Food processing and community sustainability project

Food processing and community sustainability project

Summary

In recent years, St. Lawrence County, New York, has seen several successful efforts to provide profitable market outlets for local small-scale farms. But further expansion of market opportunities and local food choices is hindered by the lack of a food-processing facility to add value to locally raised farm products.

GardenShare, a community-based nonprofit organization with wide experience and visibility in St. Lawrence County, proposed to address this problem through a five-stage process to establish a viable food-processing facility in the county.

We sought SARE funding to help us accomplish the first three stages of this process:

1. Preliminary Planning to identify key stakeholders in the local farm, restaurant, food retail, and local government communities and conduct in-depth interviews with them to understand the nature of the demand; to conduct fact-finding trips and a literature review.

2. One-Day Forum for fifty stakeholders to hear presentations about successful food-processing facilities elsewhere and to facilitate brainstorming about how best to create such a facility here.

3. Evaluation to analyze all collected information in order to inform the development of formal market research and a business plan.

Stages 1–3 ran from June 2007 to May 2008, laying the foundation for the final two stages: (4) market research and (5) business plan.

The establishment of a local food-processing facility will make our community more sustainable by conserving energy currently expended on long-distance food imports; by developing the local economy as local consumers spend more of their food dollars on products processed locally; and by empowering local consumers to use their purchasing activities and effective demand to help restructure the food system toward local sustainability.

Objectives/Performance Targets

In part, we hoped that the one-day facilitated brainstorming forum would raise community awareness about the value of food processing facilities as part of a comprehensive regional food system and would prompt some “visioning” about the possibilities. But more specifically, we expected that the information gathered at the forum would provide GardenShare with the following:

1. Clarity about how to pursue a GardenShare food-processing facility.

2. Direction about what kind of facility is most needed and viable.

3. Identities of the most enthusiastic stakeholders, especially volunteers willing to devote serious time to help GardenShare develop this project.

4. Informational resources to undertake formal market research and to create a business plan.

In addition, we believed that completing Stages 1 to 3 would generate enthusiasm for the project among local farmers and community-development professionals. That is, querying individuals on their knowledge and perceived need for such a facility, combined with the one-day facilitated brainstorming forum, would help to focus attention on the potential for expanding local marketing opportunities for farmers.

In order to accomplish these goals by the end of Stage 3, we wanted to complete these measurable tasks:

Conduct in-depth interviews with 25 to 30 key stakeholders:

Ten farmers producing for local markets.
Five food service managers at local schools.
Three local restaurant owners.
Six managers or owners of local grocery stores.
Two St. Lawrence County economic development officers.
Two Chamber of Commerce leaders from the area.
The managers of two functioning food processing facilities.

Complete two fact-finding trips by the project leader and seven key stakeholders to two operating food-processing facilities.

Sponsor a one-day forum for 50 stakeholders at which we identify the following:

Eight to ten volunteers willing to devote substantial time to pursuing this project.
Type of processing facility to be developed.
Likely products to be produced and an estimate of the market potential for those products.

Additional informational resources to inform the development of formal market research and a business plan.

Accomplishments/Milestones

We believe the Food Processing and Community Sustainability Project has succeeded in our goal of raising community awareness about the value of food processing facilities as part of a comprehensive regional food system and has prompted much “visioning” of the possibilities. But more specifically, this project has provided GardenShare with the following:

Increased clarity and direction about the kind of facility most needed and viable in St. Lawrence County. We have succeeded in eliminating some options, such as establishing a commercial kitchen for the development of new food products (because Nelson Farms already makes this service available to food entrepreneurs in our area). We have begun to focus on a cold storage facility as the most likely opportunity to expand off-season marketing opportunities for small-scale farms in St. Lawrence County.

Identified key stakeholders in food retailing who are potential food buyers; key stakeholders among food distributors who are potential collaborators in transport and storage.

Compiled basic anecdotal and statistical research among both the producers and buyers of local foods, which will be of use in further market research.

We are now ready to move forward into the final two stages of our process: (4) market research and (5) business plan.

Since we were able to manage our project even more efficiently than we had planned, and our two resource people at the forum were unexpectedly generous in sharing their time with us, a portion of our grant was unspent by the end of May. We therefore requested, and SARE approved, an amendment to our grant and a no-cost extension of six months so that we might enter stage 4, market research.

