GUILFORD-Ask the average American where their food comes from, they might say “the store.”
In many ways, we’ve lost the conscious connection to how our food is grown and produced — your bread and carrots likely made their journey from bakery or farm to you via multiple trucks and at least one warehouse.
But not if you got them from the Guilford Food Hub.
Every other Wednesday, folks roll up to the Broad Brook Community Center (BBCC) to pick up their groceries: Green Mountain Creamery yogurt from Commonwealth Dairy in Brattleboro, bacon from Corvus Ferments in Vernon, salad greens from Up the Road Farm (literally up the road from the BBCC), eggs from three growers within a 5-mile radius.
Maybe they splurge for a treat: creamy lemon bars from Paul A. Boyd Farm or fresh flowers from Tapalou Guilds, both right down the road.
The typical order form has well over 100 items to choose from, even in the lean months of winter — everything from staples to more exotic items like kombucha, kimchi, falafel, and labneh.
In this way, and many more, the Guilford Food Hub is actively working to break the anonymous distribution chain and forge deeper connections among local farmers, food makers, and the community.
Dreams of food resiliency, community connection
In 2020, in the pressure cooker of the pandemic, at a time when many balked at shopping inside grocery stores, many were looking for alternatives and talking about local resiliancy.
For a time, Hanna Jenkins organized a food buying group out of her farm, Tapalou Guilds, connecting with Food Connects, a nonprofit that lets institutions make bulk purchases from smaller regional farmers and food producers.
Although Jenkins’s primary focus on farming made running a long-term buying group out of her barn impractical, it proved that local folks could support a buying group focused on local foods.
Three Guilford residents — Julie Beet, Anna Klein, and Jody Hauser — met in August of 2020 to figure it out.
They had a lot of ideas and one big question: “What’s the infrastructure that’s required for a farmer who’s growing all of this food to actually get it into the community?”
Klein’s day job in office management and Beet’s experience ordering produce for a buzzing San Francisco food market were the group’s bare bones qualifications, but it was their vision that drove the project.
“We had ideas about what would be good for the town but, from the start, it became clear that we [would] have to be community responsive,” Beet says. “We’re just three people. We wanted it to be a community effort.”
A good idea, manifest
At first, the trio ordered from Food Connects and kept items at Beet’s house where, she says, “we had food stored in closets, in freezers.”
Klein would come by to pick up grocery orders for her neighbors across town.
“It was really just a neighborhood food buying group,” Beet says, “but we realized that we had something good going, and we didn’t want to be weighing mushrooms in my garage in -20 degrees in January anymore.”
When the BBCC reopened after undergoing extensive renovations to transform the former Grange Hall into a community center, the team moved their efforts there.
With the move came a bigger vision for the umbrella organization, which they named Neighborhood Roots. The Food Hub is one of its three community-agriculture-related projects.
“We really wanted to address food resiliency for the entire town,” Beet says. “We were holding all sorts of events throughout the year — garden education events and plant swaps and harvest swaps and food preservation workshops.”
Food resiliency includes improving food access for everyone. The move to the BBCC meant sharing storage space with the Guilford Food Pantry, an organization with a parallel mission to provide free food to those in need in the community. By sharing space, each organization could be supportive of the other’s work.
Build it, and the farmers will come
Neighborhood Roots began actively inviting local farmers and food producers to participate. One of the first vendors, Hermit Thrush Homestead, a non-certified organic farm on Green River Road, agreed to supply produce, eggs, and other goods.
“I was excited to have a new sales outlet, so I jumped at the opportunity to get involved right away,” owner Meggie Stoltzman recalls.
Stoltzman had experienced challenges trying to sell from an open-air farmstand in the winter and had been turned down as a vendor at the Brattleboro Farmers Market because others were already selling what she had to offer. She had also struggled with delivering CSA orders in cold temps.
“Practically speaking, the Food Hub gives my farm a way to sell and distribute produce in the winter months in a heated building that has plowed parking and easy access,” she says.
Today, Hermit Thrush Homestead makes about 15% of its total farm sales at the Guilford Food Hub.
Vendors now regularly approach Neighborhood Roots to be included. Priority partnership goes to hyperlocal farmers in Guilford, Brattleboro, Vernon, and Halifax, but, as Beet says, “If someone’s within 50 miles, has a product there’s a need for, and they want to deliver on a Wednesday, we consider taking them on.”
