One of the guest speakers at a recent food and beverage summit in Exeter talked about helping local producers sell at competitive prices and add value to their products.
Bruce Enloe represents the Two Rivers Food Hub in Smith Falls, Ontario.
He says sometimes people are surprised when they find local products that are more expensive than those from a large producer and he explains the difference is scale.
“It often has to do with scale. Scale helps to kind of bring down the cost because a single farmer who's able to produce ten times more of a single produce doesn't have ten times as many tools or ten times as many workers to produce that much product.”
Enloe says the purpose of a food hub is it can bring several producers together in a way that gives each of them the advantages of a larger scale by sharing tools and resources.
And by sharing tools, it also allows producers to add value to their product so that instead of one producer buying one garlic breaker for one farm it's one garlic breaker that ten different garlic farmers can use and they only have to pay for it when they use it.
“What we do is try to put a group of farmers together so you can access some of that efficiency of scale without having to be at a larger scale. We provide shared tools, shared resources. Instead of having one farmer driving one truck of product to one customer, we'll have ten farmers on that truck.”
Enloe says they've been in business for almost three years now and there have definitely been some challenges but they're pretty much where they had hoped to be at this time.
They have about 90 producers who now access their services and they have almost 200 people who receive their list and purchase from them every week including several Ottawa-area restaurants so success is not instant but they effort has paid off in the long term.
