April 2014 – The NC Growing Together project is working to support the development of Food Hubs as a promising way to address the aggregation and distribution challenges of moving local products into mainstream markets.
On April 11, NCGT arranged for Pilot Mountain Pride (PMP; a Winston-Salem area Food Hub) and TRACTOR (an Asheville-based food hub), to tour NCGT partner (and Lowes Foods sister company) Merchants Distributors Inc. (MDI).
MDI will be working with NCGT partner food hubs and an NCGT-sponsored Food Hub Research Intern to develop quality and packaging requirements for Food Hubs selling into their distribution network. NCGT is also supporting a Food Hub Apprentice at Feast Down East, otherwise known as the Southeastern NC Food Systems Program.
At the recent NCGT Research Symposium (see above), four of the research projects dealt directly or nbso online casino reviews indirectly with food hubs. One of the projects, headed by NCGT Supply Chain Fellow Sebastian Naskaris, examined the optimal distribution routes from Pilot Mountain Pride to different retail grocery stores, and compared the options of PMP delivering directly or doing a cross-docking option with a regional distributor.
Register Now! NCGT, along with the NC Cooperative Extension Service and the NC Farm Bureau, is sponsoring a Food Hub Information Exchange on May 6 in Winston-Salem. For more information and to register, click here.
This article originally appeared in the April 2014 NC Growing Together Newsletter.