Food Hub links farms, expands customer sales

Almost on cue, farmer Harley Soltes brought his van of blueberry products to the Puget Sound Food Hub Cooperative on Best Road Thursday afternoon. Soltes knows the value of cooperation and made time to recount the origins of this Co-op. In 2013 Soltes offered his Bow Hill Blueberries cold storage facility to area farmers for aggregating, storing and wholesaling their crops.

Over three years that effort grew to 22 farms, becoming a hub linking King, Snohomish, Whatcom and Skagit County farmers with wholesale buyers. The effort, said Jade Vantreese, Hub sales and marketing coordinator, actually started in the parking lot under the bridge at the Skagit Valley Food Co-op in 2010 and evolved into this producer co-op. Soltes “signed up first so I could be number one. I ran over here and waited to be first,” he recounted.

Today, 50 farms and 10 vendors, such as Lopez Island Creamery, bring their harvest and products to the food hub for a seamless to the buyer aggregation and sale. Soltes remembers the first sale went to UW Hospital. Today buyers are, like the farmers, in six counties, now including Island and San Juan.

A farmer may have pallets of potatoes or bags of carrots essentially picked to order, said Vantreese. The Food Hub takes it all, filling orders for grocery stores, hospitals, preschools, restaurants and universities.

Soltes appreciated a software system that “created roots for farmers.” They use it to report their harvests and buyers use it to place orders. While products are aggregated across farms, the individual farmers are tracked to the buyer. If there are problems or praise, the originating farmer is connected to the buyer.

There is one invoice to the buyer and farmers are paid quickly. No longer are farmers pulling up to loading docks from Seattle to Bellingham. Buyers pay extra, but don’t have farmers knocking on their door and quantities and qualities are known.

Soltes credited larger farms: Hedlin’s, Ralph’s Greenhouse, and Hopewell in Whatcom County, with providing leadership and sacrifice and pulling “through smaller farms” by providing the critical mass.

Operations manager Scott Morris noted that early on “food co-ops were instrumental with their commitment to purchase; up and down I-5 are some of our most dedicated customers.” Non-profits and grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture were also instrumental.

The Food Hub’s success – it is only one of two in Washington, with the other in Spokane – Morris believes, stems from “a very high food IQ” in the Valley. “They understand the benefit and they search for it – all the buzz words, they’re there. That’s what supports us so well.” “They” are residents, selective consumers that require their restaurants, stores and employers provide, as Soltes said, “it be done organically and sustainably.”

What Morris called “the catalyst to our growth” is “the story of the grain Skagit 1109,” a variety developed by Washington State University’s Bread Lab researchers, housed at The Port of Skagit. For generations wheat had been grown as a cover crop to be plowed under or at best sold into the commodities market. Skagit 1109 was bred for the Valley’s climate. It becomes flour that makes great tasting baked goods.

“This gives our region the ability to give farmers a chance to grow a profit, to insure management versus having a throw away crop,” Morris said.

It also created a farm to table cycle: Cairnspring Mills, at the Port, processes local wheat. Local bakeries make bread and local stores sell it to local customers.

Vantreese pointed to a floor full of tote bags full of rye seed. “One bag is 100 acres to plant,” she said. “They store it here. It is seed grain used to plant and for flour production.” Some was from Hedlin’s farm, she said. But the label she looked at wasn’t, but from a neighboring farm.

As Morris said, speaking of the farmers he works for and who collectively own the Food Hub: “We’re part of their business model. We integrate with their customer base. We are the farm. It’s a feel-good story.”