Meet the Team
Astoria Food Hub is the answer that local food leaders have been waiting for. Over the last few decades, Oregon’s North Coast region has witnessed a sharp decline in food system infrastructure, such as cold storage, coordinated distribution, and aggregation. A central source for local food commerce, Astoria Food Hub fulfills a long-awaited need for more centrally located cold storage, distribution, commercial kitchen space, marketing, and technical assistance under one roof.
The biodiverse region is celebrated for its rich abundance of foods including beef, pork, lamb, cheese and dairy products, fish and shellfish, vegetables, and craft beverages, amongst many others. Astoria Food Hub will highlight the expertise of 70+ North Coast food producers, featuring many niche products found only here, such as PNW seafood and locally-produced cheeses. This is a tight-knit community of ranchers, farmers, fishers, and food producers who all believe in uplifting the local economy by keeping more food dollars in local circulation.
The North Coast Food System Collaborative is a multi-partner network of small agriculture and seafood producers, non-profit food organizations, tourism, farmers markets, small business development centers, local ports, and food value chain technical advisors. Jared Gardner is one of the founding members of the NCFSC and a co-founder of Astoria Food Hub. Also the primary operator of Nehalem River Ranch and Nehalem Valley Provisions, Jared has the lived experience to understand the complex challenges of food producers and the unparalleled resiliency embedded in a regional food hub to strengthen local food systems.
The idea for this regional food hub was seeded over a decade ago, while Jared was working directly with Ecotrust, and has been an ongoing conversation within the North Coast food system community for years. The founding partners of Astoria Food Hub worked with the North Coast community and Steward over the past two years to propel the vision into reality by securing the physical building in which Astoria Food Hub will live. In March 2021, Astoria Food Hub purchased the historic Mason, Ehrman & Co. building on Astoria's riverwalk..
The building that Astoria Food Hub will live in has its own story to tell. Originally built in 1935, the Astoria waterfront warehouse served as the coastal arm of Mason, Ehrman & Co. - a wholesale produce distribution company. The company was founded in 1896 in Portland, Oregon and grew to cover a territory that included Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. While the company grew to have satellites across the Pacific Northwest, the Astoria building is significant for its rarity of style and quality of architectural design by John E. Wicks.
Astoria Food Hub will create and retain more jobs, allow producers to expand their operations, and increase consumer access to locally sourced and produced food. It also connects to other existing food hubs and customers in the region. The vast majority of food producers use their personally-owned vehicles to deliver products, and spend an inconceivable amount of time on the road. A report by the nonprofit Food Roots revealed that producers were spending the equivalent of 3.8 full time employees in delivery hours each week. Having access to a central hub will increase distribution efficiency for producers, while substantially lowering carbon emissions from reduced road travel.
Sharing a space with a cafe that features ethically-sourced coffees from Latin America will be an educational kitchen to share knowledge on regenerative agriculture and food production practices with the public. OSU Nutrition Services will provide lessons on how to use all parts of an animal and everything in your CSA box to promote nutritious eating and avoiding food waste. Adjacent to the cafe is the retail space, where customers will be able to engage in a hyper-local experience of nearby food producers and their vast assortment of locally-sourced products.
“We’re very blessed to be stepping into a community of people who care about doing good for both people and the planet,” says Jared. “Let’s do the right thing and keep building it.”
Astoria Food Hub Equity Statement
Equity has a far deeper meaning than financial equity, but financial wealth in the US has long been predicated on: access to land, access to labor, access to financial resources.
The Astoria Food Hub team acknowledges that for Native peoples, peoples of color, and immigrants this continent has seen historic and systemic theft of land; slavery and indentured or otherwise exploited labor; and exclusion from banking and financial systems. In far too many ways, these realities have persisted to the present.
Through Astoria Food Hub, we have an ability to respond, which then becomes our responsibility. We aim to hold ourselves accountable by building relationships, seeking inclusive participation, practicing transparency, and committing Astoria Food Hub to participate in ongoing education on equity issues especially in the food system.
Specifically, we seek collaborations with regional leaders with lived experience in the topics above to collaborate on our business practices including tenant selections, education and outreach to the Food Hub community and those who access the services we provide; on economic models to improve access and equity through our activities; and ultimately a transition of ownership to our food system community.
