15Apr 2025 by admin

You may have heard our very exciting announcement with the Ministry on March 17. Allow us to share a bit more, and in doing so start from the beginning…

On my first day in my new role with Land to Table in May 2018, I met with a group of folks at the Rancho Vignola warehouse in Armstrong, including the owners. We spoke about the potential for their building to house a community kitchen and how to support a farmers co-op. Not long after, during meetings with local food stakeholders, as follow up to a 2018 forum that L2T hosted (on Growing the Local Food Economy), I heard many times over that the North Okanagan region needed a food hub – a place and dedicated staff to oversee aggregation, marketing and distribution of local food from local farms. The long and short of it was, local farmers needed support to sell more of their food. Corporate supply chains were not designed to include local small and medium scale farmers, nor interested in their participation.

These meetings were my first lessons in network building and my early education in how food systems worked (or didn’t work, as was more often the case for North Okanagan farmers).

On March 17th Land to Table stood proudly at the old Armstrong Dairy building, still owned by the Vignola family, to announce The Food Shed, a centrally located, wholesale warehouse connecting our community’s schools, institutions, social service agencies and non-profit organizations to year-round, local, affordable, food grown by regional farmers.

Our vision for The Food Shed: for food to flow seamlessly from the land and local producers, to organizations in service to our communities.

We were joined on that March sunny day by Lana Popham, Minister for Agriculture and the Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture and Vernon-Lumby MLA Harwinder Sandhu, along with funding partner United Way of BC. The announcement: Land to Table receives a $1 million grant to build The Food Shed! This indeed felt like a full-circle moment. After 7 years of working with and learning from our local food system sectors, stakeholders, and rightsholders, we are building the missing infrastructure that the local food network has been calling for, over many years!

While we are in the early stages of this, with exactly one year to build The Food Shed facility (e.g. a local food processing facility inside the large cold storage warehouse), we are hopeful that this opportunity stands to shift our local food system – to be stronger, healthier, more resilient, and ensure access to local food for our community as a whole!

We are grateful to you, our network for engaging with us, to the local farmers who continue to draw our attention to the gaps and opportunities and for their food we look forward to purchasing, to our project partners (like Valley Direct) for ensuring we are not taking this on alone, and to our funding partners for their trust and encouragement.

We hope that you will continue to follow us in this journey – to check in on our progress, attend our information webinars, help us brainstorm all the ‘hows’ yet to be determined, and eventually by purchasing local food from us for your organizations and programs.

Here are a few ways we invite you to learn more:

  1. Check out The Food Shed website: www.thefoodshed.ca
  2. Join us on April 29 (11:30 to 12:30) or April 30th (7-8pm) for a brief online info session where we will share more about the project, how you can get involved, and answer your questions.
  3. Read about us in the press!

Thanks for your support!

-Liz and the L2T staff and Board