A word from Nicole Hinebaugh: Director of Food Security Initiatives
Smoky Mountain Harvest Hub Facility
At our new Smoky Mountain Harvest Hub facility, we have completed the installation of the two 1,000 square foot cold storage units, and have also installed two three-story high pallet racks in our warehouse in order to increase our vertical storage capacity (see photo attached). Inside the warehouse, we've also set up our box packing zone, our "market space" of donated foods, an outdoor farmer bin washing area, a new outdoor community educational pavilion, and have begun developing our onsite composting facility! We have also been awarded a Glass Foundation grant, which will enable us to move forward with the construction of our Commercial Kitchen, and a Presbyterian Women's grant, which will help us to outfit the kitchen and to support the development of our Mobile Market program. We would love to invite you to come and visit us and see all the progress we've been able to make!
Our refrigerated Food Locker program is also making progress, with all five sites now installed and backend software communications in development. We have created our order and delivery protocol, and community applications to join the program are live on our website! We hope to begin locker deliveries in October.
HCM Food Locker
Selling to the Smoky Mountain Harvest Hub has been the most impactful revenue stream for our farm this year, directly influencing the health of our operation and supporting our ability to earn a living growing produce.
This year's contract allowed us to invest in a new wash/pack house, along with other tools that have helped streamline the production of our most profitable crops. We have now scaled our production in a way that we are able to produce more volume while upholding quality, our commitment to growing sustainably, and providing living wages.
-Always Love Farm, Aug. 2025
We have begun the process of re-contracting with our farmers, and are building on the success of the first year by expanding the number of contracted growers this year. In addition to local food purchasing funds through Manna, we have secured funds from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which we were able to convert into a six-month stop-gap program in support of 55 of our prior HOP families who were receiving home-delivered healthy food boxes. These BCBS funds are now supporting regular home deliveries of fresh local food boxes, including recipes and farmer bios in both English and Spanish, through January (see unboxed photo and recipe attached). We are excited to learn about the results of the DHT food box program applications we have submitted in partnership with Haywood Pediatrics and the Haywood Senior Center, as our BCBS box program is running well and will be able to scale up easily with additional program funding. We have also secured a small Haywood Health Foundation grant to support non-Manna partners in continuing to access local foods for their pantries and meal sites.
Our full-choice market-style food pantry has been a great success, so much so that we have decided to move it indoors into a more permanent location. This will make it less weather-dependent and more functional in all seasons, and will also create the look and feel of a real grocery store experience, adding to the sense of welcome and the dignity of our participant neighbors. We hope to have the conversion completed by this coming winter, and are excited to show you the new model! The pantry continues to feed well over 1,000 people per week, and we anticipate that with the coming changes to safety net benefits, that number will only increase. Since the relaunch of our pantry in February, we have already served approximately 6,750 unduplicated individuals (over 2,400 unique households) with a total of over 39,000 visits to our pantry. That's over 1/3 of all food-insecure households in Haywood County who have made use of our market pantry in just eight months!
