GROUNDED Live - 2026: Rob Pekin - Food Hubs: The Messy Missing Middle

Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities.

In this presentation, food systems pioneer Rob Pekin explores one of the biggest challenges facing regional food systems: connecting growers with consumers. Drawing on decades of experience, Rob explains how food hubs and local processing can strengthen regional economies, improve access to good food and create fairer outcomes for producers.

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

G'day there. I'm Matthew Evans and I'm the founder and curator of the Grounded Festival. And what follows is the Grounded Podcast. Now, this is the audio that we capture from the speakers in the tent live on the day unedited. And I hope you enjoy it. Look what gets disgusted at filming conferences or events like grounded is the growing of the food. And sometimes we'd like to talk about what happens at the end of the consumer or the school or the hospital where it ends up. But then let's just fit in the middle. Rob Pickett, he's been everywhere. He's been the dairy farmer. He's been the guy doing the veggie box game for nearly two decades in Queensland. And he's just talk about the messy missing middle. Anyway, Rob from uh Brisbane uh is part of the Food Connect Foundation. Uh and he's talking the messy missing middle.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

Um uh my name's Robert Beacon. For those that haven't uh been introduced to me, I had a dairy farm on the other side of Kolac in a little little place called Larpent. Um 23 inches of rainfall, and I was attempting to milk 300 cows um uh back then, uh ecologically was the term we a bunch of us farmers did it in 1994. Um, but unfortunately no one would buy my milk um at the price that I was looking at. No one, and I was getting, it was just getting mixed in with all the other farmers, and and I was doing what I felt was a lot of lands, landscape repair and planting trees and many other things um to um and and my drive was through the cow's eye. So I had this uh epiphany one day. I was doing a um a best fed nutrition course, a bloke by the name of Les Sandals. Any dairy farmers in the room? Um a bloke by the name of Les Sandals, he was um he he he was an Aussie guy, he went to America, he learnt uh over there all the tricks to feed a dairy cow to basically extract as much milk out of them as possible, chop their heads off in four years, and then and have a have a breeding stock through. So very much the Olympian, the Olympian Parisian cow. Um, and I went and did uh a two-day course with him. Um, and I come up the other end of that course thinking, um, well, the one thing that stuck in my mind was his observation of dairy cows. And I thought, if I can be a good dairy farmer, I need to um see my farm through the cow's eyes. And that changed my life forever. It certainly didn't go in the direction that Les wanted me to go, with, you know, and back at that time, um, all us dairy farmers were feeding them fish meal, we were feeding them meat meal, we were feeding them all sorts of stuff. While over in the UK, mad cow disease was going berserk. It was actually illegal in Australia, but you could get a ton of fish meal um from Langdon Stock Foods down at Coral Rook. Um, anyone, we could all get it, and we all used it, and there was it was a bit of bedlam for a while because we were over-egging uh the meat meal and cows were literally going mad and bending bales and nearly killed a couple of farmers when they leapt out of the dairy because they just went berserk. So there was a couple of pivotal events in my life where I realized, shit, um, that's probably not the trajectory that um that I want to be on the path of. I came back to the farm, share farm with dad. We went from 200 cows to 300 cows, and I was well on my way to milking 500 to 1,000 cows. I wanted to be in the 500 club. There was back then in the 90s, there was a couple of farmers who were milking more than 500. So I'm out of breath. I had to run to the to the pessatorium and back. Um, yeah, so that's um, but there was a couple of things that were obviously really bad about me losing the farm through deregulation um uh um and uh um the eventual sort of um demise or the the the corporatization of the cooperative that I that I belong to and the demutualization of the industry. Um but the good things were I was free to read read some books um that I had on my bookshelf as a dairy farmer, but never got time to read. Um and I was really um uh uh sort of, I suppose, um uh a couple of events happened in that journey of um two or three years of being homeless um in Tasmania, living in the bush um on my own and and a and a fairly troubled mind. Um but I bumped into some Aboriginal people in Tasmania and they gave me the time to for me to bleed out my spilt milk story. Um, and then afterwards I thought, my God, what am I crying about? You know, he was a black fella um uh where we'd done all sorts of atrocities to them, and he gave me the piece, the time to listen to my spilt milk story, and I needed to give myself a kick in the pants and and do something about it. So I resolved then that I was going to work on the other side of the farm gate to try and match the heavy lifting that other farmers that I knew were doing uh um in towards landscape repair. Um, and then I set up a community supported agriculture scheme in Tasmania. I leased a farm off a local bloke, a six-acre paddock, and uh fed about 30 people for two, two, three years. I grew 70 varieties. Um I was growing um successionally weekly for about 25 families and five restaurants. Um, and I really sort of uh that gave me the confidence that there were people out there on the other side of the farm gate who were eaters and restaurateurs who were really interested in buying locally and really interested in buying good, healthy food. But uh I come out of that journey thinking this has also got knobs on it. Um, what farmer would go out there and and farm that amount of vegetables all on their own to uh to do that? So I then bumped into a bunch of other farmers and we worked out that there was plenty of farmers out there who were growing two or three things, wanted to grow more four, more five to seven things. And if we got together, we would have um much better peace of mine, we'd have a regular supply. Um, and so I created