From a Van and a Spreadsheet to $2 Million a Year

Nine years ago, Forest City Food Collective started with a donated used van, a spreadsheet, and a simple idea: if we handled the trucks, the cold storage, and the sales calls, small farmers could spend their time farming instead of chasing buyers. We were thrilled to move a couple hundred thousand dollars of local food a year back then. This year, we'll move more than $2 million, connecting over 50 farms and food producers to more than 150 buyers across Northeast and Central Ohio, from corner grocers to hospital kitchens.

That's the simple version of what a food hub does: it's the plumbing between a small farm and a buyer who wants their food but can't manage forty separate delivery schedules. We aggregate, store, deliver, and sell on behalf of producers, so farmers get paid fairly and buyers get fresh, local food without the logistics headache.

But scaling that plumbing turned out to be only half the job.

When the Federal Money Disappeared

For a while, a meaningful piece of our work ran on federal funding through USDA's Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program, which covered the cost of moving local food into food banks and pantries. It worked, food access contracts gave farmers something rare: reliable, high-volume, predictable sales, the kind that lets a small operation actually grow instead of just survive. Then that federal funding was cut.

We could have treated that as the end of the food-access side of our work. Instead, the farmers who'd grown their businesses around these relationships formed their own organization, Community Feed, to keep it going, and we went looking for local partners to replace what Washington had pulled back. That search has continued to lead us to new partners like Community Feed, Second Harvest Food Bank of North Central Ohio, the Hunger Network of Cleveland, who we're working with now to test new ways to fund farm-to-food-access work with local dollars instead of federal ones. It's early, but it's working: this season we're on pace to move nearly $500,000 worth of local food into food banks and pantries across Northeast Ohio, funded entirely outside the program that used to carry it. 

What This Looks Like for a Farmer

Dean Steiner raises and processes eggs, and he's good at it,  bringing new barns online, capitalizing new egg operations, growing his supply. What he didn't want to do was manage dozens of individual buyer relationships, run his own "milk run" deliveries, and handle the sales and onboarding paperwork that comes with selling to hospitals and institutions.

For almost two years, we've handled the distribution side so Dean can focus on the farming side. That's mattered more than usual this year: after last year's shock to the national egg market and the overproduction that followed it, a lot of small egg operations got squeezed hard. Dean was able to keep growing his other farm ventures instead of getting pulled into crisis management, because the sales and logistics side of his business was already handled.

That's the case for a food hub, in miniature: not charity, just infrastructure that lets a farmer farm.

Why We're Asking for You to Partner with Us!

None of this — the scale, the pivot when the federal money disappeared, keeping Dean's eggs moving through a rough year for his industry — happens without people funding the infrastructure in between. Yes, shopping and buying local helps, but at this critical moment, we need partners to invest in our mission and move this work forward. Trucks, cold storage, and the staff time to manage 150 buyer relationships aren't glamorous, but they're the reason a farmer gets paid and a food pantry gets fresh eggs instead of another case of canned goods. You can help grow the infrastructure needed to help us keep this model going. 

A sustaining gift of $10, $25, or $50 a month funds this mission. Our  push to move nearly $500,000 of local food to families who need it runs on partnerships and gifts like these. Every sustaining member is one more vote that this work is worth funding for the long haul — not just when the federal government says so.

[Become a sustaining member today. Visit https://forestcityfoodcollective.com/donors to learn more.

We'll have more to share soon about where this is headed. For now — thank you for being part of getting food from Dean's barn, and 50 other farms like his, onto a plate.