Our advisory committee has met several times with Thomas Plastino, executive director of CITEC, Inc., a local firm with wide experience in market research. CITEC has provided us with a Scope of Work, which our committee has reviewed and accepted, and provided the draft agreement of a feasibility study.

Funding for this feasibility study ($6,000) will come in part from the unspent SARE grant money ($3,000). The remaining $3,000 is representative of considerable “buy-in” by the local community. This funding is being provided by the dining service at SUNY Potsdam (a major purchaser of local food); the agriculture task force of the North Country Symposium of St. Lawrence University (whose dining service is another major purchaser of local food); and North Country Grown (a farmers’ cooperative that would benefit from a food storage/processing facility).

We expect the feasibility study to commence this summer and to take about eight weeks to complete. Based on the results of that study, we would pursue the final stage in our process: the formulation of a business plan for creating a facility.

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

Stage 1: Preliminary Planning

To begin our project, we first established a Project Advisory Committee of GardenShare board members and key stakeholders:

Philip Harnden, project leader and director of GardenShare.

Katherine Lang, board member of GardenShare and project coordinator of the North Country Regional Foods Initiative.

Dr. Heather Sullivan-Catlin, board member of GardenShare and chair of the sociology department at SUNY Potsdam.

Sue Rau, coordinator of the North Country Grown Cooperative.

Clive Chambers, executive director of Cornell Cooperative Extension of St. Lawrence County.

George Arnold, director of PACES Dining Services at SUNY Potsdam.

Dr. Rick Welsh, sociologist at Clarkson University specializing in food systems issues.

Doug Welch, a community member involved in promoting local food and small-scale agriculture.

Over the course of the year, this committee met regularly to plan, oversee, and evaluate the project. We’ve also worked out some rules of thumb for guiding us toward our goal:

1. Find the shortest path between the producers and the buyers that we already have.

2. Keep it simple: fewest moving parts, best chance for success.

3. Do it well: lay a solid foundation upon which to build and expand later.

In July, two members of the committee visited ComLinks, a nonprofit organization in Malone, New York, that warehouses and distributes food to food pantries across the region. They interviewed the manager and toured the cold-storage facility and a commercial kitchen, which ComLinks is in the process of installing.

In August, the entire committee toured Nelson Farms in Morrisville, New York, and interviewed the director, Dave Evans. Nelson Farms is a nonprofit, state-of-the-art facility equipped to help food entrepreneurs every step of the way from initial concept to final marketing. On this visit, we realized that it would be pointless to try to duplicate this kind of service in St. Lawrence County since Nelson Farms is more advanced and sophisticated than we could match any time soon, and it is easily accessible to food entrepreneurs in our area. Instead, it would be helpful to publicize the availability of this service to would-be food entrepreneurs in St. Lawrence County.

Meanwhile, the advisory committee began identifying stakeholders from two key sectors: food service professionals who are potential buyers of food from our facility and small-scale farmers who are potential suppliers/users of such a facility. We invited several stakeholders from each of these two groups to participate in focus groups led by the two sociologists on our committee.

In October, three professionals drawn from senior care, university, and public school food services participated in a focus group for potential buyers. This session explored such issues as current food purchases and incentives, interest in purchasing local foods, and barriers to such purchases.

In November, a focus group was held with eight small-scale farmers and also the director of the New Strategies for Farm Viability Project. This session explored interest in market expansion, food processing possibilities, and challenges such as transportation distances, labor shortages, and regulatory issues.

In December, to solicit as much input from farmers as possible, a questionnaire was mailed to 99 small-scale farmers in St. Lawrence County. The survey invited feedback regarding what kind of facility, if any, could help them expand their production; where such a facility would best be located; and what challenges and opportunities local food processing could present. Twelve surveys were completed and returned to us, showing a wide range of responses but a strong general interest in the possibility of a facility to help farmers expand their market opportunities beyond the growing season.

In January 2008, seven committee members traveled to Rochester to visit Foodlink, a nonprofit involved in many aspects of food processing. The Foodlink Farmers Fulfillment Center offers farm pickup and delivery via refrigerated trucks; web-based ordering and centralized billing; and product packaging and storage. We toured the Foodlink cold storage facility and flash-freezing operation and interviewed the director, project manager, and several key staff members.

