The work is unglamorous and decisive: consolidating orders, cold storage, washing and packing, grading, invoicing and the truck. On the buyer side it means restaurants, grocers, schools, hospitals and box programs can place one order and receive one invoice instead of negotiating with a dozen farms.
Hubs and shared kitchens overlap more than their names suggest — plenty of hubs run a commissary, and plenty of shared kitchens do a little aggregation. The Competition Bureau treats them as the same kind of shared infrastructure, finding that shared kitchens and food hubs let food entrepreneurs avoid the six-figure build-out costs of constructing their own commercial kitchen.
On a food asset map a hub is connective tissue: the link between the farms in one layer and the kitchens and retailers in another. Its absence in a region explains a lot about why local product does not reach local buyers there. Open the map.
