A new initiative seeks to form “food hubs” that will link Maine’s seafood producers with “food deserts.”
The Wiscasset-based Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI) and Wholesome Wave, of Bridgeport, Conn., have launched a two-year feasibility study to identify the best ways to integrate Maine seafood into the Northeast regional food hub system and make it more widely available to consumers.
In recent months, the USDA and U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration awarded a $568,000 Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge grant to Wholesome Wave. The grant program is a national initiative to support rural partnerships that support small businesses and farms by leveraging local assets and creating long-term economic growth in their regions.
The funding will allow Wholesome Wave to build capacity, increase financing, and provide technical assistance toward the support of “healthy food hubs.”
CEI is one of three partners contracted to deploy the grant. A portion of the $568,000 grant will fund the seafood feasibility study in the first year.
CEI’s Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Program has also been working with Wholesome Wave for the past year to deploy $3 million in the form of loans from the U.S. Treasury’s Healthy Food Finance Initiative into local food hubs.
CEI and Wholesome Wave first began discussions in 2011. The goal was to look at food-marketing infrastructure and food deserts in the northeast, said CEI Fisheries Project Director Hugh Cowperthwaite.
“This initial partnership is aimed at directing investment into these food deserts, to support infrastructure and help people eat healthier foods,” he said.
The USDA’s Accelerator Challenge program appeared to be a great fit for trying to implement better food distribution centers, he said.
“This partnership is looking at areas where current food hubs exist, but also looking at logical places in the northeast to create food hubs—large-scale distribution centers for local foods,” Cowperthwaite said.
Maine seafood is not well integrated into the food hub system, he said.
“There are examples of it, here and there, but there’s not a main line of seafood on a regular basis at many of these facilities,” he said.
In an effort to get more seafood to consumers, the plan is to study the current mechanics of seafood harvest, processing and distribution in Maine, and to explore avenues for transporting seafood elsewhere in the northeast.
The first year of the two-year project will identify opportunities, challenges and “kinks” in the current system. The second year will look at implementation strategies.
The primary focus, he said, will be on seafood other than lobster, because lobster already has high-functioning distribution mechanisms.
“It’s pretty well-established, aside from the processing piece of sending lobster to Canada,” he said. “That could play into this, although it’s early to say. Processing facilities, as a part of the food-hub concept, could really play a significant part in retaining more lobster in the state and ultimately getting to more consumers. But we’re looking at other resources that are still landed in the state of Maine: What do we have for groundfish, scallop and shrimp? We’re looking at seasonality of seafood, and whether it can be frozen, because that’s likely the best format that food hubs would want to accept seafood. We’re looking at aquaculture as well—oysters, mussels, finfish, seaweed; all of that could all be integrated into the system.”
Many fishermen are trying, on their own or in associations, to find new markets, he said.
“There are examples out there of people doing creative things and finding ways to sell their seafood to local consumers and even to people far away,” he said.
Expanding those efforts means identifying points of origin, and storage and transportation needs, and having a central place to operate in volume, he said.
The literature says food hubs may need some help in subsidies to get going. But the plan is to help facilities become self-sustaining and create efficiencies, Cowperthwaite said.
The first step involves developing a survey tool and setting up on-the-ground conversations with people in the seafood industry.
“Our hope is that by looking at the existing patterns of seafood production, destination, and use we can investigate viable alternative distribution plans in collaboration with agricultural products. There is huge potential in creating efficiencies, stabilizing markets and developing new job opportunities within the entire distribution system,” said Cowperthwaite.
Laurie Schreiber is a freelance contributor living in Bass Harbor.