Looking Back at Fifteen Years of Local Food Systems Distribution Solutions

The Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) has a more than fifteen-year history in the field of food hubs and local food distribution, experimenting with a number of models grounded in increasing the economic viability of family scale farmers and healthy local food for California communities. This paper primarily serves to 1) answer questions about CAFF’s own food hub, the Grower’s Collaborative, and 2) share lessons learned from our successes and failures in trying to localize food systems with innovative distribution solutions. We will also offer key insights that have led us to the current approach we are using to build more effective and ongoing support for the economic viability of California’s family farmers and sustainable agriculture.