Food hubs play a critical role in growing the local food ecosystem.

By providing practical, time-saving benefits to farmers and buyers alike, food hubs expand the reach of individual farmers. Hubs also make it easier for restaurants, merchants, and vendors to access a reliable supply of local produce.

Food hubs that prioritize managing and reducing their administrative burden can operate more smoothly, grow more rapidly and can strengthen their members by sharing resources. Successful hubs help build resilient supply chain structures, giving local businesses confidence in their ability to rely on local food producers.

Rooted Farmers was designed to support food hub operators, and over the years we’ve noticed what makes hubs run with more ease and build their resilience. In this guide, we share some of those best practices, including centralizing tasks, putting shared expectations in writing, developing shared marketing assets, and more.

Looking to learn more about food hub management? Check out this guide — Food Hubs: A Producers Guide by NCAT.

Here’s our list of the top five ways in which food hubs reduce administrative burden for their farms. (Bonus: These tips also help food hubs become more efficient and successful.)

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1. Relationship management:

What the hub does: Hubs offer buyers the opportunity to enjoy a one-stop shop across multiple farms, resolving a key pain point for higher-volume wholesale and business-to-business (B2B) buyers when they are trying to source from local producers. To efficiently offer this experience to buyers, hubs take on the onboarding and ongoing management of those buyer relationships. This includes everything from educating buyers about the benefits of locally grown and raised products, to answering questions about producer practices, to collecting and disseminating crucial feedback, and catering to buyer preferences. The hub’s work on buyer relationships is ongoing throughout the year, concentrating on day-to-day operational focus and triage during peak production seasons, then shifting to higher-level, more strategic discussions and rapport-building after the peak season has passed and growers wind down their own operations.

How this helps farms: Relationship management is a critical layer of building a thriving farm business — and for good reason! In a continuously administered survey of Rooted’s members, business buyers consistently report that one of the top three reasons they seek out local product is to build deeper relationships with suppliers in their communities. (Other key reasons include superior product quality from local producers and keeping dollars within their communities.)

For farmers, nurturing these buyer relationships can come at the expense of other critical production and operational workflows. It can be time-consuming work that often taxes producers who are already stretched too thin, leaving farmers with the feeling like they are falling short in other (likely multiple) areas of their businesses, particularly during those peak production months. By centralizing this work within the food hub, farmers can recapture valuable hours in their weeks, removing the vast majority of the operational burden of managing those crucial relationships — without putting them at risk.

2. Order coordination:

What the hub does: Orders change. In fact, our data show that roughly half of all preorders are changed in some way between the time buyers place them and the time sellers process them. These changes include everything from additions or removal of products to pricing adjustments, product substitutions, and changes to order fulfillment dates or locations. Hubs manage these changes, acting as a liaison to buyers and fielding their outreach throughout a weekly order cycle.

How this helps farms: By offloading this essential work to a hub, farms can reduce the administrative time spent collaborating with buyers about order details while still ensuring that this necessary customer support role is filled. The time savings for producers here are clear, but an even more meaningful benefit to farms is often the reduction in context switching for the farmer and an increase in producers’ ability to focus. Hubs intercept much if not all the order-related buyer outreach, distilling only the most important and relevant takeaways for producers. The alleviation of mental load, an outcome of reduced context switching, can pay dividends in a producer’s longevity and quality of life.

(Pro tip: Rooted’s in-order messaging system reduces this burden even further for individual farmers and food hubs, moving distributed communication with buyers into a single channel tied to a detailed history of order events! Book a demo to learn more.)

3. Streamlined logistics

What the hub does: In many ways, hubs serve as a dedicated local or regional farm distributor. They act as a single point of aggregation across multiple farms, packing cross-seller orders, and serving as either a centralized pickup location or a single delivery for buyers. This not only cuts down on costs for all sellers but also resolves an important hurdle for buyers: coordinating pickup and delivery logistics across many farms to source their weekly orders. 

According to buyers, the value of this service really cannot be overstated: Having the opportunity to source from multiple high-quality producers and receive all of those orders in a single drop is one of the key drivers for them to shop from hubs. As a bonus, many of these buyers ultimately end up spending far more with local farms through a hub than they would placing direct orders with each farm individually. In short: When we reduce the friction of shopping for buyers, they spend more money on local products.

How this helps farms: In a direct-sales model, farms are responsible for all order fulfillment — both pickup and delivery. This approach is costly and requires the farm to either set order minimums for delivery that justify the drive or apply delivery fees to offset the cost of a lengthy drive and the labor hours for a driver. Additionally, it requires maintaining an expensive fixed asset, typically a van, box truck, or multiple vehicles. When a vehicle breaks down or a driver is unable to cover their route, the burden of triaging those logistics falls on the farmer.
By streamlining these delivery and fulfillment logistics into a single point of distribution, hubs defray not only the gas expense and wear and tear on delivery vehicles, but also the time farmers would otherwise spend running the same routes as fellow local growers who are moving product into the same buyers’ hands.

4. Pooled labor resources

What the hub does: In a hub, producers typically pay a margin or a commission to the hub to cover operational and overhead expenses. Included among these expenses are labor hours for the hub’s various team members. This can cover a hub manager, delivery driver(s), order packers, bookkeepers, and more. These employees are managed by the hub’s leadership team, which shifts the overhead of effectively building and managing that team and its workflows away from individual farms.

How this helps farms: By pooling resources to support employees and labor hours at the hub, farms can reduce the range of tasks their own employees need to manage, allowing producers to hire more specialized labor instead. This specialization means that labor works more efficiently, further reducing costs.

5. Contingency planning

What the hub does: A hub has visibility into inventory across multiple farms, allowing its manager(s) to strategically approach crop planning and triage shortfalls or product failures with a 30,000-foot view. This strength in numbers helps ensure continuity for buyers, which is often cited as a top concern for wholesale or B2B customers. These customers place an outsized focus on the reliability of their supply chains, which hubs are positioned to strengthen by aggregating product from farms across a broad region.

How this helps farms: This approach works much like an insurance policy for producers. In the event of a product failure or shortage, the hub can identify alternate producers and resource product from those growers, mitigating the risk of disappointing a buyer by creating paths for substitutions and ensuring complete deliveries of expected orders. As buyers build trust in their suppliers, they increase the share of wallet that goes toward local product, helping farms increase sales and reduce waste.

A win-win-win

The often unseen cost of administrative burdens that farms assume boils down to time and money. By working in a collective-selling model with other local and regional producers, a hub’s ability to alleviate the time spent on managing relationships, coordinating orders, hiring labor, and more ultimately allows farms to mitigate risk, defray cost, and save time. Farmers get to spend more time doing what they do best: Growing incredible local food and product to serve local communities.

We’re here to help! Whether you’re a food hub operator or a grower, our Rooted team of specialty crop farmers and hub managers is excited to help you succeed. We invite you to book a demo to learn more and chat with a team member about your farm business goals and how to achieve them.