A few weeks before Thanksgiving, plump winter squash, bagged onions and sweet potatoes sat on metal shelves in the HOPE food shelf surplus room in Middlebury. Loose apples filled a large bin, and a cooler held parsnips, celery root and bags of clean but gnarled carrots. Jeanne Montross, the poverty relief nonprofit’s executive director, said most of the produce had been donated by or gleaned from Vermont farms.
Addison County residents can pick up such groceries daily from the surplus section, as well as make one monthly visit to HOPE’s main food shelf area, which stocks staples such as fresh eggs and dairy, frozen meat, canned chili, and boxed macaroni and cheese. Traffic at both rooms has spiked over the past few years. In 2023, HOPE tallied 10,289 visits, a 70 percent jump from 2022, and this year’s number is on track to leap again.
In the surplus room, recipe cards offered simple steps for creamy potato soup, butternut squash pasta sauce and herbed parsnips. But Montross said many of HOPE’s 3,000 annual clients, including about 55 who are homebound, face obstacles to cooking.
“We know that a lot of folks don’t have the strength or the resources or the time to take a winter squash and hack it open and peel it and cook it,” Montross said. “We grow enough food here in Addison County that we can feed everybody, but it’s been inaccessible to the people who need it the most.”
A partnership between HOPE and the recently established Little Village Acres project, led and funded by Vermont Coffee founder Paul Ralston, aims to help meet that growing need with local foods made as accessible as possible.
“Just because we’re low-income doesn’t mean that we don’t deserve the right to eat good, healthy food.” Alexandra, HOPE food shelf client
The successful entrepreneur, who sold his 20-year-old Middlebury coffee roastery to national specialty foods company Stonewall Kitchen in 2021 for an undisclosed amount, is putting his money where his neighbors’ mouths are, so to speak. Ralston also hopes that his effort can help funnel more Vermont food to those in need by demonstrating an on-farm model for turning surpluses into lightly processed and ready-to-eat offerings, from mashed squash to beef-and-vegetable chili.
Ralston, 71, has so far invested a little over $2 million into a 6,000-square-foot processing, storage and cooking facility on his 10-acre Middlebury farm. “We’re not done yet … though I hope it’s not a lot more,” he said with a grin during an early-November tour. He plans to endow the facility and expects annual operating costs of about $250,000.
When Ralston sold his coffee company, he put some of the proceeds into an umbrella L3C social venture dubbed Little Village Enterprises, whose overall mission, he said, “is to serve the common good.” After months of research, Ralston decided to apply his business expertise and dollars to help get more locally grown food to “people who are food insecure, the homeless and the homebound.” In a state that hangs its hat on farm-to-table, he said, “Those folks are largely left out.”
A 28-year-old HOPE client agreed that she felt excluded. “Just because we’re low-income doesn’t mean that we don’t deserve the right to eat good, healthy food,” said Alexandra, who asked to be identified by her middle name for privacy. Foods she can afford tend to be highly processed with unhealthy sugar and salt levels, she noted.
The Lincoln resident works seasonal environmental jobs and said her pay is not enough to reliably cover her living expenses. As someone with deep connections to the Earth, she said, “Fresh food and local food are really important to me, but the cost is really unattainable.”
The young woman said she appreciates the local, often organic produce in HOPE’s surplus room. “It’s a huge relief and a huge blessing to be able to make choices that are values-aligned without hurting myself financially,” she said.
Like many Vermonters, those who rely on the food shelf often lack time and energy for food prep, as well as cooking knowledge. In the past, when HOPE has been able to offer freshly prepared meals made with Vermont ingredients — such as those stocked during the pandemic through the statewide Vermont Everyone Eats program and through a past partnership with Middlebury’s Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center — they flew off the shelves, Montross said.
Alexandra does cook but said prepped local ingredients or ready-to-eat meals would be “a huge lifesaver,” especially during her busy season.
Little Village Acres is not the only organization in Vermont working to make minimally processed or prepared local foods more accessible or affordable.
Since 2013, the Just Cut program run by the Center for an Agricultural Economy in Hardwick has processed fresh-cut and frozen vegetables to sell to institutional markets, such as schools and hospitals. It has also collaborated with Salvation Farms, which coordinates statewide produce-gleaning efforts and distributes some of that food to charitable and institutional meal sites. Salvation Farms is completing fundraising to renovate a former Walgreens in Morrisville into a 6,100-square-foot processing facility of its own. In South Burlington, the nonprofit Common Roots grows vegetables that its culinary team incorporates into about 70 weekly meals and side dishes available at the town food shelf.
But Ralston believes that his self-bankrolled project has some advantages. Because he has only himself to answer to, he posited, “I’ve been able to move faster. I’ve been able to be more efficient, and when we’re done, I think we’re going to be able to be more productive.”
The road has not been without bumps. He hopes that Little Village Acres can serve as a case study for others and save them from some of the mistakes he’s made, such as spending more than $13,000 on two potato diggers that were mismatched to the farm’s scale and soil type. “I’ve always said trial and error is a really good learning model. Believe me, we are making errors all over the place,” Ralston acknowledged. “I just happen to be able to afford a few errors.”
A secondary goal is to encourage small Vermont farms to take advantage of Act 143, which permitted Ralston to build the processing facility. The 2018 state law was designed to help farmers establish on-farm, agriculture-related enterprises that towns might otherwise deny as commercial or manufacturing activities.
In January, Ralston hired a legislative lobbyist to help push through some clarifications to Act 143 that should enable more farmers, as he put it, to “ride up the value chain” by processing their raw products and those of fellow farmers into higher-revenue offerings. He recognizes that $2 million pots of gold don’t magically appear on most Vermont farms but said the Little Village facility model can be broken down into smaller, more affordable pieces.
This fall, Ralston’s five-person team wrapped up its second season growing about 8,400 pounds of vegetables for HOPE, including many butternut squash for Thanksgiving holiday boxes. Once the processing facility is fully up and running next year, Little Village Acres will help HOPE clean, process and store the roughly 40,000 pounds of local produce it gleans annually — and then expand that amount.
In the kitchen, Culinary Institute of America-trained Karen Goettelmann, former co-owner of Middlebury’s Storm Café, will be able to cook and package up to 250 meals a week for HOPE and other area food organizations. She and Ralston are connecting with meat farmers to incorporate their surplus, too.
During an on-farm tasting, Goettelmann shared a spread of dishes she’s been working on, including comforting garlic-and-potato soup and creamy tomato bisque. As alternatives to canned chili and boxed mac and cheese, she will supply HOPE with chili made from local beef and farm-grown vegetables, as well as noodles sauced with Vermont cheddar and dotted with nuggets of locally raised pork. And those gnarly but perfectly good carrots in the surplus cooler could be put to delicious use in carrot-ginger soup or carrot cake muffins.
The original print version of this article was headlined “It Takes a Village | Vermont Coffee founder Paul Ralston is investing millions to expand local food access in Addison County”
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This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2024.
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