LIBERTY – Like most businesses and non-profits, the Catskills Food Hub (CFH) continues to face challenges brought about not only by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also because of ordinary business growing pains. At the same time, it’s also expanded to serve more customers and more producers.

Growing pains
Mark McLewin, President of the CFH Board, and co-owner of The Neversink General Store, said that one of the issues has been the food delivery method.

“Our initial concept was those plastic containers you see,” McLewin said. “Basically you would buy one, and every week just exchange … we hand you a new one that we had cleaned and sterilized.”

Because of COVID, even sterilizing became risky, so the CFH switched to cardboard boxes, which, at a dollar each, are surprisingly expensive. Recently, a shift was made to reusable (with sterilization), biodegradable plastic bags.

While one of the CFH’s goals is to move more product for more farmers, McLewin reported that, “The producers always feel their oats this time of year because there are many options for them. There are multiple farmers’ markets running, NYC is reopening, so you can get back down to the city. They can feel more independent and less dependent on the Food Hub.”

Because the producers can be more selective, they have sometimes changed their minds from week to week.
McLewin gave the example of one producer who has an ill family member, and that of course is much more important than selling product at the Food Hub.

“If that happens at the last moment, and if the product is a high percentage of that week’s sale, the CFH may have to scramble to serve our customers by finding other suitable product,” McLewin said.

At the same time, the CFH is working to advise the producers as to what sells and what doesn’t, McLewin explained.

“We’re starting to do what our goal was – to make farming more profitable,” McLewin said. “To be able to say, ‘there’s more demand for x and less demand for y, so why don’t you go in that direction, and we’ll move it for you.’"

McLewin described this as a process that takes time.

“What we’re striving for at the CFH is to be more cohesive as an organism, almost be a single-celled organism that we work together all the time,” he explained.

Because the CFH gets customers’ orders before they communicate with the producers, McLewin said they can be very specific and tell the farmers “This week we need 110 heads of lettuce, next week we need 120. At a farmers’ market that same producer is going to have to guess on Friday what they should be cutting … you’re not going to waste any product with us…” The whole point of the Food Hub, McLewin said, is efficiency, hopefully approaching zero waste.

Another challenge the CFH faced was reducing the margin of error in customers’ orders. McLewin reported that “a typical mistake ratio in the grocery business, in general, is 6 – 9 percent.” Because they were striving for a “near zero or maybe a one percent error,” the board decided to go with a paid staff and an established system.

According to CFH Director Kathy Viskup, “The biggest challenge right now is trying to understand the market post COVID. It’s nice outside, farmers’ markets are open, people have relaxed their social distancing attitudes, people want to travel more, so I’m forever trying to make sure our market stays viable for our customers.”
Viskup related that, like other businesses and non-profits, the CFH is labor challenged, and prices for everything are going up.

Licensed nutritionist, CFH Vice President and owner of Sprouting Dreams Farm Eugene Thalman said the Food Hub’s “biggest challenge is being able to compete with commodity prices that are flooding the market. You can produce at a much cheaper rate in California than you can in New York. They have a more robust labor force, more stable growing conditions, and a better developed ag sector than ours.”

As one of the producers for the CFH, that labor force is currently one of Thalman’s major headaches.

“It’s hard for me to find help, they’re not trained so it’s extremely expensive for me to have employees,” Thalman said. “People don’t recognize the difference between the local produce and what you get at the grocery store. Local is more nutrient dense – the time from field-to-plate is much less. As soon as you cut something, it starts to lose nutrition, and the enzymes diminish.”

The gains
With the CFH’s struggles also come some significant accomplishments.

“We have a much bigger selection now in product,” said McLewin. “We’re trying to develop a more well-rounded cart so hopefully you can get maybe 90 to 100 percent of what you need. As opposed to saying I’m going to get vegetables there, and meat there, or bread there. You can say I’m going to get vegetables, meat, bread, lemons, spices, cheese, fresh and dried herbs …”

He credits Viskup with finding interesting foods.

