As part of USDA’s commitment to supporting the development and growth of food hubs, it often responds to inquiries from food hub planners and operators requesting technical assistance on food warehouse layout and design, facility management and operations, and physical volume capacities. In an effort to provide food hub stakeholders with on-the-ground examples of how food hubs manage distribution infrastructure, USDA worked with Tuscarora Organic Growers, an established producer cooperative in Pennsylvania, to document the stages of development of its aggregation and distribution warehouse. This document describes the cooperative’s solutions to warehouse layout, design, and function, and the associated costs of equipment and labor to gain the space capacity for handling certain amounts and types of product, with the hope that these insights will assist both new and expanding food hubs in making decisions about infrastructure investments.
Publication Date
02/01/2015