A non-profit wholesaler outside of Boston, Massachusetts, on a mission to sustain farms and provide access to fresh food, has completed the next step in what they say is a much-needed cold-storage facility.
Boston Area Gleaners, Inc., which buys and transports produce from farms in western Mass. and across the region, used a FY 26 Food Security Infrastructure grant from Massachusetts Department of Agriculture, to build the 17-thousand square foot structure, located in the town of Acton, Mass.
The grant was close to $1 million. Next steps will be to construct refrigerated rooms inside the facility, according to Boston Area Gleaners Executive Director Usha Thakrar.
She said said the new facility when finished will 'triple the volume' of what they can buy from farmers and sell to stores and other businesses.
“The Food Hub [a project of the organization] is sort of a middle-of-a-supply-chain program, where we work with farmers to identify what products they have in abundance that they're really trying to sell,” Thakrar said.
She said the organization is close to securing funding for solar panels that will power the refrigeration, and they have enough funding to build the first of several coolers.
"The reason to have different rooms is because different produce items like different temperatures," Thakrar said. "You know, butternut squash will like 60 degrees versus lettuce that likes 36 degrees."
In time, there will also be additional room for storage crops.
"So it's going to give us some flexibility in terms of how long we can hold inventory and how we can kind of titrate our distribution," Thakrar said.
Part of the organization’s mission is to support farmer viability and to increase access to fresh food Thakrar said his week is a great example of why more refrigerated space is needed.
“We're going have to play some complicated game of Tetris for everything that's here. Sometimes we end up putting things on refrigerated trucks and running them overnight,” Thakrar said.
That’s because right now they have nowhere else to put the produce.
In western Mass., Thakrar said the organization's Boston Food Hub contracts with farms around New England, among them about 15 to 20 farms between Ashfield and Springfield, Mass.
