The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Innovative food hub helps farmers, everyone else
It’s Friday afternoon, and people on bikes and in cars are pulling up to an enormous red-brick warehouse in Portland’s Central Eastside to pick up their “Greater Good” boxes. Packed with local food, the $50 boxes are organized by local grocery chain New Seasons and wholesaler Organically Grown Co. A similar pickup parade occurs on Wednesdays, when people cart away “Dock Boxes” of fish, shrimp and crab from popular Oregon Coast seafood restaurant Local Ocean.
And on Monday evenings, Farm Punk drops off its 50 community-supported agriculture shares here, to be delivered the next day to front porches via electric-assist trikes.
This is the “new normal” at the Redd on Salmon, an enterprise that’s optimizing Portland’s local food system and helping farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk adapt to a post-COVID reality.
Even in the before times, the Redd on Salmon served as a solution to the infrastructure dilemma for small and mid-size farmers, who face all kinds of logistical challenges as they try to get food to consumers.
Without the production volume to justify large-scale storage and transport systems, small farmers often spend a full day on the road each week, burning precious time and money driving to restaurants and supermarkets, dropping off their wares one at a time.
They also need to market and often sell their own goods — skills many farmers don’t know the first thing about.
The Redd solves all these problems in one fell swoop, acting as a distribution hub, an affordable storage space and a shared industrial kitchen. Ecotrust, the environmental think tank behind the Redd, also hosts a business accelerator, helping small farmers to scale up. Currently, the Redd supports more than 150 small to mid-size food-related businesses.
From 2018 to 2019, the facility’s core tenants saw a 45% increase in job creation and a 12% increase in jobs at or above the living wage.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the failures of the industrial food system. Grocery stores have run short of pasta, canned beans, flour, yeast and meat. And 20 gargantuan meat process plants were shuttered by coronavirus outbreaks.
Solving a conundrum
The Redd on Salmon is what is known as a food hub, a centrally located space that facilitates the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution and/or marketing of regionally produced food products.
Not only does the block-long space provide farmers a 2,000-square-foot cold storage facility (half freezer, half refrigeration), it has offices and “dry storage” space so local companies like Ground Up PDX (nut butters) and Hoss Sauce (hot sauce) can stash boxes and product at a central location closer to their customers.
The Redd solves the transport conundrum, too, with its main tenant, B-Line. A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “lastmile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites.
Trike drivers load up their insulated trailers with up to 600 pounds of product and drop off food at restaurants, grocery stores and corporate cafeterias like Airbnb and Google. (B-Line also has one truck for deliveries that are further than three miles away. Founder and CEO Franklin Jones is saving up for an electric one.)
By providing an all-in-one distribution hub to farmers who could never afford one on their own, the Redd was conceived as a way to support what food systems experts call “the agriculture of the middle.”
Ag of the middle producers are larger than those who sell via local farmers’ markets or community-supported agriculture, but smaller than those supplying globalized commodity markets.
With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, these producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets
like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices.
A food hub on steroids
Lest you think this is a quirky boutique solution unique to Portlandia, there are more than 350 food hubs around the country — from Durham, North Carolina, to Traverse City, Michigan. A traditional food hub offers aggregation, marketing and often distribution for agricultural products.
It might also serve as an incubator for micro-businesses. But the Redd takes it a step further, offering shared kitchens, a co-working space and even (across the street in the Redd East) an 8,000-square-foot event space with a state-of-the-art kitchen.
Jim Barham, an agricultural economist at the USDA, calls the Redd a food hub on steroids.
The Redd runs a two-year Ag of the Middle Accelerator Program that helps smaller-scale farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk learn the basics of marketing, accounting, taxation and business structure, as well as helping them apply for USDA value-added producer grants.
As part of their orientation, participants in the accelerator tour the Redd’s facilities; graduates often end up using the space in some way. More than 70 producers have either graduated from the accelerator program or are in it right now. The current cohort of 17 businesses increased their sales by $1.5 million, collectively, after one year in the program.
And the Redd campus — with its robust local food community — helped keep flour and hand sanitizer on some shelves while mainline distributors couldn’t keep up with the spike in demand.
“The whole pandemic,” said Jones, who hasn’t had to lay off anyone at B-Line as a result of his increased business, “really shone a spotlight on how resilient the local supply chain could be.”