Food Connect in 2004. Um I was still homeless and still didn't have any money, um, but that didn't stop the community getting behind me and investing in me. So we I attracted $5,000 from a couple of uh my customers that I didn't have yet, but they were um um interested in the idea, and Food Connect was started. We leased the building and off we went. Um my main philosophical sort of drive at that point was um um out of a concept called associative economics, um which is, and I do a philosophy of the philosophy of finance or the um three colours of money courses these days, which is this idea of entrepreneurs associating together to change the world. Um, but there's a there's a fair discipline to it. Um so that's a bit of my background story. Um so there's um those who who was at the previous session? Enough of you, so you know enough about this board here, but we're in this, we're in this interregnum, this um metamorphosis of humanity at the moment. There's lots of cracks appearing down the middle here. We're in this, some people, there's transition finance things happening. Um, there's the the world of natural capital and all the additionalities that are on the health side of things or the social side of things. Um, there's lots of really interesting stuff bubbling to the surface at the moment. Um, and uh food hubs um and these alternate ways to distribute food and regionalize food economies and grow economies um in a in a uh into a place where we have thriving regional communities is starting to emerge. Um and and uh the food connect shed that Emma is Emma here, my partner? No, she's gone to the other the other uh event, which is a really good event too. Um uh anyway, we in 2015, we celebrated our 10-year anniversary, and I created the Brisbane Food Plan, which was basically the sourcing policy for Brisbane. It's online, you can grab it. Liz is using it down that lay. It's a really useful model for thinking thinking about the whole world as your procurement oyster, um, and where should things come from through an ecological lens, an economic lens, um, an ecological lens, and a human health lens or social justice lens. So through those lenses, where should we source food from to feed our our city, our regions? Um, and and out of that mapping exercise, all sorts of opportunities pop up to the surface. Um, but the piece in the middle is is who does the coordination, who does the aggregation, uh, and where does the infrastructure come from to help us lower the overhead so these young entrepreneurs, these farmers, can get a better price? How can we pay them a better price through the product that they're delivering? It's really hard to do that in Australia. We've got coals and woolies, they dominate the market. It's a really tough space. So it's messy, it's shitty work, it's um it's a it's an exploration and it's a journey for a lot of us. But I feel like we're at the at the point, particularly now where fossil fuels are starting to be priced how they should be. And certainly urea is is a is the fossil fuel product that is really um bumping or uh making the the current system uh um wake up to itself a little bit. And we certainly have heard many stories here over the weekend, over these two days. Um so there's um on the um I'm just gonna draw um there's there's these sort of typology of food can of sheds um um from right over here what we call CFEs. Community food enterprises, much more not-for-profit based, uh much more around food literacy. Um uh and they're like a um they might be a house or a large house or a little shed where there's a community garden and there's a community kitchen in there, and they teach people how to use foods, how to cook with foods, and basically build people's confidence around using fresh fruit and vegetables. So they're generally called community food enterprises. The stop is probably the most well-known one in Canada. An amazing enterprise, Catherine Schaff, um, visited Australia, and they've got many of these community food enterprises in America. So they're not food rescue, let's make a distinction. I'm not into food rescue, that's just a band-aid, it's not solving the problem, it's just diverting food to hungry people, which is a great thing in of itself, but it doesn't solve the problem. But actually, in a lot of cases, it perpetuates the problem because they use, because Coles and Woolies use that as their social license. Um CFEs is the sort of small version, more not for profit-based, more philanthropic or grant-driven. Um, and then you go through to the larger food hubs in America, which are you know, large warehouses, um, in some cases, um 20,000 uh square meters, uh, big coal rooms, um, big processing kitchens, um uh uh large packing rooms, you know, forklifts, semi, semi-trailers can pop in. Um so it's much more aggregation of from mainstream farmers, from larger farmers, um, where they where the produce is aggregated and it's distributed within the region to local hospitals, local age care centers, uh, local um retail chains, um schools, and to local shops. And then it goes into the cities. So we have this concept of of uh large, large aggregation facilities, very highly commercial. Um, and then in the middle is sort of like the operations, and there's there's so many in between as well. Um I'm just drawing that one there. They're all called food hubs, they're all just called food hubs. There's just so many different typologies of food hubs. I've just given you um, well, and then the food connect shed, I think, sits in the middle. Um, these are more rural, regional based on highways. Um, these ones are here more in social, you know, in suburban, urban, urban areas. Um, ours is in an industrial area in Salisbury and Brisbane. Um, and these type of ones are more in the periurban area. So they might be larger, they might have a um, like ours has got an event space, um, ours has got coal rooms, commercial kitchens that are leased flexibly. Um uh and it's it's two and a half thousand square meters. So two and a half thousand square meters. Currently designing one down in Adelaide Hills, which will be around about five thousand square meters, possibly more. Um, uh working with a developer down there to do one, and it it it'll have elements of this and elements of that. We've got to do a mapping exercise to just test what uh the farmers in the Adelaide Hills are looking for.

