True story: How a fish went to school

Apr 102013
 

Julie Mack, Healthy Active Schools Coordinator for the Centennial School District, was looking for fish. She needed enough for a district with a student enrollment of 6, 700 and it had to be caught or processed in Oregon.

Enter FoodHub.

Mack searched the online directory FoodHub, Ecotrust’s network that connects food buyers and sellers. She found Lyf Gildersleeve of Flying Fish Company. Gildersleeve fishmongers from a 176 square foot shack on Southeast Hawthorne in Portland. He set Mack up with an order of cod filet from Astoria.

Mack is using a $29,033 grant from the state Department of Education to bring more local foods into school cafeterias to expand food choices and help support local food producers. She presents new, locally-based dishes to the district on Wednesdays through the middle of May. That cod from Astoria featured once last month and will return to the plates again on April 22.

Centennial is one of 11 Oregon districts receiving a total of $189,000 in grants through a Farm to School bill passed by the 2011 Legislature. Ecotrust research made the case for that bill. Since 2007, Ecotrust has also been active in connecting schools, farmers, and other producers as the Western Regional Lead agency for the National Farm to School Network.

The new grants not only support purchases from farmers but fishermen as well, through what is becoming referred to as “Boat to School.”

FoodHub directly connects schools with local food distributors, like Flying Fish Company. Photo: Lyf Gildersleeve

FoodHub directly connects schools with local food distributors, like Flying Fish Company. Photo: Lyf Gildersleeve

Stacey Sobell, Farm to School Manager for Ecotrust, recently pointed out to OPB’s Ecotrope that grants play a key role in making more local food available to schools, and establishing the connections between all sorts of new producers and large local buyers like schools.

 Sobell said “center of the plate” protein items are a new focus for schools looking to serve local lunch food, and seafood is gaining traction in a handful of schools nationwide.

“This is a big new area that’s really taking off,” she said.

FoodHub and Farm to School are central to Ecotrust’s efforts to build a resilient food system that offers fresh, healthy food to all residents, economically viable food value chains that fairly compensate and respect the dignity of all participants, and methods of food production that renew our resources.

Flying Fish Company is the sort of company that forms the heart of that system.

Recently one of four nominees for Edible Portland’s Local Hero Award in the Retailer category, Flying Fish was first opened by Lyf’s father, Craig Gildersleeve, in 1979 in Sandpoint, Idaho. The family business now has branches in Colorado, Utah, and Oregon.

Flying Fish was recently one of four nominees for Edible Portland's Local Hero Award in the retailer category. Photo: www.flyingfishcompany.com

Flying Fish was recently one of four nominees for Edible Portland’s Local Hero Award in the retailer category.
Photo: www.flyingfishcompany.com

Flying Fish’s mission statement reads, “We would never sell anything we wouldn’t serve at our own dinner table.” They’re the kind of small business that can leverage FoodHub’s marketing and networking tools to find buyers like Centennial.

In addition to selling responsibly harvested seafood, including Oregon Dungeness crab and Oregon albacore tuna, the company also offers grassfed meat, including beef, lamb, pork, elk, and bison. Their specialty products range from hand-churned butter to wasabi. To continue stocking the shelves when seasonal products run dry, Flying Fish is now selling products like smoked salmon, sauerkraut, soup, crab and salmon cakes. Gildersleeve said he’ll be looking to FoodHub to help stock that supply chain as well.

Ecotrust names Oborne new Director of Food and Farms

Mar 282013
 

Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub.Ecotrust President Astrid Scholz has announced that Amanda Oborne will take over as Ecotrust’s Director of Food and Farms.  Oborne, who heads Ecotrust’s FoodHub initiative, was introduced as the new Food and Farms director at Ecotrust’s Local Hero Awards last week.

“After a national search that yielded an impressive candidate pool, we were pleased to discover that the best candidate was right here in our midst,” Scholz said.

Amanda Oborne, Ecotrust's new director of food and farms.

Amanda Oborne, Ecotrust’s new Director of Food and Farms.

Oborne joined FoodHub as sales and marketing director in 2010 and took over as director in 2012. She has helped build the online wholesale marketplace’s membership to 4,500, spread  across six Western states.  Fast Company named FoodHub one of the top 10 most innovative initiatives in food in 2011, and the site has become an asset for large institutional buyers – particularly schools – looking to source food from regional producers. It has also opened up new markets for rural producers: 20% of members are located in rural counties, and FoodHub allows them to quickly find and connect with urban buyers.

