National Good Food Network Webinar Series

The National Good Food Network (NGFN) hosts a very informative, interactive webinar series, which gives people the opportunity to learn and connect with on-the-ground practitioners and experts. The next webinar is being held February 11 at 10:00 am PST (1:00 pm EST) on the topic of Building the Supply of Healthy Foods – Experiences and Tools from the Field. To register for the event, click here.

If you want to take a peek at past webinars, we’ve posted them below.

November’s Good Food at Retail – Models of Success

Getting more good food into retail is a priority. According to USDA-ERS over 90% of the food that Americans consume at home is purchased at retail outlets. This month’s webinar focuses on the details of innovative approaches to getting more good food into retail channels of very different kinds, including a mid-size regional retail chain (200 stores), a three-store cooperative and a WIC-only store.

December’s An Introduction to the National Farm to School Network

The National Farm to School Network aims to bring local and regional food directly from farms to school cafeterias across the country. This webinar covers key aspects of farm to school initiatives that are getting more good food to more students, all over the country. Leaders of the National Farm to School organization describe their strategies, the network and the services they provide. A representative from USDA’s farm to school “tactical team” talks about how they are supporting farm to school efforts and how USDA has prioritized the farm to school concept.

January’s Community Food Enterprises (CFE)

To many, local food is exclusively about proximity, with consumers demanding higher quality food grown, caught, processed, cooked, and sold by people they know and trust. But an equally important part of local food is local ownership of food businesses. An innovative recent report looks at the full range of locally owned businesses involved in food, whether they are small or big, whether they are primary producers or manufacturers or retailers, whether their focus is local or global markets (referred to as CFEs).

A detailed field report on the performance of 24 CFEs, half inside the United States and half international, the project shows that CFEs represent a huge diversity of legal forms, scales, activities, and designs. The report asks are CFEs replicable? The authors believe the answer is “yes,” especially if the successful strategies revealed in their study are widely communicated and adopted.

To that end, John Fisk, Director of the Wallace Center at Winrock International and CFE co-project director lays the foundation of the discussion by explaining the origins and underlying assumptions of the study. Lead author and co-director of the study, Michael Shuman, Director of Research and Economic Development at Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), presents the major findings of the work, with a particular emphasis on scaling up good food domestically. To ground the theory with the practical, Mike Lorentz, visionary co-owner of Lorentz Meats (one of the featured CFEs), presents the story of how it is possible to be highly successful while serving the seemingly competing needs of large and small ranchers.

Related posts:

1. Webinar Series Explores How to Create Healthy Communities
2. Obama’s Budget Funds National Healthy Food Financing Initiative
3. A Local Network of Home Gardens = A Community of Food Producers!

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