SPEAKER_04 12:42

Yes. Just one.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

There's lots in the States, um and you can have virtual food hubs. So you can have virtual ones, which are sort of more where it's um their technology drives them. So it might be, you know, 10 farmers get together um and aggregate their produce and then use local logistics chains um to get it into you know um a supermarket or a hospital. But the main um purpose of a food hub is to put the destiny of farmers and people in those regions, put their or they co-design their own destiny, their own future, their own food system um themselves, and that's the that's the critical piece. So we're moving, and as we were talking about over here, where we're moving from um a hyper-individual um uh stupid economy um to a more collaborative and then onto a more collective economy. Um so uh we've got a bit of a picture there. I I can this is all in the report regenerating the regions report, which is going to be turned into um a much more um that's the front cover. Um regenerate, you can get that off our website, foodconnect foundation.org.au. Um, and I'll go into the different legal structures um and a few other things in a minute. But um, yeah, this has got a good so so the Food Connect Shed has been operating for seven years, and we've in there here is a case study, a deep interrogation into the finances, um the makeup, all the 96 businesses that have operated in the shed. Um at one stage we had 45 tenants in the place. That's uh my um that's the first version that I was editing over. Um it's gonna be turned into a blueprint for food hubs. We're gonna make the title really simple, a blueprint for food hubs, um, in the next couple of months. So that'll be accessible, and we'll do a much more um uh engaging webinar series and uh um and marketing around sharing that the information that's in that report. Um that's two years of work gone into that report. I'm a very slow writer, busy person. Um so everyone's got the idea of the typology of food hubs. So there's no one type, it really has to be co-designed by people in their regions in a collective sense to sort of think about well, what is what are the opportunities. One of the things um we did, um Emma and I, before we created the Food Connect shed, I mean, obviously we're working with 150 farmers and we had about 80 value adders who we're working with. A few of them were in the shed. Um, and but we only owned or we only rented the shed. Actually, it's it's 40 metres by 50 metres, so it's pretty easy, and it's got a double story along one side. Um, and this is a street, and that's a street. Two streets, so we're on the corner. Um one of the things that was really important to us was an event space. So this corner here was this. I should use other colours. I've got all these colours here. So this is the party space, and then there's a commercial kitchen here. We're building another commercial kitchen here, and then over here there's packing rooms and cold rooms and cold rooms up the back here. Um you get the picture, and there's offices all the way along here with a couple of loading docks here, here, and here, um, and three entrances here as well. So this is the public side, and this is the commercial side. We have uh we had a sort of a master plan. I knew that um, and I'll get into the philosophy or the principles of food hubs that that uh are in the report because they're probably the most important thing. Because you can get into the specific design of each food hub, but the principles are probably the most important thing. How you design it out of those principles is totally up to you, and you could you can configure um food food hubs in whatever way possible. Um, so we were renting um this space here. Our landlord, lovely landlord, but he never repaired the place. It was an old World War II building. Um, we approached him uh about buying the whole building because we had many people who wanted to co-locate with us. Um, they were all producing amazing foods, sauerkrauts, um, kimchi's um uh um kefirs, uh kombuchas, just all sorts of things, but they couldn't compete on price. We knew they were in factories all over Brisbane, they all had a forklift each, they all had a printer each, they all had um, you know, they were renting space each, they they were they were just on their own and they were on their own. So when we had um this idea of bringing everyone together and sharing a forklift and sharing a printer and sharing offices, sharing loading docks, sharing transport, sharing logistics, we had a lot of vans at that point in time. Um, this concept became well, what could that do to our overheads to allow us, allow us to sell an affordable product, a really great product at a price where people were more people would buy that product and really working on those um that uh marginal cost curve. Because we it's all right to be small and wonderful and really, really high quality, but if you're not making money or you're not paying yourself well, then that's not great. And an investor's never going to look at you if you're if you if you if you're not looking after yourself, you're not paying yourself well. Um, yeah, so the concept of the Food Connect Shed um developed. We bought um uh there's nine different types of capital that came into the shed. Um, and I suppose the lesson here is it's much easier now because the world is in a bit more of a crisis, and there are, as we were, you know, listening to um to who was at the last session? The last session? Yeah, the last session with Carmel Onions and Rain. Um, the finance system is starting to go, my God, you know, there's a train wreck coming, and we need to prepare ourselves to invest in the sort of businesses that are going to uh land humanity um safely. Um the big challenge. And farmers are doing all the heavy lifting at the moment and they're not getting the price reward. I don't know how many farmers I talk to who are doing a regenerative product or even a better quality product, and they're still selling it through the commodity system and not being recognized. We've got great transitional finance tools like carbon markets and uh and nature repair markets and all those things coming through, um, which is really, really fantastic. But we actually need to pay them better for the product. Um, we're also at a human scale, so humanity has been on this hyper, this journey to hyper-individual foolishness, um, where we sort of look at that and we go, well, we can do a bit better than that. Our deepest humanity is to collectivize, our deepest humanity is to share and work with each other and collaborate. Um, so the first principle of any any food hub is to not be too prescriptive about the design. The first principle is to think about how do we create um facilities that are flexible and can be shared, where people bump into each other in a more of a um that just bump into each other. And then they go, What are you doing? I'm making this, or why don't we collaborate? Or where are you getting your bottles from? Or how who's making your stickers? Um and farmers can also bump into. So the place, and this comes out of Emma's, Emma's a criminologist, my partner Emma, here she is, right on cue. Emma's a former criminologist who um came across a particular form of criminology that was called um septed, crime prevention through environmental design. Um, Jane Jacobs, anyone heard of the work of Jane Jacobs? You would have, as you know Marilyn, Marilyn Waring. Um, so Jane Jacobs' work is a huge influence on how the shed is constructed. And it's this idea of more eyes on the street, um uh um uh permeable perme permeability where you can see there's no walls, there's not too many walls where people feel like they're isolated on their own. You can see everyone, everyone can see each other, and it becomes a safe place. It's really important to us um as well that we are feminizing the food system. So most of the value adders in the Food Connect Shed, I think uh the 96 tenants we've had there, 64 of them being uh female run um entrepreneurs, um, and particularly the fermented healthy foods. They they really love producing the sauerkrauts and the kimchi and the confiras um and the um all of the other things.

SPEAKER_04 21:14

Yes, hang on.

