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!

Food Connects Builds Food Security Alongside Economic Recovery and Resiliency

Food Connects continues to grow despite COVID-19 food supply chain disruption, proving the value of local food systems for resiliency and economic recovery.

Food Connects raised over $700,000 in grants over the last six months to increase community food security, allowing the organization to step into a larger leadership role in the regional food economy. We saw our food sales more than double since the pandemic struck, highlighting the rising demand for fresh, local food.

A combination of federal, private foundation, and corporate grants will add capacity to Food Connects’ local food distribution system. These projects are critical for food security and economic recovery. The most recent, $184,250 from the Northern Borders Regional Commission, will fund further infrastructure development—including cold storage, warehouse equipment, and a new refrigerated vehicle. These pieces are essential to our Food Hub’s ability to increase the capacity of 90 farms and food producers, enable producers to reach new markets within and outside of Vermont, and better address food insecurity in the region.

Current fleet of 3 vehicles.

Over 10 other private and corporate grants totaling over $400,000, from organizations including the Vermont Community Foundation and New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, helped Food Connects cover the cost of a new walk-in cooler, a fourth refrigerated truck, and three new staff members—growing the organization’s capacity to support local farmers and food producers.

Food Connects currently works with over 90 farms and food producers and over 135 wholesale customers. Our reach extends beyond the Brattleboro community, into the Keene and Peterborough areas of New Hampshire, the Bennington region, and the Upper and Pioneer Valleys, as well as to similar food hubs around New England. As a social enterprise, Food Connects focuses on making it easier for local food businesses to buy wholesale from local farms and food producers and on building shorter, more community-based supply chains that are less reliant on national or global networks and food suppliers. 

The funding from these generous organizations couldn’t have come at a better time. When the conventional national and international food supply chain struggled with disruptions and shortages that left many store shelves empty, Food Connects stepped in to offer our local, rural communities weekly deliveries of foods produced in our little slice of New England.

Food Connects saw its sales double since the pandemic hit and keeping up with the increasingly higher demand for local food requires more internal resources and improved infrastructure. “We are reaching our 2021 sales goals in 2020 and it has been a challenge to keep up with staffing, systems, and infrastructure needs,” says Executive Director and Founder Richard Berkfield. “We realize we are very privileged to have these problems of rapid growth while so many businesses are struggling or closing.”

The combination of grant funds allows us to hire three new positions—a Food Hub Operations Coordinator, Sales Associate, and Local Food Procurement Coordinator. This new capacity will improve internal operations to more efficiently serve more local farmers and food producers and develop new markets to a larger geographic area. With the addition of these new employees, the Food Connects team will have quadrupled in size in the past two years.

“It's a strange feeling to see all this growth during such a challenging time,” says Berkfield. “It's become clear that what we do really matters in response to supply chain disruption, food security, and building economic resilience and recovery. We are all feeling very proud of our work and grateful to be doing it, which lessens the emotional strain of day-to-day COVID-19 reality and future uncertainty.”