The middle of the supply chain: How food hubs are strengthening New England’s local food system
“The famous quote about food hubs is when you’ve seen one food hub, you’ve seen one food hub. They’re like snowflakes,” said Katelyn Porter of the New England Food Hub & Processors Network at a meeting hosted by Healthy Communities of the Capital Area in Hallowell, Maine.
According to USDA, a food hub is a business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution and marketing of source-identified food products, primarily from local and regional producers, to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale, retail and institutional demand.
Food hubs respond to the needs of the community, said Porter. Some are warehouses where farmers drop off their products. Some are focused on processing. Others are retail markets or online ordering platforms. Many are simply trucks on the road delivering products.
Porter described food hubs as serving “the middle of the supply chain” – a critical link between producers and the markets they need to reach. Porter estimates that there are about 400 food hubs in the U.S., with 40 located in the Northeast.
Four food hub operators joined Porter to describe how their operations work in practice.
- Colleen Hanlon-Smith, Daybreak Growers Alliance and Peak Season
Daybreak Growers Alliance and Peak Season operate as sister businesses, explained co-founder Hanlon-Smith. Based in Unity, Maine, the two hubs share warehousing and trucking, with Unity serving as the central aggregation point. Together they work with 100 Maine farmers and food producers.
Daybreak focuses on direct-to-consumer sales through a customizable year-round farm share. Customers select exactly what they want from an online platform and Daybreak delivers the orders to 30 locations throughout Maine. Products include vegetables, dairy, eggs, meat, baked items and a host of value-added goods.
Peak Season focuses on wholesale business, primarily to K-12 schools. They work with roughly 60 schools in 13 of Maine’s 16 counties.
- Lotty Roozekrans, the Center for an Agricultural Economy
Farm Connex, the food hub at the Center for an Agricultural Economy in Hardwick, VT, is a freight trucking company offering logistics, transportation and storage. They work with over 80 Vermont farms, making about 400 stops per week. In 2025, they sold nearly $13 million worth of products.
Food hub account manager Roozekrans explained that the center didn’t anticipate getting into trucking. But when a local food trucking company went out of business, stepping in felt necessary to preserve a vital connection to markets for Vermont’s farmers and food producers.
“Farm Connex moves a lot of product to farm stands and small general stores and other producers that are looking to source local products that some traditional distributors don’t service,” Roozekrans said.
The center also operates Just Cut, a commercial kitchen enterprise. Just Cut purchases vegetables from Vermont farms and processes them into products such as julienned beets and carrots, shredded cabbage and cubed potatoes. This service provides institutions and other prepared food kitchens with high-quality, ready-to-use produce which Farm Connex then distributes throughout Vermont.
- Kayla Carrier, Maine Grains
Located in a former county jail in Skowhegan, Maine Grains sources regionally grown grain from about 40 farmer partners and stone-mills it into flour prized for its nutrition and baking performance. It is one of only 20 remaining gristmills in the U.S., said Carrier, chief of sales and marketing.
The operation processes and mills about 2.5 million lbs. of grain annually, distributing through 10 local distributors across the Northeast, reaching as far south as northern Virginia.
About 75% of their business is wholesale – bulk bags of flour, oats and other grains sold to bakeries, restaurants and institutions. The remainder goes to grocery stores, natural food stores and food co-ops.
- Chuck Larsen, North Atlantic Naturals
Based in Cumberland, Maine, North Atlantic Naturals is a direct store delivery distributor, moving value-added food products to about 800 retailers from Bar Harbor to Boston. Their focus is on helping small producers scale up.
Founder Larsen described his typical customer: “The people that come in through our door are usually someone who’s been selling out of the trunk of their car to 30 accounts and then all of a sudden, boom, something happened – they got into a Market Basket, they need to scale up, they need storage, they need a better production facility.”
North Atlantic Naturals was recently awarded grant funding in collaboration with Maine’s Midcoast Council of Government to strengthen regional food systems through shared cold storage and market access. The project aggregates frozen foods into North Atlantic’s 3,000-square-foot freezer space, with the goal of expanding institutional and wholesale market access for Maine-based value-added food processors. The grant also provides technical assistance to those processors.
“We meet with each supplier to get what their needs are – figure out how best to help them be successful. And that’s right in line with our mission as a company to help small suppliers get distribution, get market share and expand throughout Maine and into the rest of New England,” said Larsen.
Want to learn more about the network? Head to farmtoinstitution.org/new-england-food-hub-processor-network.
by Sonja Heyck-Merlin
