Community Food Distribution Center

David Harper
www.landincommon.org
Spence Dickinson
www.spencesfarm.com

A Community Food Distribution Center can serve as a crossroads for matching local growers (including Community Farm Trust farms) with food and meat processors and large-scale food buyers such as school districts, natural foods stores, restaurants, caterers, institutions, universities and local corporations. A Community Food Distribution Center will be an important step toward creating a local living economy that is not dependent on the shifting forces of unsustainable, corporate globalization. It would allow us to begin mining the money we have? that is otherwise spent on food produced outside the region or invested in food industry corporations that are bent on profiting from a community at the expense of the community’s character and economic vitality.

A regional community kitchen would be included as part of a Food Distribution Center and would serve as an incubator for starting businesses that would produce prepared foods that from locally grown ingredients as an alternative to prepared foods we normally bring in from distant sources, using distant ingredients.  It would allow start-up local food  businesses to increase production without incurring the expenses for capital improvements. A Food Distribution Center can also coordinate a regions’ agricultural needs, production, harvesting and distribution for its local farmers. By connecting farmers with the local food buyers for our food stores, restaurants, and institutions, a Food Distribution Center can strengthen the market for local, sustainably-produced foods.

*photo by Doug Jones

Farm-to-School programs can get off the ground with a Community Food Distribution center, providing one-stop-shopping for institutional buyers who can’t invest the time dealing with many individual farmers. Schools and children can participate in a School-to-Farm program (see CSE Farms) that would give the farmer help when they need additional labor and strengthen the buy-in by children (and parents) interested in having local foods in their cafeterias.

A number of local farmers have already formed an LLC to insure the continuation of a needed chicken processing facility. Weaver Street Market is remodeling an industrial facility to produce some of these same facilities. Orange County has partnered with Chatham, Alamance and Durham Counties to study the viability of a regional community kitchen. After forming a board, incorporating as either a for-profit or non-profit organization, and preparing a Strategic Business Plan, the Center could secure funding, lease or purchase space, and begin to develop relationships with local growers, local processed-food businesses, and large-scale food buyers in the region.

The Fair Food Project
(http://www.whitedogcafefoundation.org/fairfood.html) started by Judy Wicks at the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, PA offers a glimpse of how relationships between farmers, restaurants and institututions can work.

*photo by Doug Jones