Cooperatives and Food Hubs

"The Food Hub Directory lists businesses or organizations that actively manage the aggregation, distribution, and marketing of source-identified food products to multiple buyers from multiple producers, primarily local and regional producers, to strengthen the ability of these producers to satisfy local and regional wholesale, retail, and institutional demand." Food hub managers may add their market to the database.

Links to USDA Rural Development’s resources for cooperatives, including education and research, funding opportunities, and data and statistics.

"This report presents an overview of the myriad issues facing food hubs across the United States." The authors includes a definition of a food hub, examine the rationale for food hub formation, and explore the economic role of food hubs. The report includes "some of the many organizational structures and services that food hubs offer, including the emerging area of virtual food hubs," and provides examples of the challenges and limitations faced by food hubs.

Multi-volume series identifying lessons learned from food hub failures and providing information and guidance to new and existing food hubs.

• Volume 1: Lessons from the Field "compiles a number of best business practices for starting or expanding a food hub enterprise" … and "includes operational profiles of the food hubs profiled in the report."  
• Volume 2: A Business Operations Guide "focuses on operational issues faced by food hubs," including organization, infrastructure, logistics, risks, and human resources
• Volume 3: Assessing Financial Viability “provides benchmarks for established and emerging food hubs to use as a comparison for assessing their own financial viability and for making strategic business decisions."
• Volume 4: Learning from Food Hub Closures provides six case studies and identifies six lessons for success

A Web portal on food hubs featuring webinars, publications, educational materials, contributed resources, food hub feasibility studies, conference proceedings, research and more.

A collection of publications and literature reviews that "explore opportunities and challenges for food hubs and VBSC implementation, and can be used as resources for participants interested in orienting their work toward values-based marketing and distribution."

"This resource guide is designed to give readers a greater understanding of what regional food hubs are, their impacts, strategies to assist their success and growth, and direction on where to find
financial resources to support them."

The objective is to improve profitability of local producers and increase accessibility to local foods. This toolkit, used as replicable system of data collection, will help users better understand their local food systems. We have found that the ability to identify a new population of local producers and resources has been crucial in offering further technical assistance, expanding our outreach, and connecting producers to markets, primarily a food hub serving producers in these four contiguous counties.

This feasibility study discusses the potential for success in the development and implementation of a food business incubator in the Sacramento region. (For the definition of, and more information on, kitchen incubators: https://www.agmrc.org/markets-industries/food/kitchen-incubators).

The study addressed the need for a central aggregation and distribution hub for local Central Texas producers seeking access to new or expanded market opportunities in the Austin metro area.