Come Up With A New Plan
Quick Recap: Empire State of Food is a two-sided marketplace that connects local farmers with institutional buyers like schools and hospitals. It is a way to streamline orders from multiple farms, create new opportunities for farmers and reduce carbon emissions in our food system.
How are you doing? I hope wherever you are you’re safe and well!
We had a pilot planned for our Spring Break, which was this past week, and we were really excited about it. We were going to rent a van, collect orders from our partner institutions, pick up deliveries from our partner farms, and then deliver them. However, our buyer shut down their operations due to COVID-19. To state the obvious, most institutions have shut down for the time being and we’re certainly not going to try to sell to hospitals now when they have much more important things to worry about.
Food supply chains have been disrupted on many fronts with new protocols, panic-buying at grocery stores, etc. Some farmers are scrambling because restaurants they’ve sold to have closed. Another piece of our new reality is that unemployment is at an all time high in the U.S.
Food security programs are needed more now than they have been before. There is a lot of amazing work happening. We’re in New York City and we’re here to help.
- We’ll take orders from food security programs for local produce at distributor prices.
- If your organization needs produce donated, we have a limited capacity to get some vegetables donated.
- With our matching algorithm, we’ll assign products to farmers in our network and place orders with farmers in the Hudson Valley.
- We’ll use a third party delivery service to get the food to wherever the food security programs are being administered.
We’re still working out the details. If this seems like it might be a good fit for you or your organization, please reach out. My email is lpm36@cornell.edu. Stay tuned.
