What is a Food Hub?
Did you know enough food is produced each year to feed 1.5x the number of people on Earth?
And yet, not only does ⅓ of it go to waste, but much of the food produced never reaches undernourished and impoverished families. The North Carolina Food Hub Collaborative aims to change that.
(You can read some of the food statistics here on the United Nations website.)
The NC FOOD HUB COLLABORATIVE is a group of long-standing nonprofit, mostly-rural food hubs across North Carolina that came together to support each other’s growth and sustainability.
Diagram from NC Food Hubs about how the programs work to distribute more food to those in need all while supporting NC Farmers.
Food Hubs across the state work with local North Carolina farms and provide production, distribution, and marketing services. This food in turn is then distributed is a direct fashion to support programs such as community food access, farm to table for school children, and senior food programs to help ensure our delicious, nutritious, and abundant food in our state goes directly to the people who could most benefit, and keeps this food from being wasted and tossed.
Food hubs in the NC Food Hub Collaborative are existing food hubs that have proven to have staying power in their communities. The average "age" of a food hub in the network is 8 years. In 2020, The Resourceful Communities Program formalized the NC Food Hub Collaborative, bringing together 8 existing food hubs throughout North Carolina to grow their impacts, both individually and collectively.
To learn more, visit their website here: https://www.ncfoodhubs.org/about
We’ve recently added these FoodHubs to the Visit NC Farms app (Apple / Android) to help garner more attention. These FoodHubs are here for those in need, and are always looking for more volunteers to help feed those in need across our state.
In addition to Food Hubs, our state participates in amazing programs such as Double Up Food Bucks which enables families in need to get double their money when they spend EBT SNAP funds at local markets and Food Hubs compared to big grocers. https://doubleupamerica.org/
This allows program beneficiaries to get access to higher quality more nutritious foods closer to our economic supply chain that more directly supports our state. Talk about a win-win situation.
If you are looking to support our state, our farmers, our fellow North Carolinians, there is no better way than to support these Food Hub members, and buy locally.
We recently teamed up with Matthew’s Farmer’s Market to do a giveaway and cross promotion with Double Up America. Follow us on Socials to see when the next giveaway goes down. Shoutout to our giveaway winner @treatemsweet. We hope you get to enjoy all the fresh goodness this state has to offer.
To learn more about the different Food Hubs of North Carolina, keep following along:
