Food Dignity started by running a food pantry but not runs a food hub.

From the beginning, what set our work apart was a commitment to listen carefully to the people using that pantry and to take seriously the barriers they experienced in accessing food. We believe in a simple principle: everyone, regardless of income or circumstance, deserves access to food with dignity.

That commitment to listening changed the way we understood the problem.

Food insecurity was never only about whether enough food existed. People told us about transportation barriers, limited access to fresh produce, rising food costs, chronic health concerns, and the difficulty of finding food that was both affordable and nourishing.

After years of receiving end-of-life produce donations—and sometimes spoiled food we had to throw away—we realized that the same commitment to listening needed to be applied to the food system itself. We started following the food upstream and listening to farmers.

We came to learn that farmers in our region faced a different set of barriers. Small and mid-sized farms could grow food for their communities, but reaching larger community buyers—schools, hospitals, nonprofits, food banks, and other institutions—required infrastructure most individual farms could not reasonably build on their own.

Someone has to receive deliveries from multiple farms. Someone has to aggregate products into orders large enough for institutional buyers. Someone has to provide refrigeration, storage, inventory management, transportation, food-safety systems, invoicing, and coordination.

What Northeast Pennsylvania needed was not simply more food. We needed stronger food-system infrastructure.

In 2023, that realization led Food Dignity to establish the Wilkes-Barre Area Career & Technical Center (WBACTC) CONNECT Food Hub.

The missing middle of the food system

For decades, much of the American food system has moved toward scale, consolidation, and efficiency. Conventional supply chains are very good at moving enormous quantities of standardized products efficiently across national and global markets. At the other end of the spectrum, farmers markets, farm stands, CSA programs, and other direct-to-consumer models have helped rebuild relationships between farmers and the people who eat their food. Both systems have strengths. But there is a gap between them.

A farmer may be able to sell 40 bunches of kale at a farmers market. A school district may need 4,000 pounds of vegetables delivered on a schedule, packed to specification, invoiced through a purchasing system, and accompanied by food-safety documentation. The challenge is not necessarily that farmers cannot grow the food. The challenge is building the infrastructure that allows many smaller producers to collectively serve larger markets.

Food hubs emerged in part to fill this “missing middle.”

They aggregate food from multiple farms, store and distribute it, coordinate orders, and connect smaller producers with buyers that would otherwise be difficult for them to reach. That makes a regional food hub much more than a warehouse.

Food hubs are powerful connective infrastructure

A functioning food hub might receive produce from ten farms in a morning, consolidate those deliveries, place products into cold storage, track inventory, assemble orders for multiple institutions, coordinate transportation, handle invoices, and make sure every buyer receives the right food at the right time. Those logistical functions matter. But the most promising food hubs do something else as well: they organize those logistics around a set of values.

A conventional distributor is designed to optimize efficiency, scale, and price. A values-based regional food hub can ask additional questions: Who grew this food? What were they paid? Can smaller farms participate? Are purchasing dollars staying within the region? Are institutions gaining access to fresher food? Are communities that have historically had the least access to fresh food benefiting from the system?

Food hubs can function as social, economic, and physical infrastructure at the same time.

They can strengthen relationships between farmers, institutions, community organizations, and consumers while providing the practical infrastructure necessary to make those relationships work at scale.

Food Dignity came to the food hub from a different direction

Many food hubs begin with a market question: how can farmers reach more customers? Food Dignity arrived at the same infrastructure from the other side of the food system. We began with food access. Our question was: How do we make fresh, locally grown food reliably available to people who are least likely to have access to it?

In that sense, the CONNECT Food Hub is a different kind of middle. It sits between farmers who need dependable markets and communities that need dependable access to fresh food. And because CONNECT is located within the Wilkes-Barre Area Career & Technical Center, it adds another relationship to that system: young people.

Students participate in receiving deliveries, inventory management, cold storage, order preparation, logistics, and distribution. The infrastructure needed to move regional food also becomes infrastructure for workforce development.

That combination—dependable markets for farmers, community food access, and youth workforce development—is what makes the model especially powerful.

Building resilience before the emergency

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how vulnerable highly centralized supply chains can be.

At the same time that conventional food systems were experiencing major disruptions, many regional food organizations found themselves rapidly changing where food came from, where it went, and how it was distributed.

Regional infrastructure matters partly because it creates options. A food hub maintains relationships with producers, buyers, storage facilities, drivers, community organizations, and institutions before an emergency occurs. When circumstances change, those relationships can be reorganized much more quickly than a new supply chain can be built from scratch. That makes food hubs potentially important pieces of regional resilience. The goal is not to replace national and global food systems with entirely local ones. It is to make sure communities have more than one way to feed themselves.

That is what makes the CONNECT Food Hub powerful. It is not powerful simply because it stores and distributes food. It is powerful because it creates relationships and infrastructure between parts of the food system that are too often disconnected: local farmers, young people, institutions, community organizations, and families. By strengthening those connections before they are urgently needed, we are building a regional food system that is more capable of feeding people with dignity.

Article and Art Credit: Rebecca Garofano 

Citations:

• Jablonski, B. B. R., et al. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 on food supply chains. Agricultural and Resource Economics Review.
• Berti, G., & Mulligan, C. (2020). Competitiveness of small farms and innovative food supply chains. Sustainability.
• Low, S. A., et al. (2020). Trends in U.S. local and regional food systems. USDA ERS.
• Guptill, A., & Wilkins, J. (2022). Scaling values-based food supply chains. JAFSCD.
• White, M. M., et al. (2023). Food hubs, racial equity, and regional food systems. Food Policy.