To date, she says, “we’ve never turned away a farmer.”
Competition makes for a better market
Even as the team accepts increasing numbers of vendors selling similar offerings, the attitude of vendors is more about camaraderie than competition. Farmers have found that more vendors simply makes for a better market.
Board member Meghan Dougherty, a participating volunteer on Food Hub Wednesdays, says, “One of my favorite moments is when I see vendors talking to each other, saying, ‘Oh, hey, I learned this,’ or ‘I just took this course.’ It’s really cool to be part of that connective tissue and see it all come together.”
For smaller local farms, joining the Food Hub provides an opportunity to learn from other farmers as well as gain an expanded audience.
Tadj Schreck, who owns Up The Road Farm, has a small farmstand on Bullock Road, but finds the Food Hub “a great place to sell more perishable items that we like to grow, like herbs, but struggle to sell at our farmstand before they wilt.”
“We can harvest the exact amount consumers order, so we do not waste time harvesting and washing produce that may or may not be sold,” Schreck says.
Making the numbers work
What began as a spark of an idea has grown into a sustainable model. Dozens of farmers and food makers deliver their products to the BBCC every other Wednesday morning. Volunteers sort the food into big green bins. Neighbors show up to grab and pay for their orders, often stopping to chat.
“We’re not just creating a place for people to come shop. We’re creating a market that the vendors rely on as much as the buyers,” says Dougherty.
“We’re able to use that market as a funnel for money from inside the community to stay inside the community and bolster the economic situation of the town,” she adds.
In 2025, the Guilford Food Hub logged 1,124 orders from 140 households, and $77,640 flowed through the organization to farmers and food makers, a 43% increase from 2024.
The Food Hub is able to sell food at cost, with no store markup, because its expenses are low.
All labor is handled by volunteer effort. Minor expenses include a modest fee to rent the BBCC space, the subscription cost of the ordering software, EBT (electronic benefits transfer) fees, insurance, credit card point-of-sale fees, and miscellaneous supplies.
To cover these charges, customers can opt to round up their totals, and recently, vendors unanimously voted to start paying a 5% fee.
Since moving to the BBCC, the Food Hub has added a pay-what-you-want food table on pickup day. It now accepts SNAP/EBT payments with Farm Stand Match from the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT), a program that lets consumers who receive support through the 3SquaresVT (food stamps) program double their benefits up to a certain amount.
Neighborhood Roots has also raised money from the community for its Food Security Fund, which lets the Food Hub offer coupons — $25 for small families, $50 for large — which can be applied to any order, no questions asked.
“We’ve never done a big push to get more people or more vendors,” Beet says. “It has just continued to grow organically to the point where we’re now at this tipping point of ‘Wow, it’s getting a little tight at the BBCC.’”
An evolving vision for the community
The Neighborhood Roots board is considering whether and how to keep growing the Guilford Food Hub beyond its current space.
The organization could move beyond the all-volunteer model to hiring staff. It could expand into a bigger space.
It will almost certainly encompass other ways of connecting local farmers and makers with eaters. In addition to the Food Hub, Neighborhood Roots is in the beginning stages of creating a community medicinal garden in Guilford — built by citizen volunteers and available to anyone who wants to harvest for their household.
The board has plenty more ideas for growing the organization and creating easier access to locally produced food.
The organization is looking to raise $38,000 this year to help bridge the organization beyond its grassroots beginnings. To date, it has raised almost $6,000.
“There’s a lot of dreaming,” Dougherty says. “The thing that impresses me is how, as a group, these women have managed to balance forward drive with patience and an attitude of ‘Let’s wait and see, maybe we’ll learn something from the space that we’re in.’”
Ultimately, Beet says, “My vision is that Guilford becomes a town known for food — a place where farmers can thrive. Not just where we say we support our rural heritage, but where we actually live it.
“If there’s a farmer with some land, even a small amount, we have a market here where they can sell. And Guilford will become a place where local food is celebrated.”
It starts with the personal connection of knowing not just roughly where your food comes from, but exactly who grew or made it.
“Every night at dinner, we can say, ‘These are Meggie’s carrots and Jane’s beans,” Dougherty says. “It’s something that’s really special.”
For more information about Neighborhood Roots, visit neighborhoodroots.org, where new customers can sign up to order from the Guilford Food Hub.
This News item by Joslyn McIntyre was written for The Commons.