10/6/15
WELCOMING AUTUMN 2015

Happy Autumn everyone! 2015 has been an amazing year for The Fresh Connection. We have been thrilled to deliver for so many local producers and look forward to continuing to build our network.

The growing season may be winding down but our producers still have plenty to send off to their buyers. Fall is the season for dairy, eggs, value added products and autumnal produce such as winter squash and cold-hardy greens. We look forward to continuing to deliver unique products including City Saucery's artisanal tomato sauces and Cowbella milk and yogurt from Lucky Dog Local Food Hub.

And now, some terrific news!...

We are pleased to announce that we have been awarded a USDA Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP) grant of $93,000 in order to develop a Last-Mile Aggregation and Distribution Hub in New York City. Over the last year The Fresh Connection has helped over 40 farmers and food makers to deliver over $250,000 of local product. By 2017 this hub will enable us to partner with 80 producers to deliver up to $600,000 worth of product by 2017. Our receipt of the LFPP grant will enable us to greatly expand our capacity to provide a vital link in the local food chain.

That's all for now, folks. Stay tuned for more updates on our Autumn deliveries and news on how we will use our LFPP grant to help more local producers get more of their products to more buyers. Here's to growth in all its splendid forms!

10/6/15
KICKSTARTER UPDATE

Hi everybody! It's been a roller coaster of a summer, but through it all we are still here, and continuing to support local and regional farms and food makers. Soon we'll be posting a more robust Fall Update, but first I wanted to give a quick recap of the Kickstarter project.

Unfortunately, we did not meet our Kickstarter goal, so the project was not funded. This was certainly a bummer, but as it was the beginning of the growing season we didn't have much time to dwell on it. Despite the setback we carried on and made it work. I knew from the outset it was an ambitious goal and we would need some amount of viral support to really get there. That didn't happen, but it does bring me to what did go right: I was honestly blown away by the support from everyone in my network. We got about 20% funded within 3 or 4 days, which speaks to how much everyone was willing to participate. The fact that the campaign didn't make it beyond our network is on me. So for everyone who contributed THANK YOU!! And also a big thank you to the generous donations made towards the rewards...I really wish I could have given them out!!

There may be another crowd-sourcing attempt to come, and we will keep everyone informed if and when that happens. In the meantime we keep on going...Fall Update to come!!

- Mark

5/15/15
OUR KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN IS LIVE!

We’re excited to announce that on the heels of our successful KivaZip fundraising campaign, The Fresh Connection has launched a new campaign on Kickstarter (http://kck.st/1cxHeu1)

The Fresh Connection is the only trucking and logistics company in New York City that specializes in supporting the local food system. Since 2012 we have made it our mission to get food from local farms and producers to the restaurants, businesses, and CSA customers they serve.

The goal of this Kickstarter is to purchase a refrigerated Sprinter Van. We currently lease our trucks, and this will be the first vehicle owned outright by The Fresh Connection. It will be branded with our logo, and will increase our capacity and flexibility, enabling us to grow and serve an even wider range of local farmers and food producers.

For your contribution you can receive The Fresh Connection swag as well as rewards generously contributed by other food businesses in our network such as Regal Vegan, Splendid Spoon, Good Eggs, Great Performances, Natural Gourmet Institute, City Saucery, Culture Yogurt, Heritage Radio Network, Brooklyn Grange, and Quinciple.

Thank you so much for your support!! http://kck.st/1cxHeu1

5/1/15
Gearing Up For Summer!
The winter finally seems to be behind us for real, and our great local producers have some beautiful veggies coming in. This week it's asparagus and ramps, before you know it there'll be tomatoes, eggplant and peppers, oh my!



3/24/15
KivaZip Loan Fully Funded!
Wow! In under 72 hours we raised $10,000 through KivaZip. This 0% interest loan will help us get through the rest of the winter and set us up to roll into Spring with some great momentum. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed! And if you didn't get a chance to contribute, don't worry! We'll be following this success up with a Kickstarter campaign sometime in May!