Oborne has twice spoken at White House food summits and regularly appears at national forums on food and agriculture, including the National Good Food Network, SXSW Eco, and the Chefs’ Collaborative National Summit. She has advised on food policy for Multnomah County and Portland Mayor Charlie Hales.

Oborne will focus on developing strong regional markets for locally produced food; building the infrastructure required for regional food systems; and cultivating the land and businesses that form the heart of that regional system.

“Amanda’s leadership, can-do attitude, highly networked approach and range of experience will serve the program and Ecotrust well, both now and into the future,” Scholz said.

Formerly direct marketing manager for Intuit’s QuickBooks small business accounting software, Oborne also served as executive director of a regional trade association in the Pacific Northwest. She has a master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern University (2000) and a BS from Washington University in St. Louis (1995).

FoodHub goes East to build distribution network with OR FoodEx

Oct 032012
 

FoodHub, Ecotrust’s online food marketplace, and Boston-based social venture OR FoodEx  announced today their intention to partner on a new joint venture designed to overcome the single biggest barrier to building robust regional food economies: distribution.

FoodHub’s a “meet market” for producers and wholesale buyers, and it now has 4,000 members across the West.

The new venture will integrate the technology, teams, and expertise of the two entities to create an online matchmaking and on-the-ground logistics solution that helps wholesale food buyers overcome a host of obstacles to sourcing food from local producers.

Beginning in 2013, the combined platform will build connections and online transactions between wholesale buyers — including universities, corporate cafeterias, hospitals, schools, and retailers — and local producers, and it will leverage FoodEx’s existing trucking and logistics infrastructure to deliver products from multiple producers on a consolidated delivery and invoicing system.

The integrated FoodHub + FoodEx system will retain the source identity throughout the value chain, while online profiles will provide stories and pictures from the producers for chefs and grocers to share with eaters.

Once the new group refines the combined model in New England, the joint venture will seek to replicate it in FoodHub’s home region on the West Coast.

Most importantly, the innovative model will put more of the value created in the wholesale food supply chain into the pockets of farmers, fishermen, and ranchers. This will allow them to stay on their land and in their boats, and make food production more attractive to the next generation, all of which will be imperative in the years to come as demand for local food continues to grow.

Founder and CEO of OR FoodEx, JD Kemp, and Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub, announced the partnership while presenting on a panel at the SXSW Eco conference in Austin, TX today.  Along with Ecotrust’s executive vice president and panel moderator Astrid Scholz, Oborne and Kemp used an infographic recently released by FoodHub called the Local Food Technology Landscape as a platform for both envisioning an alternative food system and calling attention to the newly formed partnership.

Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub.

The vision of the yet-to-be-named joint venture is to create an alternative, regionally-based and transparent food value chain across the nation. As Spencer Beebe, founder of Ecotrust, explained, “Ecotrust and FoodEx are in perfect alignment on the goal of this new company – we’re going to change the food system.”

FoodEx CEO Kemp said, “To change the system, we have to create an economically viable, workable alternative. Independent, family-scale farmers, ranchers, fishermen, dairies, and specialty producers are making an enormous amount of good, fresh, healthy food in this country. There are also millions of people who care about where their food comes from and how it was produced. The system doesn’t work for any of them right now.”

Background

Kemp launched FoodEx in 2009 out of warehouses in Boston and Athol, MA, distributing products for independent producers primarily to specialty retailers and grocery co-ops. A systems-optimization engineer by trade, Kemp had a vision for what systemic change in the food supply chain could look like, and he knew it required a much bigger scale. In the fall of 2011, FoodEx launched a pilot distribution project to aggregate supply from local farmers and deliver the products to the foodservice contractor at two area universities.

In early 2012, FoodHub’s Oborne was surveying innovations in the local food and technology sector and called Kemp to learn about his business. The two hit it off immediately. “I remember proposing the partnership that we’re now executing the very first time I spoke to JD. We shared the same mission, but were coming at it from opposite ends,” she explained. “With FoodHub we had built a very user-friendly platform for helping local food buyers and sellers find each other and connect, but we couldn’t solve their distribution challenges. FoodEx had pioneered a disruptive model for regional-scale fulfillment, but their platform was missing the producers’ stories and all the relationship-building tools we had developed. It felt like peanut butter and jelly.”

Merging technologies and teams is a lot harder than making a sandwich, however. FoodHub is based in Portland and FoodEx in Boston, so the new venture will take some time to build. Oborne emphasized that FoodHub is committed to maintaining and enhancing its existing networks. “There are more than 4,000 food producers, wholesale buyers, and industry suppliers who are actively using FoodHub to connect, and we are 100% committed to facilitating those connections,” she said. “FoodHub members will also be the first to know about and have access to the new integrated solution when it’s launched here, so now is a great time to join.”

