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On your mark … get set … grow!
The Food to Market Challenge — a collaboration between The Chicago Community Trust and Kinship Foundation — is officially underway. At stake: a cool $500,000.
The winner-takes-all competition, challenging teams to improve the supply of local and sustainable food in the Chicago area, will continue throughout the summer and culminate in a "Shark Tank"-like public event in October, when final contestants present their ideas to a panel of judges.
Registration for the challenge closed Tuesday, and as late as Monday, applicants were scrambling to nail down prospective partners. Of the 311 people who registered to participate, 77 are farmers, said Sarah Knobloch, senior program associate for Kinship Foundation. Those participants have until May 10 to organize into their teams.
The money's enough to draw significant interest. But the long-range hope is that the competition jump-starts collaboration and creative thinking to manifest change to the local food supply for years to come, Knobloch said.
"We think there's an enormous economic opportunity on the table here," she said.
Tom Rosenfeld, founder of Earth First Farms, located about 100 miles from Chicago in southwest Michigan, had hoped for years to establish a regional brand and packing facility that would help increase the supply of local organic produce in the Chicago area.
The amount he'd previously identified to get the plan off the ground? $500,000.
Under the plan Rosenfeld is developing for the challenge, small to mid-sized organic produce farmers would be able to more easily sell their fruits and vegetables to restaurants and stores through one regional brand. Their products would be graded, sorted and distributed through a shared packing facility.
"There's a number of farms that don't show up on anyone's menu and you don't see in any stores," Rosenfeld said. "This is about bringing more local produce into the market."
Such cooperative-type concepts are more common in Wisconsin and Minnesota, where smaller farms have traditionally been the norm, as opposed to Illinois, which is more known for its large-scale commodity agriculture, said Rob Montalbano, of Montalbano Farms, an organic farm in Sandwich, Ill., about 60 miles west of Chicago.
Wholesale distribution is a huge challenge for small farms, said Montalbano, who's part of Rosenfeld's team.
"It's really expensive for me to move product. And if I'm in the truck, that's a day that I'm not on the farm. And if I'm not on the farm, that's a day lost," he said.
In the Food to Market Challenge, Rosenfeld's team will be squaring off against competitors including McCormick Place and the Chicago Botanic Garden, which are partnering on a plan to connect produce grown by small farmers to the convention center, restaurants and health clinics in Chicago that are part of the Women, Infants and Children program.
In recent years, McCormick Place has worked to increase its offerings of local and sustainably grown food to help set it apart from convention centers in other cities, said Kevin Jezewski, assistant director of food and beverage for Savor, the company that manages food service at McCormick Place.
For the past three years, McCormick Place has contracted with Chicago Botanic Garden to tend to a 20,000-square-foot rooftop garden that grows food served in the convention center, Jezewski said.
"We want to show our customers bringing conventions to Chicago what this city's all about. It's not just pizza and beef," Jezewski said.
The botanic garden also manages the Windy City Harvest program, which teaches teens and adults, many of them former criminal offenders, how to farm at 13 different sites throughout Chicago. The garden also runs a farm incubator program.
The plan being developed by McCormick Place and the botanic garden for the challenge calls for establishing a new "aggregation space," where produce from those programs could be cleaned, graded and sorted, in North Lawndale. There will also be an educational component, said Angela Mason, associate vice president of Windy City Harvest.
"I think one of the innovative things about this challenge is you have to build a team. … That's what it's going to take to build up our local food system," Mason said.
The competition will select up to five finalists in mid-June.
The judges on the final panel that will determine the winner Oct. 26 are: Michael Ferro, CEO of Merrick Ventures and Tribune Publishing chairman; Bob Mariano, president and CEO of Roundy's supermarkets; Alpana Singh, a restaurateur who owns The Boarding House and Seven Lions; Chuck Templeton, managing director of S2G Ventures investment fund; and Helene York, global director of responsible business for Compass Group at Google.
gtrotter@tribpub.com
Twitter @GregTrotterTrib