SPEAKER_02 22:09

Yeah, yeah. So this is where we um dive into indigenous epistemology or terms of reference around autonomy as a human being. So the the associate economic framework is autonomous entrepreneurs in service of each other, in service of community. So this is where awareness of the PL and awareness of the balance sheet and how that relates to your pricing model and how that relates to your trading model, who you're buying raw product off and who you're selling to, um getting a stable price, a consistent price, not relying on the market. So the three principles or the three ideas of the sheet is to decouple from fossil fuels, divorce ourselves from market forces, and collaborate for good. But as Hamish was saying, as autonomous human beings, an Indigenous epistemology has a lot written around the idea of being autonomous, being completely responsible, owning your own shit, but also working in service of others in a way where you're in this messy, it's called autonomous regard. If you want to read some really good literature around how do we do this, uh what we fear, because we're pushing more and more to the extremes. Um how do we how do we engage in these messy conversations in the middle? Because that's where our deepest humanity is, is to be flawed, to be imperfect, because none of us are, but actually, in a way, by doing that, we actually are unfolding our our our unfolding our our our um our best uh of our humanity in service of not in service of ourselves. Actually, I would submit that probably humanity as individuals, um, I'm better off not looking after myself at all. And actually, mathematically, if you if I shared my dream with you and you all shared your dreams with me, we would have 50 people all looking after Penny, and Penny wouldn't have to look after herself. Whereas in the hyper-individual world, Penny's just looking after herself. That's one, as opposed to 50. And if we're all doing that, do you get the maths? It's pretty amazing. Like that's that's a phenomena. Like double entry bookkeeping is a phenomena. It's practiced globally around the world. It is the only thing in the world that's practiced globally. It's a phenomena. And that's why I'm focusing on double entry bookkeeping and what Luca Pacchioli taught, and what Marilyn Waring spoke about, and what um who was the one who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Um Eleanor, Eleanor Ostrom. Yeah. Um, yeah, the common, how we how we look up common. So the shed, in a way, is a common, community owned owned. So we raised 2.1 million, the first 150,000, and Emma did this. Emma, we wrote a loan to a women's giving circle in Brisbane um for $150,000 at 3% interest over five years to kick start this idea of us buying the shed. The circle of women, the Brisbane Giving Circle, they loved the idea so much, they just gave us the money. All of it. 150 grand, no questions asked. We were prepared to borrow it. And that was like um, and Goethe has this phrase once you head in a direction, um, all sorts of provenance will follow you. If it's a good idea. If it's not a bad, if it's not a good idea, it won't. Yeah. So that was our first cue. Oh, this is going to work. Within four months, we'd raised $2.1 million. The building was worth 1.8. Um, and we've raised another million in the meantime, building infrastructure inside the shed. Any questions so far?

SPEAKER_04 25:43

I'm rushing through this. Yes. Hello. Right. Oh, yes, of course. Um, so the seven principles of the shed.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

Um governance. It is imperative that we separate pecuniary rights from voting rights, i.e., the money doesn't tell the entrepreneurs what to do. The money accompanies the entrepreneurs to be in service of humanity. The entrepreneurs need to be highly financially literate to measure up to that money. If you don't measure up to that money, that money won't flow. So we have to become really close to our PL, really close to our our balance sheet, um, and do forecasting in a way where the future becomes the future the future um the future appears. So we have to be very, very financially literate. If I was to draw on there, um, shade the area, that there's the PL you probably can't see that, and I can't get to it. Bring it to the front.

SPEAKER_04 26:52

If I was to this is really important that we do get this. Yeah, bring it to the front. Yeah, no, just sit on the on the on the thing though, on the on the on the on the stage so people can see it, yeah. Oh yes, all the leads out. Who said that?

SPEAKER_02 27:12

Who said that? So basically, if we look at the government at the moment, and I shaded the the only area that they have any visibility on, and that this is the PL, income, expenses, balance sheet, assets, liabilities, equity, the bottom as a result, not profit, that's not profit there. It only turns into profit when it goes over here. If I was to say to the government, what area do they have any idea of income tax.

SPEAKER_04 27:45

That's all they have any visibility on.

SPEAKER_02 27:47

That's all they think about. So they've got no financial literacy. Government have never had financial literacy. The balance sheet, if we did it in natural counting terms, would would be right insolvent.

SPEAKER_04 27:59

Uh no, we're insolvent, sorry. Um if I was to look at a not-for-profit, what are they looking at? Yeah, they're just looking at expenses. That's right, they're just looking at expenses.

