Fresh Thinking

Food System Development/Consulting

Much of what we do at Red Tomato is aimed at learning and testing in the marketplace - practical, real-world buying, selling and marketing - to find the best strategies that create opportunities for farmers to become primary suppliers to a sustainable food system. We also aim to test and share what we learn through collaboration in various networks and working groups, strategic consulting, and presentations at conferences and workshops. We call this our Food System Development work.

 

Our current Food System Development work includes:

 

• Northern Iowa Food and Farm Partnership

Red Tomato provides on-going 'coaching in context' for a network of fruit and vegetable farmers in Northern Iowa seeking to collaborate in logistics and marketing in order to create unified identity for future use in the marketplace.

• Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center (HUFED)

The Wallace Center was awarded a grant by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture to create the HUFED Center. The Centers role is to make grants to organizations that are responding to the growing need to reorganize, rethink and transform the way food is grown, sourced, distributed, marketed and consumed in the United States in order to better meet the need of historically underserved communities. Red Tomato acted as a member of the HUFED Council and as such as an advisor for the development of grant criteria and grant reader for the initial round of HUFED funding. Red Tomato may also act as a technical advisor to organizations receiving funding through HUFED that share areas of concentration in marketing, logistics, and trade.


Past Food System Development work includes:

2008 - 2009

• Federation of Southern Cooperatives: Value-added Produce and Branding Project

Red Tomato, the Federation of Southern Cooperative (FSC), and the Southwest Georgia Project (SGP) worked together through an eight-year partnership to develop value-added products for a southeast regional market. The goal was to increase FSC family farm income, and maintain ownership of farmland in the African-American community. Earlier collaboration focused on marketing watermelons grown by FSC members into the Northeast market. Most recently, we worked with the IPM Institute of North America to identify pilot crops and varieties, train growers, lay the groundwork for development of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) protocols, and improve harvest and post-harvest handling and logistics.

• Kellogg: Boston Collaborative Food and Fitness Initiative (BCFF)

Red Tomato was involved in the planning and leadership of this ten-year Kellogg-funded initiative, focused on assisting with one of the Initiative's main goals, to make local, healthy food widely accessible and affordable for low-income Boston residents. Red Tomato helped to identify community resources and additional funding sources; and assessing successful urban school, healthcare, and neighborhood retail food distribution approaches.

• WINROCK: Indicators Project

The project goal was to develop indicators used by diverse stakeholders to catalyze change and to measure progress towards food systems that are environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. Download here.

• University of Wisconsin: Value Chain Project
Red Tomato was the subject of a case study by Steve Stevenson of the University of Wisconsin. The research looked at whether mid-scale, values-based food supply chains (value chains) can provide increased economic prosperity for farms and ranches that are too small to compete successfully in global agricultural commodity markets, yet too big or otherwise not positioned to directly market food products to local consumers. 

• Harvard Business School Case Study: Red Tomato: Keeping it Local

The Red Tomato case study was taught to second year MBA students as well as in a winter session for agribusiness executives.

2006 - 2007

• Portland Downtown District: Redevelopment Plan for a New Public Market
Red Tomato worked with Community Heritage Partners, the Local Economy Center, and the Maine Department of Agriculture to explore the potential of a new public market in Portland, Maine following the closing of Portland's Public Market in 2006. We developed marketing and merchandising recommendations to strengthen the four core vendors and lay the framework for a new public market look and identity.


2005 - 2006

• AGROFAIR: USA Fair Trade Banana Business Development
Red Tomato did a feasibility study and business plan for the entry of a new fair trade tropical fruit company into the U.S. market. In April of 2006, Red Tomato, AgroFair and Equal Exchange became owner/investors in the new fair trade tropical fruit company, OKE USA.  The first container of fair trade bananas was imported into the U.S. market in August of 2006, all sourced from AgroFair's member cooperatives. AgroFair and Oké USA are unique, as they are majority owned by small farm and cooperative growers in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.

• SEMAP: Collaborative Organizational Sustainability Project
Red Tomato served as a consultant to SEMAP (Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership) to help clarify its organizational marketing strategy and Buy Local Campaign.


2004 - 2005

• Chicago Community Funders Network: Illinois Food System Study
Red Tomato researched and developed recommendations on how to accelerate the growth of sustainable agriculture in Illinois. The report, completed in July of 2004, proposed to accelerate the pace of sustainable agriculture in rural areas and promote high-tech urban agriculture. The report is available as a pdf: Feeding Ourselves: Strategies for a New Illinois Food System

• USDA: Local Processed Lettuce Business Feasibility Study

Seventy percent of lettuce eaten in the U.S. comes in a plastic bag from California. Could this product be grown in New England? At the end of this study, Red Tomato piloted on-farm bagged romaine hearts with Pleasant Valley Gardens (PVG), a small Massachusetts family farm. As a result of the pilot, PVG and Red Tomato have developed a packaged romaine hearts program.

• Equal Exchange: Domestic Fair Trade Product Development
Red Tomato assessed and recommended possible products and identified North American small farm and cooperative sources for a new line of products for the fair trade coffee company, Equal Exchange (EE). Based on Red Tomato's recommendations, Equal Exchange developed a line of domestic fair trade products, starting with healthy snacks. National distribution of these products began in 2006.