Grow and Connect Interior bolsters access to local food across the region
By Contributor
More local food may be coming to your town. Grow and Connect Interior is a software ased tool that will improve access to local food in Interior British Columbia by forming connections between regional stakeholders.
In rural areas, especially within local food systems, organizations often face challenges in gathering and using important data about their supply chain relationships and networks.
Traditional methods of collecting supply chain data are usually designed for specific industries, making them complicated and not very user-friendly.
This lack of a single source for gathering supply chain data creates a barrier to effective collaboration and inclusivity among organizations within the food industry. The limited existing data also lacks information on grassroots and small-scale stakeholders, who make up a large portion of food supply chains in rural Canada.
Grow and Connect is an interactive supply chain modeling system that removes these barriers; creating advanced, collaborative decision-making tools for different industries in rural communities across the Interior.
Grow and Connect (foodsupplychain.ca) also serves as a free tool for individual producers to monitor and manage their supply chains, regardless of scale or industry, all within the context of their community. By consolidating real-time, crowdsourced data from members into interactive visualizations, Grow and Connect offers a comprehensive view of the food supply chain that is adaptable to any scale. Watch how it works here: Demo Video.
Kevin McHallam, Founder of Kamloops kombucha company KMK Living, says the “supply chain mapping tool [is] instrumental in revolutionizing how businesses like ours can easily connect with specialty retailers and customers, while identifying new delivery options in underserved markets in the BC Interior. These tools facilitate connections and support the growth of sustainable, community-focused food systems.”
The partners behind Grow and Connect want to see more local food in institutions, stores, and restaurants across the Interior – but a lack of transportation options, combined with high and unpredictable costs associated with the existing options, makes that hard. We can reduce these costs by using Grow and Connect to bring producers together quickly and conveniently to share the cost of transportation, reach new customers, and get more local food into our communities.
Sarah-Patricia Breen, the Regional Innovation Chair in Rural Economic Development at Selkirk College says, “Through our research we have confirmed distribution and aggregation as a common challenge for food and agricultural businesses across the southern interior. While this challenge may not be unique to food and agriculture, it brings with it an additional set of needs, necessitating sector specific investigation and expertise, which makes Grow and Connect a timely and exciting opportunity.”
Behind Grow and Connect are five partners: the Kamloops Food Policy Council (KFPC), TruGIS, Selkirk College (Western Kootenay & Boundary Region), Boundary Community Ventures Assn (BCVA), and the Central Kootenay Food Policy Council (CKFPC).
These partners have worked to implement three place-based pilots in addition to the Grow and Connect software. The pilots include an ecommerce platform, distribution and aggregation efforts, and increased storage and distribution capacity for an existing food hub in the region.
This project is funded under the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative, and is delivered by the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC.
Grow and Connect Interior has also received funding from the Economic Trust of the Southern Interior, the CN Rail Community Fund, and has drawn on research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Regional District of Central Kootenay.
