Growing Up, Up, and Up

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!

A Year in Review

This last quarter marked the end of a banner year for the Food Hub, a year in which we:

Julicia and Scott on the road.

• Built and moved into our new cold storage facility;

• Transitioned 100% of our operations to our central location in Brattleboro; 

• Hired a new Sales Manager and two new Operations Coordinators; 

• Launched new delivery routes to the Burlington, the Upper Valley, and to the Mt. Sunapee area of NH;

• Purchased a second refrigerated delivery van;

• Brought on more than a dozen new producers.

Nathanael on the road with a new refrigerated van,

In 2019 the Food Hub sold $562,840 of local food to local customers, representing approximately $465,000 of revenue paid back to farms and food producers in our area and 41% growth over total sales in 2018. In our largest sales week of the 4th quarter 2019 we sold, aggregated, and delivered $18,400 of food.

All of this change and growth sets the stage for building Food Connects into a gateway for moving smaller-scale, specialty food products from northern New England to larger population centers to the south. In Q1 and Q2 of 2020, we will launch a new software platform for managing inventory, e-commerce, and accounting. This tool will revolutionize our ability to generate sales through promotions, maintain traceability for food safety standards, accurately track and price in overhead costs, and coordinate everyday product movement logistics in our local service area and beyond. In partnership with Equinox Food Brokers, we will lead an initiative to create a “catalog” of specialty products from VT and NH food hubs and start sales and delivery of those products to retailers and distributors in MA, CT, RI, and NY. 

Inside our new cooler.

In all, we expect that 2020 will be a year of seeking out—and capitalizing on—new opportunities to push the boundaries of what a rural New England food hub can do. 

Our Food Hub Hits Record Sales Growth

The cooler jam-packed with local food!

Thanks to the support of our customers and tireless work of our producers, the Food Hub is growing—and growing quickly! Between July and the end of September, Food Connects sold and transported $202,100 of local food. That means FC sales grew 60% over the previous quarter, and 61% over the same period in 2018. Our largest sales week totaled $19,055, which represents a 46% increase over our strongest week in 2018. Since this time last year, we have added 16 new producers to our regular catalog. Items from those new producers accounted for sales of more than $36,000 in Q3 and $60,000 in 2019 to-date.

While our small-but-mighty staff hustles to move more and more weekly orders, we are laying the groundwork for future growth. In Q3, among other projects, we:

• bought a second refrigerated van for our delivery fleet; 

• added an Operations Coordinator position; 

• saw our cooler/freezer facility construction project nearing completion; 

• began transitioning online sales to a new platform; 

• and launched a new delivery route to the Mt. Sunapee area in New Hampshire.

New cooler, mid construction.

The next two quarters will be no less busy. In October, we will finally move 100% of our operations into our new Brattleboro facility, where we’ll be able to handle, store, and care for products to the highest possible standards, and where we’ll have the space to continue this year’s rate of growth into 2020 and beyond. In Q4, we’ll begin regular routes to the Pioneer Valley, to the Upper Valley, and all the way to Burlington. With these new routes, Food Connects will tap into areas that have never before been served by a wholesale food hub. We’ll also access new products for our catalog, so that all our customers can enjoy an even broader selection of the exceptional foods this region has to offer.