SPEAKER_02 28:15

Yep, they've got the grant money, and that's all they're looking at. So not-for-profits aren't going to save the world. But businesses, particularly businesses that get equity, they have visibility, they have to have visibility on the whole, on all four quadrants of the balance sheet and the PL. Um and that and and it's really important that we recognize double entry bookkeeping as Luca Pacchioli first described it. He didn't invent it. It was invented way before him, but he was the first one to describe it to the merchants of Venice who were answerable to God at that point in time, and they had to measure up. But we have to measure up now because the planet is, it needs us to measure up in a financial way. Um so, yeah, so the first thing is to separate pecuniary rights from voting rights. So the money is accompanied, um, um, but it doesn't have votes. Really important. So we set up legal structures that do that. One of the second principles um is around uh the operating model. We have to be transparent around our expenses that the business needs to operate and that the rents that the tenants bring in on the income side of things. Um it's really important that we do we practice true pricing, what's called true pricing, or or in some some people call it true cost, true cost accounting. So we know what the real price is. We're not, it's not a margin, it's not a percentage, it's an actual real number that we can relay to the tenants and say, well, this is what you're paying for, insurance, percentage of the insurance, uh percentage of fire, a percentage of water, a percentage of yeah, all the things, all those things. They're separate, utilities and outgoings are separate, but the other thing. So really get really detailed, and then the tenants get that and they know exactly what they're paying for. It's not it's not um intangible, it's very tangible, very, very, very um, very measurable. Um the investment model um we used at the shed um when we raised the $2.9 million dollars was a blended capital stack. So we knew because we were piloting the Food Connect shed that we needed to get there's three types of money. Everyone knows this is this is your PL. It's red money because it's the blood flow of the of the business. You don't go and buy a tractor out of the PL. This pays wages, it pays rent, it pays electricity, it pays what um all those sort of things. So um red money, blue money, which is the balance sheet money, long-term money. Um, this is where assets uh and liabilities are and where it's either debt or equity. And then there's a third type of money called gift money. And it's up here in the financial world wanting to land and give humanity a safe landing. It's it's really needing us as entrepreneurs to measure up, um, and that's where you come into your forecasting. When you do your forecasting over years, you'll start to say, okay, it's whatever it is, $150,000 in philanthropy I need, or it's $50,000. So this is the impact space. This is where we measure what is our impact, and how can we measure that? Over and above the commercial part of the building, uh, the commercial part of the business. You you I do a course called Um uh the Philosophy of Finance or the Head, Heart, Hands of Finance. So this is the head, heart. So it's the hands, that's the head, and this is the heart. And every business should practice that. Every person should have a balance between the head, heart, and hands as they go about um their world in the business. Half an hour. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm nearly at the end of this. Um I I spoke about the infrastructure model before. It has to be flexible use, it has to be space that multiple tenants can use at various times or can be shared space. So uh like a pasteurizing machine or a freeze-drying machine that that five or six farmers can use on a on a daily basis, um, and then you have operators in there. So it's a flexible space, um, a shared space. Um, I mentioned the sourcing plan before, so you have to do some mapping. You have to understand what does this region, what's the diet of this region, how many chickens is Brisbane eating per day or per week? How many carrots is Brisbane eating? Um, how many, you know, whatever it is, and then where is that coming from? What are the opportunities here? If they're drinking whatever it is, you know, um 200 litres of of kombucha a day, is it coming from Melbourne or is it coming from Brisbane? And then you start to map those opportunities and then you start to look for um well, what could go into the food hub that basically stops the drain of money. So if it's like in Brisbane's case, if it's if the you know the 2000, is it 2000 Ks from Melbourne to Brisbane? Yeah, you know, we see things on the shop that's come 2,000 Ks from into a couple of shops around Brisbane. We start to say, well, what why why isn't that coming from Brisbane? And then you the food hub could start to put the equipment in there or the plant in there that that allows that to happen. Um so that mapping and that understanding the diet of the region um is really critical. Um it's it's not hard to do either. You you don't have to um there there are various things like the the the Australian basket that you can look at, where they they tell you how much what what is the average basket that that every individual in Australia buys. And you can just look at that and then just um extrapolate that out over the population um and uh and figure things out. Um uh and then the and then the the seventh principle is community engagement. Um, the only way we're going to get out of this is to um have a participatory model of engagement where more and more people can dip their toes into this new food system in a participatory way. People, when they participate, when people participate, they go on a journey with you, they go on a journey supporting you. And in fact, we need them as much as they need us, because a lot of them are sitting out there in the extremes, which is why we need to have conversations that don't polarize. We don't judge people, they're sitting out there going, How can I, you know, um, we they're looking for an opportunity to participate in something that's really um that's exciting, that gives them health, that um genuinely takes away some of their loneliness or takes away some of their mental health problems. They need spaces that are inclusive and allow them, and it might be with their money, it might be with their volunteering, it might be with coming to an event, like holding the event space, you know, it holds uh weddings, um 21sts, um, and it's also opportunities um for all the tenants to sell there. Um I'll and I'll finish on what a food hub isn't, which is really important as well, because a lot of people um think, well, you know, what's the distinction? So a food hub isn't something that an individual can do. So and and a food hub isn't something that someone else is already doing in your region unless they're doing it shit. So coals and woolies, they're doing it shit. A food hub could eventually become a community supermarket, eventually, and show Coles and Woolies how to do it properly. Um so you don't do something that someone else is already doing if they're doing it really well. You look at ways you can collaborate or augment what they're doing. Fresh food, yeah. So these ones here are more focused around fresh food, aggregation of fresh produce, and finding markets. Um, ours is more focused on uh on low-processed, high-value um um uh making of food. Um, and these ones here are more around educating people around how to use food. You can still do that in here. We we do have workshops where people come in and learn how to make a sauerkraut or things like that. Yeah, so that was the missing piece for us as Food Connect.

SPEAKER_04 36:17

Yeah, yeah. Minimal retrocessors, correct. Yep, yep.

SPEAKER_02 36:37

Uh no, they they definitely are about fresh food, um, especially the larger ones, and these ones could do it as well. The one we're designing in in in Adelaide is going to have a big fresh fruit and food component. Um, they can have a mixture of all of those sort of things. But that was probably a missing piece for us as we developed Food Connect is we were thinking fresh food, but uh you know, when we first started in 2005, but eventually a whole bunch of makers came to us and said, We've we've made an amazing ginger beer. Can you sell it to us? You know, or can you can you sell it for us, be our first test to the market? Um, so a low, low-processed, high-value product made locally and then sold locally is the um, you know, so the sourcing of it is really critical through that sourcing policy that I mentioned before, which is to the whole globe.

SPEAKER_04 37:33

And a lot of communities are saying that to us.

SPEAKER_07 37:35

We think we want a food hub and they don't even know what they actually need. So we have to do a piece before that. And what it looks like at the moment is that they actually need two things. They need an aggregation facility, cold storage, for farmers to access that's a bit further west of NUSA, and then that's closer to the freeway than M1. And then they also need something in NUSA Central that is around agritourism, showing off the region's produce and products that the value adders are doing and having a bit of that shared infrastructure component so that they can share the processing at lower barriers to entry for new businesses to get going.

