Midcoast farmers, fishermen and food entrepreneurs will have a new option for storing and processing food this harvest season, as a massive $2 million food storage facility will go online sometime in July. The facility, operated by Coastal Farms and Foods, will operate a freezer and cold and dry storage for produce and fish, a food processing facility and a shared kitchen.
The facility is partly the brainchild of Jan Anderson, a farmer and former Belfast City Councilor who saw the need for a dedicated storage space in the agricultural community. USDA studies show that the average farmer or grocer can lose approximately 30 percent of harvested product over the winter, and farmers often are asked to take that loss, Anderson said. Properly storing a harvest is expensive, and another USDA study found that 90 percent of growers cite a lack of storage space as a factor holding back their growth. As a city councilor, Anderson pushed for such a facility in the area, but she never expected at the time that she would be the one who was going to build it.
“I was thinking there would be someone else to step up to the plate. No one did,” Anderson said.
She decided to commit to the idea when her friend Tony Kelley, a veteran blueberry food storage manager, asked her about the idea of building more storage and processing capacity for the blueberry market. They teamed up with local real estate investor Wayne Snyder to sell $1 million in company shares to individual investors and raised an additional $1 million from a farming credit organization.
The facility, located on Route 1 at the vacated Moss Inc. manufacturing plant, will be designed for climate control to cut the losses of storage down to 5 percent for farmers and the fishing community, according to Maine state agriculture officials. Most of its footprint will be massive freezers, which will go online in early July but take a month to cool down to -10 degrees Fahrenheit. While the freezers and coolers will store everything from smoked salmon to local produce used for school lunches, Anderson said it will also help build storage capacity for the state’s blueberry and cranberry growers. While there are five storage and processing facilities located Downeast, options thin out as you go south down the coast, and there are few options for smaller independent growers.
“If the freezer’s full, the rest of the berries are left in the field,” Anderson said.
But the plant will also feature a dedicated 10,000-square-foot space for food processing, including an area where beginning entrepreneurs can rent by the month, week, day or hour. In its first year, the processing area will have an eclectic mix of clients, from locally made tofu to dilly (pickled) green beans.
One of the first clients will be Tournesol, a nascent veggie pate venture in Belfast. In its first year of production, Tamara McElroy says she and business partner Kate McLeod have already realized the acute need for a closer option for storage and processing. Right now, they commute 45 minutes to Unity to make batches of pate and then must find a separate space for storage. She says the new facility will streamline the process.
“It’s going to help tremendously,” McElroy said. “It’s going to simplify our production.”
Creating a value-added food product can have a lot of start-up costs to bring a facility up to code, said Cal Hancock, owner of the Hancock Lobster Company in Topsham. Hancock said she already had some food processing tools available when she started making value-added lobster products, but she says it’s invaluable to have a shared facility, with shared costs, when you’re just beginning to fine-tune your product.
“You can kind of test your product and try and see if it’s marketable,” Hancock said.
Anderson said she hopes to keep costs down to the point where it can help a beginning entrepreneur get a foot in the door and grow a business to the point of needing an independent facility. She also wants the products made at her facility to be affordable to average Mainers.
“We want those dilly beans to go right next to the pickles at Hannaford,” she said.