Kemp added, “We have the wheels on the ground in Boston. With this partnership and our combined platforms, our producers will have one more tool in their kit to help market their products to an ever-increasing array of buyers hungry for local food. We couldn’t have asked for a better solution to both enhance and streamline our offerings.”

Ecotrust’s Scholz told audiences at SXSW Eco that “this is just the kind of unusual alliance and 21st-century solution we are constantly seeking at Ecotrust. It seems a natural evolution of the work we’ve been doing to build robust regional food systems for the past 20 years.  We couldn’t be more excited about the potential for this partnership to reshape the food system for greater good.”

FoodHub infographic captures local food/tech landscape

Sep 262012
 

The team behind FoodHub, Ecotrust’s online marketplace that helps local food buyers and sellers connect, has just released Local Food/Tech Landscape, an interactive guide to innovation at the intersection of local food and technology.

FoodHub’s new infographic highlights the main players in the local food/technology space.

As Amanda Oborne, FoodHub’s director put it, “There has been an incredible proliferation of start-ups and innovators in the food and technology space, all working to create an alternative, regionally-based food system in this country. I believe the opportunities for collaboration among those innovators are limitless. The first step in making those connections is understanding the space and the players. We created this model to get some clarity ourselves, and then realized others might find it useful, too.”

Local Food/Tech Landscape is an interactive infographic that categorizes local food/technology innovations by their role in a new alternative food system – farming, aggregating, distributing, finding and buying. There is also a resources section, which highlights the ecosystem of service providers offering both support to innovators and help in advancing the food movement directly.

To be included in the infographic, innovations must have 1) technology integral to their model ( a snappy website isn’t enough); 2) some minimum criteria or stated focus on local, sustainable or regional food and; 3) be available nationally, or being piloted regionally with an intention to scale up.

Oborne explains that the infographic takes a tip from mainstream eaters and uses the word “local” as a catch-all for local, regional, sustainable, socially responsible, humane, clean, “good” or any relevant combination of specific claims related to production methods. “We understand that ‘local’ is being used as short hand for all of these different ideas — it’s not just about mileage.”

The designer and developer of the Local Food/Tech Landscape is Will Moore, FoodHub’s lead developer. “This was an exciting project to work on because it’s right on the leading edge of this new industry,” Moore said. “Understanding this landscape has the potential to catalyze some very fruitful collaborations.”

Astrid Scholz, executive vice president of Ecotrust, said the infographic project flows from Ecotrust’s efforts to deploy technology for social good. “The local food and technology space is advancing the food movement around the country, and we will continue to facilitate that change as best we can.”

The team readily acknowledges that with new innovations in the local food/technology sector being launched rapid fire, it will take some work to keep the data in the guide updated. There is a comment form on the graphic where suggestions for additional innovations can be submitted.

FoodHub spreads the love of local food across the Pacific Northwest

Aug 082012
 

Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub

For those of us who live here, the oft-celebrated agricultural productivity in the Pacific Northwest provides residents with some of the best fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy to hit our plates and palates. In Portland, legions of adventurous eaters flock to restaurant tables and farmers markets hoping to find local food and connect with the people who grow it. Still, despite a growing interest in knowing where our food comes from (sometimes too much interest), individuals don’t often have the buying power it takes to keep more local foods within state lines.

Even in a metropolitan area that boasts more than 40 farmers markets, only one to two percent of Portland-area growers sell their products at those markets. Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub –Ecotrust’s online networking tool for wholesale food buyers and sellers — reminds us that in order to support regional agriculture, we often have to scale up.

It’s caterers, restaurants, bakeries, and other wholesale buyers that can underwrite a even stronger local food scene because their purchases of meats, dairy, eggs and produce in bulk often leads to more lucrative relationships for local farmers, ranchers and fishermen. FoodHub facilitates the connections between local growers and large buyers — even larger institutional buyers, such as schools or hospitals, helping create substantive changes on a broad level.

In a recent interview with Metroscope’s Ted Douglass, Oborne discusses the role FoodHub is playing to shift the agricultural landscape across the Pacific Northwest. While the site is certainly a boon to locavores’ bellies and tastebuds, Oborne also highlights the impact of local agriculture on the job market and the region’s overall environmental health.

Listen here :

  
(or download the mp3: Amanda Oborne’s Metroscope Interview)

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