3/18/14
As we start to gear up for the coming growing season we're very excited to bring on some new partners. One of these new partners will be Barefoot Organics. From their website:

This is the farm's fourth year of production, via the West End and Tribeca CSAs in New York City, the Gowanus/Park Slope CSA in Brooklyn, the Center City CSA in Philadelphia and our on-farm pick-up, for our neighbors in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. We look forward to our continuing stewardship of the farm. Our goal is to foster a real revolution in our food - how we raise it, how we eat it, how we maintain the land and how it all contributes to a closer, supportive, more holistic community.

1/15/14
Without our great network of partners and clients, The Fresh Connection would not be able to do the work we do. Over the next few weeks we're going to profile some of our partners and clients who have helped make the past year such a success, and I thought it fitting to start with FarmersWeb whose co-founder, Jennifer Goggin, first planted the seed in my head of starting logistics company to serve the needs of local producers.

FarmersWeb helps chefs and purchasing managers order fresh, environmentally sustainable produce, meat, dairy products and more, while making it easier for farmers to manage their wholesale customers and access new markets close to home.


FarmersWeb was founded on the belief that both buyers and sellers benefit from finding and doing business with each other directly, rather than going through a distributor. By ordering through FarmersWeb, buyers always know exactly where their food is coming from and how it was grown or produced. Purchases are picked and packed to order, rather than coming from a distributor’s warehouse. The farms and food producers maintain control over the quality of their brand, and selling directly to the end buyer means they are able to keep more of every dollar spent on food.

As an added bonus, buyers can order from multiple farms at the Union Square Greenmarket through FarmersWeb and get it delivered together by The Fresh Connection: one order minimum, one shipping fee, and one drop.

If you're a producer, a buyer, or just want to learn more, check FarmersWeb out at www.farmersweb.com

1/2/14
We're already heavy into planning for 2014, but before we completely move on from 2013 we've got a couple of items to share:

Several customers of The Fresh Connection showed up in this year's Where to Eat issue of New York Magazine including Franny's, Marco's, Glasserie, and Dover. I've eaten at most of these, and I can affirm Adam Platt's assertion that not only is the source product great, but the end product is delicious as well!

This December The Fresh Connection also celebrated its first full year of operation by having our first ever holiday party. The TFC team fully represented: Bruce, Andrew, Mark, Nathaniel, and Wendell:




12/2/13
In the excitement and madness of our first full growing season I've been very negligent of this blog, not making updates or posting photos. Now with things slowing down a bit for the winter and the holiday season approaching I thought this would be a good time to put together a little recap of the past 6 months or so and let you all know what we've been doing:

This past growing season, our first as a full-time operation, was more successful than I could ever have predicted. Since the middle of June we've had two vehicles on the road five days a week, with the occasional Saturday route mixed in as well. Some of the highlights:

- Through partnerships with companies such as FarmersWeb and Plovgh and individual producers such as Norwich Meadows Farm, Brooklyn Grange, Cascun Farm and J. Glebocki Farm we delivered to an average of more than 40 wholesale customers every week sourcing from an array of producers.
- Working with Farmshare we made weekly deliveries (working together with Revolution Rickshaws) of Norwich Meadows CSA boxes to an average of 180 individual residences. We are also regularly able to donate extra boxes to the West Side Coalition Against Hunger.
- We also worked with Norwich Meadows to make CSA deliveries to long-running CSA groups Grand St CSA, Washington Square CSA, and Fulton St CSA which had been displaced from their pick-up location by Hurricane Sandy.
- In partnership with Quinciple and Nextdoorganics, we've delivered subscription CSA boxes to over 20 pick-up locations, serving over 600 customers every week.
- We have set up a little home at the Pfizer building in Brooklyn where we have a small refrigerated facility that allows to better serve out customers by providing storage allowing for more delivery flexibility.
- And last but not least, we've been able to steadily employ four drivers, Bruce, Andrew, Nathaniel, and Wendell, without whom none of this would be possible.

So far this winter has slowed down enough to allow me to do things like write this update, but we're hoping on keeping the momentum going throughout the cold winter months. A number of our producers and other partners are operating straight through the winter, and if they're working, so are we. We're also continuing to work with Martin Bournhonesque, a farmer in California who sends weekly shipments east that The Fresh Connection delivers to many farm-to-table restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn, ensuring that they stay stocked throughout the lean growing months here.

