we saw our revenue double during the pandemic, hitting over $1 million in sales of regionally produced foods. As more community members turned to local co-ops and farm stores to get their food, those wholesale customers turned to us. Our coolers allowed us to bring on more producers and increase the quantity of each product.
Even in this ample space, our cooler can get cramped. In advance of our busiest season—late spring to early fall—we're expanding up with pallet racking in our cooler and freezer. We will have 19 new pallet spaces after the project is complete, meaning a lot more regionally produced foods! The pallet racking will allow us to utilize the unused vertical space in the cooler, expand our storage capacity, and prepare our Food Hub for continued growth.
This pallet racking and improvements to our Food Hub was made possible, in part, by a generous grant from the You Have Our Trust Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. In addition to our pallet racking, Harley Sterling and the Farm to School Cafe generously donated shelving for our dry storage space to increase organization and capacity.
We are thrilled that more and more community members are turning towards local food. As we do our best to prepare for the future and our continued growth, we look forward to the challenges that lie ahead, watching our local food economy grow, and, of course, all that delicious food!