Rutland food hub reopens after remediation; leaders describe packing, processing and year-round market plans

Heidi Lynch, executive director of the Vermont Farmers Food Center in Rutland, told the Senate Agriculture Committee on Feb. 6 that the hub has completed a three-year remediation and is pursuing upgrades to ovens, kitchens, storage and a regional produce packing center to expand year-round capacity for local producers.

“Our mission as an organization is to relocalize the food system through increasing food access, education, and infrastructure,” Lynch said, describing the center’s origins as a farmer-led effort to sustain winter markets and the campus’s later role in pandemic response.

Lynch said the center became an anchor for emergency food distribution during COVID, administering Everyone Eats activity in the Rutland region and processing “over $3,000,000” in food and delivering hundreds of thousands of meals at the program’s height. She described the campus as a former industrial site that required environmental assessment and cleanup prior to renovation; the cleanup included addressing a subsoil volatile contaminant (TCE) and asbestos and lead abatement in other buildings, Lynch said.

The center’s priorities now include: renovating incubator and commercial kitchen spaces to support value-added food businesses; tightening the thermal envelope and upgrading heating systems to reduce operating costs; and completing a second-phase conversion of a post-and-beam building into a regional produce packing and storage facility with freezer capacity. Lynch said shared, fee-for-service storage and packing would allow small producers to aggregate product for institutional buyers — schools and larger distributors — and would reduce the need for each farm to maintain expensive on-farm storage.

Lynch described the food hub collaborative across Vermont and said Rutland’s center plays a connectivity role where other hubs have limited reach. She listed other hubs active in the statewide network: Food Connects (Brattleboro), Hardwick’s CAE and the Yellow Barn project, Intervale Center (Burlington), Green Mountain Farm Direct and the Addison County Relocalization Network. Lynch said the collaborative meets monthly to share logistics and to reduce duplication across regions.

Why it matters: speakers and committee members said greater regional packing, storage and processing capacity would boost local producers’ ability to supply institutions and expand markets beyond traditional farmers-market seasons, while also strengthening disaster response capacity.

Funding and timeline: Lynch recounted a mix of federal, state and philanthropic awards used for planning, remediation and initial renovation tasks and said one resilience-focused federal award was pending. She credited the Agency of Commerce and Community Development and brownfields funding with supporting the remediation. Lynch did not provide a single overall project cost during testimony.

Operational details: the hub operates an online ordering platform with weekly distribution, cross-docks product for other hubs, hosts an incubator kitchen for small value-added businesses, runs education and “food-as-medicine” programs tied to local health partners, and rents event space to diversify income. Lynch said remediation is complete and renovations are underway, with the hub reopening and vendor activity rebuilding after closures during remediation.

Committee members asked about vendor counts and winter operations; Lynch said market vendor numbers were rebuilding and currently hovered around 60 vendors after disruptions related to remediation and COVID-era displacements.

What’s next: Lynch invited committee members to visit the campus as interior renovations progress and asked continued support for infrastructure investments that would enable producers to scale and strengthen the statewide network of food hubs.