Published: December 18, 2017 on foodlandopportunity.org.
Food to Market Challenge Winner Launches Food Box Programs
On December 6, students and staff at Clemente High School received their first delivery of food boxes as part of the new Farm to Community Food Box program developed by Team Leverage, winner of the Food to Market Challenge. Team Leverage team members, FarmLogix, Top Box Foods and This Old Farm, developed the idea for scaling the supply of local food in Chicago, using Chicago Public Schools (CPS) as delivery sites. The launch at Clemente is the first demonstration of a local food delivery system at CPS that will expand in 2018 to include at least 10 additional school sites.
How it works
The CPS food box program taps into an existing relationship between FarmLogix and Aramark CPS. Since 2013, their Food to School program has provided locally sourced food for the CPS menu 12 times per month. The Team Leverage food box program brings the same local food model to homes. CPS students, their families and other members of the community can order food boxes online and then pick up at school locations. The school sites are situated in neighborhoods that lack access to healthy and affordable food and participating schools must be able to store refrigerated and frozen products.
Logistically, the program uses an existing supply chain. Each month, CPS’ food distributor receives and stores inventory from This Old Farm and then makes delivery on the days when other Farm to School products are scheduled, avoiding additional delivery fees and fuel costs. Linda Mallers, president of Farm Logix says, “The key to this program is leveraging existing relationships. I’ve worked with This Old Farm on a local meat program for Loyola University since 2015, so I was already familiar with their products and knew they could help us create this program. And we already had a relationship with Aramark CPS. This all came together because of demonstrated experience and established networks.”
Food box delivery
Delivering food boxes is a model that Top Box Foods has been using for almost six years to bring healthy food directly into the communities where healthy food options are limited. Using volunteers and partnering with a community network, Top Box makes deliveries of food boxes that translate to about 40,000 meals each month. As a result of the Challenge, Top Box has been able to expand their box offering to include meat that is locally and sustainably sourced.
In addition to offering meat boxes at over 20 established delivery sites, the award allowed Top Box to open up new routes to Evanston Township High School and to Olive-Harvey College, with plans to expand to all seven Chicago City Colleges in 2018. Sheila Kennedy, executive director of Top Box Foods says, “The Challenge award has allowed us to offer a wide selection of local meats, and the opportunity to expand the number of locations where we operate. The result is not only reaching more people, but now those in underserved communities have better access to quality meats. In 2018, our goal is to sell 3000 local meat boxes and reach about 600 families overall.”
Local and sustainable
The local food producer supporting the box programs is This Old Farm, a network of over 100 protein farmers based in Colfax, Indiana. When owner Jessica Smith connected with other members of Team Leverage, she was looking for a way to expand into the Chicago market. The box programs are creating the demand that she needs to build her pool of farmers, increasing the amount of local, sustainable meat in the Chicago region.
The Challenge award allowed This Old Farm to scale their operations: building out much-needed cooler space, a retail store, and activating technology to support food transparency. Jessica says, “Technology has been a big investment area for us. The award allowed us to build out basic systems for our operations, to track orders and, importantly, track food safety. Our labels show you the farm the meat came from, but we’re also able to trace back to the individual animal.”
The expansion was something that Jessica needed to do but she lacked the necessary financing. “What we’ve been able to do since the competition is advance our five-year business plan,” says Jessica. “Once we had the seed capital, we were able to get bank financing.” According to Jessica, there are no national benchmarks for processing facilities, so there isn’t enough data to give banks the comfort and assurance they require. Financial institutions need to see other entities invest in the local food system. Jessica says, “With the seed capital, the bank felt confident loaning to us for our first expansion.”
By the numbers
In 2017, Team Leverage distributed over 1000 protein boxes, or over 11,000 pounds of meat, feeding over 46,000 meals to Chicago residents. In 2018, the team expects to add additional sites, increasing sales for This Old Farm’s network of farmers and creating more opportunities for Chicago consumers to access local and sustainable meat products.
Food to Market Challenge finalists advance their projects
The Food to Market Challenge had only a single prize, but there were other compelling ideas that made it to the final round of the competition. Michael Davidson, senior program officer at The Chicago Community Trust says, “A few months after the competition ended, we followed up with all of the teams to see how they had progressed and if the Challenge had helped to elevate their work, and it turns out it had. Their solutions were all moving forward but needed a boost to continue doing so. Although we couldn’t support the teams at the same funding level as the Challenge winner, we were able to provide the funds they needed to take their solutions to the next level.”
For a few of the finalists, the Challenge was the impetus needed to move a concept into a working program. Irv Cernauskas of Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks is spearheading a network of on-farm aggregation hubs. Irv says, “The Challenge was a great catalyst for the formation of the Farmer Alliance as a vehicle to move forward our individual team efforts to build the local food system. Articulating our vision led to a significant grant award from the USDA. That’s been huge for us.”
In mid-November, the Kane County Board announced the development of a countywide food hub. The private hub will operate under the name Dream Distributors (the project competed in the Challenge as Good Food Partners Community Food Hub) and offer production, distribution and marketing services to small farms. The concept was the result of a feasibility study and food system plan that identified a food hub as a resource to connect farmers to wholesale buyers that would otherwise not be able to do business with them.
The Farm on Ogden food hub and training center is now fully funded and under construction. Angela Mason, associate vice president of Windy City Harvest at Chicago Botanic garden says, “The Food to Market Challenge helped us refine our vision for the Farm on Ogden and the role of partners. The video and buzz created for the Challenge definitely helped galvanize interest and led, in part, to the project gaining momentum last fall. The facility at the heart of the project—the food hub and training center—will launch operations in January and takes our work in Lawndale a huge step forward. We look forward to contributing to a stronger local food system in Chicago to benefit communities.”
The Artisan Grain Collaborative (AGC) is building demand for new, artisan, food-grade crop varieties in Chicago markets through a systems approach that connects the key players throughout the grain value chain, including chefs, bakers, nonprofits, farmers, millers, and researchers. “While the need to better align the grain value chain has been discussed in the Chicago foodshed for years, the Food to Market Challenge provided the motivation for a variety of practitioners to come together and work under the Artisan Grain Collaborative banner,” says Ben Shorofsky, programs specialist at Delta Institute. “The planning we did during the competition and through the subsequent Food:Land:Opportunity grant has enabled AGC members to begin testing a variety of small-batch crops and develop educational materials to promote local grain use to practitioners and the general public. The team has leveraged this work to receive a highly competitive USDA Local Food Promotion Program Grant in September 2017, which will provide critical support for the AGC over the next three years.”
Lenore Beyer, director of conservation programs for Kinship Foundation says that the Challenge projects have demonstrated the potential for Chicago to organize and scale its local food economy: “We see common themes in all of these projects. Each project uses a different technique to address distribution challenges by creating an integrated food value chain or food hub. But all of the projects are breaking down fragmentation barriers and working collaboratively with new partners. The teams are using innovative methods to tap into existing food distribution systems, creating new networks developed by local food producers. All of these projects validate the strategies advocated by Food: Land: Opportunity to create a resilient local food economy.”