SPEAKER_02 38:16

Yeah, we had a meeting with 50 chefs in NUSA and and they're all still getting their produce from Brisbane. They said if if we could have a you know, a floor basically where we could go to every day and pick up our fresh produce, no, know where it's sourced from, you know, uh that would save them a lot of money in transport and logistics. Yes, I've been working with Zoe and a few of the others down there. Um yeah, it's it's it's a really exciting project. Yes. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_05 38:44

Yes, sorry. Sorry. So sorry. Sorry, so food hubs, so I agree with you. I've been um looking at this space for some time too, and also doing a lot of advocacy around different conversations with different, very diverse people, because I look at food systems holistically using systems thinking and transdisciplinary approaches. So um, so a couple of things. One, I agree with you, there are various typologies of the food hubs, it you um certainly in that schema. And um and the other thing is I'm currently in Canberra, and my background happened to somehow got involved with very briefly with a working group for an ACT feasibility study about setting up a food hub in Canberra. And it was very much around functionality. I mean, you haven't used that term, but it's exactly what you're suggesting for you know, talking about in NISA. And um, and this relates to Canberra or ACT region, capital region as it's called, has a food strategy. And um, and this is one of the things, but there's not much publicity about it, or what are the outcomes, or you know, what are the intentions. So the project was ran by um two par um two consulting sort of working together. And um, but it's basically about aggregation and then distribution. And they're also looking at it at stage one, stage two, and they've looked at the economics and side of things with that because of the transfer.

SPEAKER_02 40:10

Yes, yes. I've read the ACT um food hub um feasibility study that um SGS and Sustained developed. Yep. No, it's it's good. It's good to see um these sort of projects uh getting a bit of air time to reduce food miles. I mean, uh, what a time to be talking about food hubs.

SPEAKER_04 40:29

Cool, next question. Yes.

unknown 40:33

Oh, never know.

SPEAKER_09 40:35

Um I'm just wondering, do you did you ask yourself why the fresh food component didn't come to the party?

SPEAKER_02 40:43

Yeah, well, because we ran a fresh food business, um multi-farmer distribution business for 18 years. Um what we we the building just wasn't big enough. So we were starting to see bit larger and larger trucks. This road down here was too narrow for larger trucks. Um, and then there was the diversity question. So this was our seven-year review because this area was always going to be about fresh food and fresh food distribution. Um uh there were two things. Um, we had too many diverse types of tenants, and that we as the shed um just felt it was going to be much easier to run if we had a um um a consistent type of tenant, more around value adding. Um, also down the road, two kilometers down the road, is all the wholesalers. And a couple of those wholesalers come to the Southeast Queensland Food Summit two years ago, and they were very excited about this, and they wanted to partner with us. So that's that idea of don't replicate what someone's already doing or someone's really interested in doing, and they can do it much better than us. So that's Suncoast Fresh, Graham Twine from Suncoast Fresh, and he said, I want to work with you. So that's sort of well, well, why do that when we had so much demand, particularly for commercial kitchens? Like we get two inquiries for commercial kitchens a day to come into this year. So we sort of thought, well, let's let's make that our focus. Yeah. Good question though. Um, this lady here, and then you.

SPEAKER_10 42:08

Um, I love the work that you are doing. It's really amazing. Um we're from I'm from the Wollongong area, and I just look at Food Connect Shed and think it's like everyone needs one. Um but my question is about the like the I guess the structure of the Food Connect Shed. Like what how I know that you have care holders, so you've got 512 care holders. How does that work?

SPEAKER_02 42:30

Yeah, so um basically there's two entities. Um there's sort of like a you could almost call it FCF, which is which is Emma and I and Jesse. Um so with a not-for-profit arm that's more the advocacy arm, more an association that oversees. We berthed the shed. And then as the shed, it's a public unlisted company. Um, so with normal PTY LTDs, you can only raise capital up to $2 million from a maximum of 20 people, whereas with a public unlisted company, that's unlimited. You can have as many investors as possible. Um, you can only raise from the public through an equity crowdfunding uh campaign, and that's what we did. So we've got 540 owners of the building. Um the foundation has what's called the golden share or the foundation share. Um so it basically has four objects in the constitution of the shed that it oversees. So one around um uh there's a um because we want we want we want to allow the shed to have autonomy in running the business as they see fit, but not to go against the mission of what it's meant to be. So obviously, one is about being a food hub. Not go rogue, not go rogue, that's right. Yeah, so we have to have asset locks in there, um, and then everyone who's invested into the shed, so all the equity uh and and the debt.

SPEAKER_04 44:00

Um and the quasi debt and the debt convertible debt. Convertible debt. I'll just save myself time.

SPEAKER_02 44:13

And there's also some loans to individual tenants in the shed, too, that we facilitate. So at the moment we're building a kitchen for a tenant who's gone from start-up to stand-up. We have three types of tenants: startup, stand-up, and stay-ups. There's not many stay-ups. Actually, a lot of the larger businesses are becoming shakier as stay-ups in the current climate with fuel and urea and just the general business climate, the cost of doing business. Yeah, so there's a tenant who's been with us for four years, Egyptian falafels, three three fellas. We've had a lot of tenants who have been with us four or five years and then left and gone and opened up their own premises to great expense, and they lose that ecosystem support. So that's other one, one of the other principles. I didn't cover all the other principles, but in the shed, there's this other layer of ecosystem support. And the ecosystem support is the admin, the finance, the marketing, the facilitation of collaborations, the the um uh the um facilitation of workshops, and basically giving them um or rounding out their business skills um where they're a great sauerkraut maker, but they're you know, whatever it is, can't design a label. That's right. So this ecosystem support is is probably one of the other critical injections. So along this side here, there's um another level of officers. So there's a marketing company in one of them, there's uh an interior design company up this end here, um, there's a um uh an editor or a writer up there, and they all participate in the shared buyers club. And so there's lots of people who are intermingling and intermixing, as I said before, not in a prescribed way, but more in an incidental way. They bump into each other, they find out of each other, they get curious, and then all of a sudden they're doing a blend together or they're they're doing something fun.