The project advisory committee reviewed what had been learned over the past several months of research. We had surveyed area farmers and held focus groups to interview key people in local agriculture and food retailing. We had sought out the advice of more than a hundred people and listened carefully to what they had told us. Committee members had also taken field trips to visit three food-processing operations elsewhere.

We had considered shared-use community kitchens, blast freezers, refrigeration facilities, and meal-assembly operations. We had discussed regional branding, food business incubation, specialty marketing, farm-to-school, restaurant sourcing, and job creation. In addition, we had looked at the regulatory challenges and at past attempts to create such facilities. Along the way, we had discarded some of our early assumptions, and we had explored some new directions.

Among a segment of the farmers, we identified a strong interest in developing farm-specific food products, such as jams, jellies, sauerkraut, apple cider. This led us to realize that one positive but unanticipated outcome of this project could be to publicize the services offered to just such food entrepreneurs by Nelson Farms in Morrisville. We began exploring how this could be incorporated into our Forum.

But gradually our attention began to focus on the idea of a cold-storage facility where small-scale farmers could store their excess crops and meats for later sale.

With such a facility, vegetable growers, for example, could expand their production of certain vegetable crops, store the excess that cannot be sold immediately, and then sell the stored vegetables to university dining services when the colleges are in session over the winter. Meat could be similarly stored in a freezer section of the facility.

This would follow the rules of thumb that our committee had given itself:

1. Find the shortest path between the producers and the buyers that we already have: The buyers (university dining services) are already poised to buy more local food; North Country Grown Cooperative already has farmers organized to connect with this market.

2. Keep it simple; fewest moving parts, best chance for success: This facility would be relatively affordable to construct and simple to operate.

3. Do it well; lay a solid foundation upon which to build and expand later: A successful cold-storage operation could later expand into more complex forms of food processing (such as blast freezing and shredding).

Other uses for such a facility would also be possible. CSA farmers, for example, could offer winter shares to their members by storing root crops and other farm products in the facility.

We were ready to present our findings and invite responses from the community.

Stage 2: Public Forum

In April, we held a public forum on the theme “Food Storage/Processing Opportunities for Small-Scale Farmers.” Invitations were sent to 155 people; 60 attended in addition to organizers and presenters. Attenders included 32 food producers, 8 food buyers, and 31 others (including representatives from economic development agencies, chambers of commerce, local universities, the county legislature, health agencies, nonprofit organizations, as well as other people interested in expanding local food consumption in St. Lawrence County).

The forum’s morning session, “Benefiting from a Cold Storage Facility,” invited responses to the proposal to establish a cold-storage facility where small-scale farmers could store their excess crops and meats for later sale. It began with a panel presentation, a summation of the information we had collected over the past ten months from farmers and food service professionals and a discussion of the benefits such a facility could have for food retailers and restaurateurs and for our local economy. One of our sociologists reviewed the focus group findings. Then a university food buyer presented the perspective of a food buyer, and the coordinator of a farmers’ marketing cooperative gave the perspective of a food producer. The floor was then opened to questions and comments from the audience.

The challenges of agriculture in the North Country—weather, distances, labor—were clearly articulated by a number of participants. But opportunities also emerged, as two food distributors expressed an interest in collaborating with GardenShare to help move the project forward. The executive director of the county Chamber of Commerce also voiced support and an offer to help facilitate meetings with economic developers.

Two note takers recorded the comments, suggestions, and concerns voiced. Participants were also given the opportunity to write out their comments and leave these cards with us (six did). Other suggestions came to light informally during the lunch break.

A lunch was served highlighting as many local foods as could be obtained in April.

The afternoon session was entitled “Developing Your Own Food Products.” This session was the result of our finding that many producers are interested in developing their own food products. Dave Evans of Nelson Farms presented the services his organization offers to beginning and established food entrepreneurs. Olga Padilla-Zakour, director of the Northeast Center for Food Entrepreneurship, discussed the technical assistance available from her center and answered questions about equipment, product development, and food regulations.

In the days following the forum, the committee met to debrief and to review our findings from the past year.