“There are some really nice cheeses and some nice vegetables,” Mclewin said. “That’s actually the beauty of having a chef at the helm of the Food Hub.”

Both McLewin and Viskup point to the expanding pickup locations as a major achievement in both growth and convenience. Current pickup locations are Liberty, Narrowsburg, Livingston Manor, Margaretville and Mamakating, and they’re adding Benji & Jakes in Kauneonga Lake.

Customers generally have a two- to four-hour pickup window, depending on the location.
McLewin doesn’t consider the pickup expansion as a growing pain, but rather an exciting development, “because if we’re adding locations that means we’re expanding business.”

One of the positives for the CFH’s producers is their independence, McLewin explains.

“We have a portal for every vendor,” he said. “Every vendor logs in every week and lists the quantity of what they’re selling and the price they want to charge. They’re in full control of that part of it… They can treat it as their own business because they have full access.”

The greatest triumph for Viskup was her number one priority during the pandemic – to make sure the CFH stayed open. Toward that end she started seeking out winter sustainable products, and had to go looking further south. While the priority remains to keep the produce as local as possible, the necessity of having product at all made the production circle expand, but what’s not local is mostly east coast produced, Viskup assured.

“It’s a matter of supplementing good quality produce and products that our customers are going to buy. The only producers we had were a very few greenhouses. Nobody knew if we were going to survive. The few things we did maintain here from our local producers, we were able to keep selling... I can’t tell you how many producers – micro greens, potatoes, apples, cheese, milk – they were happy we were here for them.

“When we put something on the market and it’s not local, we always try to tell you what farm it came from and where it’s located,” said Viskup. “It matters to some people how local it is.”

Food Hub future
Both McLewin and Viskup realize that the non-profit needs to grow. While they’re always looking for new pickup locations, they’re also reaching out to the community.

“We still need the support of this community, not just the homeowners, but our restaurants, our groceries, our marketplaces,” said Viskup. “I’m learning it’s easier for larger third-party vendors to buy directly from the producer. But we need them to buy from us. We need to have the support of both our retail and wholesale customers… We are here to grow the economy and we need all the help we can get. Grow the local economy, keep our ag market in business and keep people employed. All that helps to boost the economy.”

McLewin explained that a great deal of what the CFH does is a “training thing. … this is what a carrot should taste like, because a carrot from the grocery store and a carrot from the yard are very different carrots.”
He also wants to become embedded with the school systems to educate children at a young age “what food really could be, or what it is, or what it should be.”

As a licensed nutritionist, CFH board member Eugene Thalman agrees about getting local product into schools, but says there’s a “gap between what they can afford and what it costs to produce.”

School systems must go with the lowest bidder, but want the best product, said Thalman. “Who is paying for our children to eat healthier? It can’t be at the farmers’ expense.”

Thalman is excited about the CFH’s future.

“The Food Hub is giving farmers a way to market their food. Helping farmers like myself to expand their business and learn more about production cycles. We’re going to be able to expand our agriculture capacity and ability to produce by supplying our local institutions and the greater tri-state area… You can’t have a farmer expand capacity without having the market for it.”

In order to do that, the CFH needs to get more people buying on any given week. Toward that end, they’ve taken out radio ads, newspaper ads and prepared handout-like business cards.

“We need to increase sales by 50 percent,” said McLewin.

One change that will be a big incentive toward growing sales is the recent lowering of a minimum retail order to $35. Or you can get your order delivered by spending $150.

McLewin summed up the challenges and goals.

“We really need to continue expanding our business… it’s about getting more people involved, getting more customers buying more product. And with that we’re going to need the producers to keep expanding their lines and making more money.

“We still have not quite achieved the level to at least break even on all the expenses. We’re still in need of grants and other money being injected into the system.

“I’d rather this system be self-supportive, and I know it can be. I know there are plenty of us who want good food that’s healthy for us, and I know there are plenty of us that want to keep our money as local as possible. That’s really the next goal.”