SPEAKER_10 46:03

Um if you love Jane Jacobs, there's a guy called Richard Sennett who talks about um unplanned exchanges within urban spaces. So that's exactly that concept.

SPEAKER_02 46:13

Yeah, yeah. No, that's that's yeah, great question. Thank you, and thanks for your love. Um there was a question over here, yes.

SPEAKER_03 46:24

Thanks, Rob. Look, just as a group of um people in a room with all different backgrounds and interests, what's kind of the call to action for this group? How can we create demand for this sort of space? How can we support these spaces where they exist? What is it, what does it look like?

SPEAKER_02 46:40

Um Yeah, so the um the um the first thing we need to do is support the existing attempts to to regionalize food economies, and there's many of them around Australia in very nascent ways, trying doing it pretty tough. So we need to um acknowledge their work and um support their work wherever we can. Um the second thing we need to do is make the invisible work that people like Liz and others are doing in regions, really make that really visible. So this coordination, organizing, kicking in the ass, trying to get whatever grants to regionalize economies needs to be supported much better. Actually, when we were writing the re the Regenerating the Regions report, um uh we um we got a letter from Sarah sorry, uh we had a uh phone call with Sarah Brocker. She was the head of the USDA's food hub project program in in America, and she'd just uh written an article called Don't Build That Food Hub. And she rang us to say, why shouldn't you, you know, and and it was basically um it was the food hub can't be built. That's the physical infrastructure, that building there, but it's actually the what we call a connection infrastructure. So this is the physical infrastructure, and then there's this connection infrastructure, mainly women in regions who really want to bring farmers together, get them over whatever it is they need to do, um, uh, and basically help them to aggregate, help them to coordinate better, um, talk to hospitals, aged care centers in their regions. What's the opportunity that we can have a procurement contract with them or pilot something or other? So that connection infrastructure needs to be really well supported. I mean, the work of grains, I'm looking at Emily over there. The work of grains, three women bringing to their amazing conference for the last since 2009, Emily. Um, yeah, and they're just they're just doing it um out of out of love of rebuilding a grain economy. You know, and anyone on the supply, on the grain supply chain, it's an amazing event. It's so collaborative, so wonderful, but they're totally doing it um in their spare time. And yet those things it needs to be something that Emily does full-time. Grains, grains, there's on the hat. I've got a hat, I'll go and get, I should go and get my hat. Um so there's there's a lot of existing um movements that we need to support better of. Um so we're leveraging off the work that's already existing. We're not going out there and creating something new. So that were the they're the first couple of things. The third thing I suspect, as we're seeing at the shed, is a lot of businesses don't have this financial acumen. Um, we sort of thought it was more prevalent, but a lot of people, uh, you know, just these three things here like don't buy a tractor out of the PL, um buy it out of the PL, uh, buy it out of the balance sheet. Um, you know, the four lies, there's four lies farmers tell themselves that I talk about in the course. So being really honest about your, you know, the the income that you're you're basically the off-farm income that's perpetuating the problem. If we if we if we let Australia know that 60% of the produce that they're eating from coals and woolies is actually being funded by off-farm income that women make on farms, that's very embarrassing. So we need to uh um find ways that we can communicate uh how broke the system is financially, and then equip people with the financial literacy where they can where they can get themselves out of that out of that bind.

SPEAKER_04 50:15

More questions. Yes.

SPEAKER_08 50:21

Thank you so much, Rob, and thank you for sharing your story from the outset. Really touching. Um look, we're in a fuel crisis that's about to become a food crisis, and I can't help thinking that what you're presenting here is an answer to shorter value chains that that could um move us away from a very fragile longer value chain. Um I'm just wondering, in terms of um opportunities, what does that mean for your model?

SPEAKER_02 50:46

Yeah, um, yeah, no, it's it's an amazing opportunity for us. Um we sort of uh um fortunately um or unfortunately, um how do I phrase this? Because um it's yeah, it's it's it's a um it's a really, really big opportunity for us to, as I was talking about before, this these cracks are appearing, and this is a great opportunity for food hubs to enter the market. They're very cheap to bring into the market. In some cases, it doesn't take any money at all. It just takes some support for people like Liz to be able to aggregate those farmers and bring it together and find a hospital or an aged care center that we can drive. Emma's report, Emma just released a report called Good for Good Food Procurement Australia, um, which is an amazing report about the the affordability we can, you know, the governments can save a lot of money, let alone the avoided cost. Um and now the fuel crisis and the price of urea and other things are really only just fix that.

SPEAKER_07 51:42

Um the National Food Security Strategy is currently um doing the rounds around the country. Probably a lot of you have been in those consultations. Um thank you. Um and I've been on the phone with Def a couple of times in the last couple of weeks since the Transforming the Public Plate report's been out, and they're quite excited about that. And they've also looked at our Regenerating the Regions report because they don't have any clues, like they're out of ideas. So the more we can advocate to our Department of Primary Industries, but also across the silos, you know, we need to get the climate and environment departments on board with this stuff and get them to connect the dots between the food system and climate. Um, the health system, like there's just so much opportunity for some good advocacy work there. But as a movement, we need to be a lot more coordinated and singing off the same song sheet with this stuff. Um so yeah, but and also it's interesting because you know, um governments want to talk to you for the ideas, but when you say, but we need money for that, all of a sudden there's no money. So we have to find innovative ways of using what existing money pools are out there, like the National Heritage Trust or um, you know, the climate adaptation stuff that's coming out, um uh the Future Made in Australia fund, how can we advocate to repurpose those big big buckets of money to help build this infrastructure quickly?

