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Local Food Production
How to Set Up a Food Hub 1 - Food Lochaber
Date and time: to
Location: Online
Organisation: Scottish Crofting Commission
Local Food Production
A local food hub can be a great way of starting small and working with others to sell croft produce in your local area. They can provide an easy route to market, leaving you more time to concentrate directly on food production, and can be a useful opportunity for sharing experience and expertise.
Food Lochaber is a not-for-profit enterprise, part of the Lochaber Environmental Group charity. Since 2019 they have been supporting and promoting their area’s local food production by running a regular online food market as a small collective of local crofters, smallholders and grow-your-own gardeners, selling fruit, veg, herbs, bread and cakes, frozen meat (beef, lamb, venison, occasionally hogget and goat) eggs, dairy, preserves and more, to local customers.
Marian Austin (Food Lochaber’s founder volunteer director and crofter-producer) and Mandy Ketchin (their part-time administrator) will talk about how their online market hub works, the benefits for producers (like taking a lot of the time, worry and hassle out of selling and marketing, and being able to market even tiny quantities of occasional seasonal surplus) plus the challenges involved in setting up a food hub (for example how to meet the administrative costs, and how to operate effectively in a dispersed rural area) and all the practicalities of running a hub on the Open Food Network platform.