We are also planning for the future and will take the relative calm of the next couple months to make 2014 an even greater success, continuing to establish The Fresh Connection as the go-to provider of logistics and transportation for the local and sustainable food system in and around New York City. Thank you all for your ongoing support, and I wish my best to you and yours for the coming holiday season!!

- Mark

4/3/13
This past Friday afternoon I was a panelist for a workshop called "From Farm to Plate: The Role of Distribution In The Food System" at the Just Food Conference. We had a packed room with lots of great questions and touched on many different themes including how to keep food fresh, growing capacity, and developing economies of scale all of which led to some great discussion.

One underlying theme that is very dear to me and the vision of The Fresh Connection is how to redefine distribution. We talked about how in the local/sustainable food movement distribution is a somewhat dirty word. Buyers tend to think of distributors as somewhat unnecessary middle men looking only to take a margin off the cost of the product. And in the current food system, that is often the case, with food often going through several layers of middlemen and mark-ups before it reaches its final destination with little or no transparency.

Many buyers try to circumvent this system by buying directly from producers. This is great, but I don't believe that it is necessarily scalable. We need people whose specialty it is to get product from the producer to the buyer - to "distribute" product - while maintaining transparency and those important relationships between producers and buyers. So how do we successfully distribute product without taking on the negative aspects of a Distributor? I believe that we can't do this if we're just trying to replicate the model of large main-stream distributors. Just like we're trying to change our food system by emphasizing local, sustainable, and artisanal product, we need to also change our distribution system in order to fit this growing food system. Here at The Fresh Connection we're working with our partners to aggregate and deliver great local, sustainable, and artisanal product while maintaining the transparency and the connection to the producer that is so important for our customers.

- Mark

2/25/13
I'm participating in a panel on distribution at the 2013 Just Food Conference at the end of March (which I will post about later), and in the planning of the workshop a discussion of the use of the word "local" came up. While there are definitely people who are advocating for a strictly local food system, many of the people who talk about being local food advocates are using "local" as a catch-all phrase that is actually very limiting. The point was made by one of my co-organizers in this workshop that local food in Iowa may be factory-farmed pork while fair trade coffee from South America may be sustainable while not local for us here in New York City. Instead, what The Fresh Connection and many others in this "local" food movement are really advocating is the use of food from independent, artisinal, and environmentally and economically sustainable producers with an emphasis on local when possible. Unfortunately, as far as I know there is no single word to cover all of this. Some people use "good food" or "real food" but those phrases are pretty nebulous as well.



This issue has come up for The Fresh Connection in our work with Martin Bournhonesque, a California farmer who works with several other producers to supply about 20 NYC restaurants through the winter months with fresh, responsibly grown produce. When I first started working with Martin I was unsure about how to frame this in light of the fact that The Fresh Connection's mission is to work with "local" producers. However it's unrealistic to think that all the restaurants in the city (not to mention the schools, groceries, and corporate kitchens) are going to only source from local producers through the winter months, and in order to be successful we have to branch out from a strictly local definition to one that strongly leads toward local whenever possible, but also includes all those producers that are working towards a more sustainable food system.

-Mark









2/1/13

Hi Everyone, and welcome to The Fresh Connection's Blog! Here you'll find updates on everything going on with The Fresh Connection. I though I'd kick off this blog with a little bit about why I started The Fresh Connection in the spring/summer of 2012, and where I hope to see it go:

Through my experience in the local food world, I've seen that while there are so many great people and organizations working to change the food system and make it more local, the actual work of physically getting the product from Point A to Point B is a constant challenge, looked upon as a necessary evil rather than a key component of making a new local food system work. Along with creating a network of farmers, buyers, and intermediary organizations, we need people with expertise in the logistics of delivery and transportation, and that's where The Fresh Connection comes in. We want to become the go-to option for physically connecting all the participants in our local food system, and I'm confident that as we prepare for our first full growing season we are well on our way towards achieving that goal. Thank you for visiting the site and for your support of The Fresh Connection!

-Mark