Puget Sound Food Hub:

The Bridge on the Journey from Farm to Table

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you’ve likely heard the phrase “farm-to-table”. The words are commonplace now, often indicating a meal with locally-sourced ingredients or a particular product that’s crafted just down the road. And while we can all appreciate a delicious local meal, the journey that food takes from land or sea to plate often goes underrecognized.  

The Puget Sound Food Hub is a key part of that journey, connecting farmers and vendors to markets, consumers, and institutions across the state of Washington. They’re a farmer-owned cooperative, whose members create products, grow produce, steward the land and sea, and support the Puget Sound Food Hub in their commitment to making local food easier to access.  

The Food Hub acts as a central location for buyers to source local food – one truck, one invoice, one order. While they now serve customers statewide, including hospitals, schools, grocery stores, restaurants, and more, their story began as most things do – as a seed.  

Ed Morris, Puget Sound Food Hub’s Sales and Sourcing Manager, recalls, “The Food Hub started in 2016 with a bunch of local, Skagit-area producers doing farmers markets in Mount Vernon. They would see each other at the markets and talk about their struggles getting their products beyond the farmers market. Everyone shared the same challenges. They said, ‘Hey, let’s unite and create this system together. Let’s share the expense, the stress, let’s make this so we can grow our businesses together.’ That’s how the Food Hub began, with the need to work collaboratively. Fast forward, and we have 80+ member vendors, we’re officially serving the whole state of Washington, we have trucks on the road six days a week, and we have a staff of 30 employees.” 

The Food Hub’s work doesn’t just benefit the chefs, co-ops, and institutions who receive healthy, local food. It also supports local farmers, allowing them to do what they do best – grow food. Ed shares, “We help our farmers and members concentrate on their farms, expand, and do what they love to do. They’re not tied up in phone calls, driving all over the place, meeting with chefs and restaurants. They’re farmers, they don’t want to be delivery drivers. One of the huge values we provide is access to markets, with retail especially. If a local producer is making hot sauce or yogurt, we help those folks get into larger groceries or distributors without having to get slotted with UNFI or take out large loans.” 

With farming’s narrow profit margins and high level of risk, the Food Hub’s work is critical in supporting small family farms as they grow their market and expand their impact. The Food Hub also plays a role in shaping the food and farming culture of Washington. As the climate changes, growing seasons lengthen and change as well. “Our area is up-and-coming and growing fast,” Ed notes. “The majority of produce grown in the US still comes from California, but even in my three years at the Food Hub I’ve seen longer crop seasons yielding different crops. Who would have thought that we’d be growing Scotch Bonnet peppers – you’d find them in the humid South. A lot of farmers are stepping into it, growing tomatoes early, or lettuce into December. We’re still defining our region, and we’re on the precipice of exponential growth.”  

And while the Food Hub grows to meet those changing conditions, they remain loyal to the principles behind their organization, as well as the folks who started it. Ed shares, “Ralph’s Greenhouse is one of the original farmers of the Food Hub. They’re at a national level now – their leeks go across the country! But they’re still invested in working with the Food Hub today, day in and day out. Cairnspring Mills is another business that was a part of the birth of the Food Hub, and in the past two years our relationship with them has turned on its head; we’re selling most of their flour on the West Coast, supporting the team and the farms they work with to get the grain for flour. It’s been incredible to see that growth. They’re our neighbors, just 5 miles from the Food Hub. And, of course, the co-ops have been strong partners throughout the years, in Whatcom, Skagit, the Islands, and Seattle. PCC Community Markets is our largest customer, and we provide grocery, dairy, cheese, bakery and deli products for their stores. It’s a match made in heaven, and despite being the largest co-op in the country in terms of sales, they’re just simple, straightforward people with the same goal: let’s support local producers.”  

The Puget Sound Food Hub benefits many facets of the food system, from improving food access to supporting farmers as they grow their business. The Food Hub makes the journey from farm to table more direct, sustainable, and, of course, delicious.  

Photos courtesy of the Puget Sound Food Hub