SPEAKER_04 53:24

Oh, is it?

SPEAKER_00 53:31

Uh how are your investors getting a return? They're getting a return on a dividend, and then when you divide your rent between your all of your tenants, they're not all using a dehydrator or a whatever. So how are you is there gonna be arguments about am I not paying for that? How do you divide that?

SPEAKER_02 53:53

Um so uh if if a tenant come comes in, so the first question is yeah, dividends. Um we we aren't paying dividends yet, and eventually that will happen. So it's all around dividends. Um there are some debts there that we're paying, you know, 4% on, uh, 5% on, um, 3% on, just individual loans on on equipment, so not on the building. Um so we've uh we've got a new tenant in at the moment. Um he's bought a massive big dehydrator, so he's dehydrating um spent beer uh grains, spent brewer's grains, um, and then um I'm milling them in the flour mill, and then he's turning them into beer snacks, Indian beer snacks. So in the case where it's a piece of equipment that no one else really can use, they buy a, we give them the space or put a room around it and and and they pay for that. In the case of the commercial kitchen, which has got a lot of shared equipment, it's done on an hourly basis. Three or four tenants might be in the same time or a half-day basis or a day basis. So the rents have been worked out around well, what what does that look like to recover all of the cost plus the repairable parts plus equity on the commercial kitchen and then their storage as well. So um, yeah, it's it uh I thought it would be very complicated, but it actually turned out to be quite simple. We buy the big, heavy, expensive stuff that can be shared, um, and we rent it out to them, or like in the case of the kitchen, the commercial kitchen we're building for time at the moment, uh, we're building the kitchen for $100,000, they're buying $100,000 worth of gear, um, and they will pay that back over three years to us in through their lease. So it's basically like a loan um situation. Um, I'm trying to think of all the other. Most people do have their own space. The trickiest part in this model, particularly when we went to fed 45 tenants, when we only had about 15 tenants at the start, is who pays for the shared space, who pays for the, you know, where people walk and where people drive their cars. That's been the hardest. When there were four tenants sharing 102 square meters, we we all just divided it up into four and we paid the full base rate, base rate lease. Now there's about 10 tenants using that space, and some of them um are so small that the rent on the shared space is higher than their little. Yeah. No, no, that's right. And she's no, well, she's up here, she's got her own entrance, and she she all the offices are individually rented. Yeah. Yeah. So over here there's five tenants using one kitchen. So basically they all pay for their own little offices, but the shared toilets, um, stairs, kitchen, um, and uh a bit of storage space, they all pay equal shares. So that's divided up and they all pay for that equally. So we sit down, that's a participatory model. Sit them down and say, here's all your leases. This bit isn't being paid for, but you're all using it. Um, we'll just divide it by four or five or six or whoever it is that's using it. And everyone goes, no brainer, like it's really easy.

SPEAKER_04 56:57

So it's that transparency piece. So yeah. Thank you.

SPEAKER_06 57:06

There's a really big moment of opportunity arriving soon, and it's through what the Federal Treasury is doing with sustainability accounting. This is particularly pertinent to farming and how our loss of biodiversity is being quantified as a loss. So farmers are going to have to well, those who are using a lot of chemicals and monocultures are really going to have to change their habits or be penalized financially. This also means that with food manufacturing, where there are 13,800 food manufacturers in Australia, um, most of them do high processed foods. And the average distance a bag of supermarket goods travels is 21,000 kilometers. So these are now being put into the accounting system, sustainability accounting system. So I see big changes are going to be made very soon with demands on manufacturers and scope three emissions, for example, having to be included into the costs of production. So I think we're at a really good time to be doing this.

SPEAKER_09 58:33

Oh meat, yeah, sorry. Okay, so as uh sorry, I've got a few hats, but as with my um vegetable, organically grown vegetable grower hat, um, I ask what where are the um the resources for financial for gaining more financial literacy?

SPEAKER_02 58:54

There's not many, um, which is why I've been asked to do this financing the food system course. Um for the bakers and the grain guys, because I did a session with them and they were all just you know, how can we find out more about this? How can we teach ourselves um the right, you know, where to find the right capital at the right time in the right way, and measure up our financial literacy measures up to our ecological literacy or our social literacy if we're a social enterprise. But we have to do that in an aggregated way. So the super so the large money doesn't want to come down to us in $50,000, you know, to $500,000. It wants to come to us in an aggregated way. So we have to collectivize and we have to learn one language and become really financially literate, not in the language of well, not only in the language of finance, but the language of our own businesses. Yeah. So that the financing the food system course, we put it in front of a few philanthropists to fund that work. Um they're looking at it. They don't sort of see the revel relevance of it, but I say it's actually, and that's one of the things to answer the question earlier is unless we become financially literate, this work is not going to happen. It's really important that we measure up um our business skills, our business acumen, our entrepreneurial sort of skills, and not bootstrap ourselves anymore. And that's the other thing. We've got to end bootstrapping, we've got to end the age of the hero entrepreneur. That's a model for the past. That has so much baggage tied to it. It's just not a it's not a I've been there and it's not a not a good place to be. You might feel great, um, but it's not good. It it certainly scrubs the ego really well, but it doesn't do much for the head. Okay, we're done, I think.