THE REDD ON SALMON STREET
REGENERATIVE QUALITIES OF THE REDD ON SALMON STREET
Robust Circulatory Flow / Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive
Robust Circulatory Flow / Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive
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Food halls housed in repurposed warehouses are now part of the fabric of the urban landscape. Most of them are based on a business model that capitalizes on affluent city and suburbs dwellers' romance with the locavore, farm-to-table movement and with niche culinary experiences. The Redd on Salmon Street—located in the Central Eastside industrial district of Portland-Oregon—is a food project of an entirely different order, with a much more inclusive and wildly ambitious mission: to make regeneratively produced, locally sourced food a mainstay of the regional diet.
Today, if you shop in a big box grocery store, or dine in a corporate cafeteria or in most restaurants, your meals are invariably sourced from the industrial agriculture pipeline. “We want to invert that whole system,” explains Amanda Oborne, Vice President of Ecotrust’s Food & Farms program and architect of the Redd’s mission. “We want it to be viable for every individual and institution—from a transaction cost, distribution, and business perspective—to be able to buy from a network of hundreds of small- and medium-sized local producers, not just from the global industrial ag commodity system.” |
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REDD CLIENT
Nate Schlachter, Owner, SOUPCYCLE 
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“SoupCycle began with our curiosity around whether or not a bike-based business could be successful. Now, we’re looking back to some of those early questions and realizing that the bicycle is one of our keys to success. In downtown, we are able to make quick deliveries avoiding the time and cost to park. The cost of our bike trailers is much lower than a truck or van. Bikes are also a key element to our branding and core to our mission of providing sustainably delivered meals.
The collaborative environment among businesses at the Redd is really exciting for us. By moving there, we are able to easily access additional local ingredients because of our proximity to the community of food purveyors that will call the Redd home. In addition, we are already finding solutions for distribution and access to new sales channels.” |
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The Redd—Conceptually and Operationally
The Redd is a project of Portland-based Ecotrust, a unique organization founded in 1991 by Spencer Beebe, a distinguished leader of the conservation movement. As part of its mission to advance social equity, economic opportunity, and environmental benefit for all, Ecotrust has conducted extensive research into the barriers that prevent small farmers, ranchers, and fishers from scaling up and rebuilding the “agriculture of the middle.” Ecotrust's research indicated that in order to graduate into the middle sector of the agricultural economy, early-stage food producers must often finance all aspects of their growth—from infrastructure and processing to staffing and sales—simultaneously. That’s not always feasible given the attendant risks. The Redd hopes to provide a solution. 
One pallet of storage space in the Redd freezer, a desk to do labeling and fulfillment, and affordable distribution can be just the helping hand a fledging food business needs to go to the next level. “So basically instead of facing those giant-step-level changes,"Amanda explains, "the Redd tips the business onto an on-ramp for growth." |
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When fully operational, the Redd will be a two-city block campus housed in two buildings with a green space that includes parking and food carts in between. The Redd East, a former ironworks, is in its final phases of fundraising and design, with construction slated to start mid-2017. The Redd West is now fully leased and operational.
Three mutually supporting functions operate out of the Redd. B-Line Sustainable Urban Delivery, the Redd’s first anchor tenant, operates the Redd’s managed warehouse in about half of the Redd West’s space, helping to overcome the “last mile logistics” hurdle that is critical to connecting local producers with wholesale markets. It's a receiving, warehousing, cold storage, and distribution center where farmers, ranchers, and fishers drop products and from which regenerative food system entrepreneurs can order product in bulk without tying up their own staff to receive it. |
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REDD CLIENT
Cory Carman, CARMAN RANCH 
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“At Carman Ranch, we can’t grow our business until we have access to more freezer and cooler space, and we won’t become more profitable until we have value-added processing, which ensures that we can sell every cut in the animal for a good price. As demand for local and sustainable food continues to grow, and with investments in projects like the Redd, that reality is changing. There are two dreams in the Redd — the first is connecting the farmer with the consumer. The second is cementing the idea that what consumers choose to put on their plates has tremendous power. For our part, Carman Ranch plans to work with B-Line Sustainable Urban Delivery and secure warehouse space in the Redd’s Marble building to keep more product close to our customers in Portland’s urban core.” |
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REDD CLIENT
John Neumeister, CATTAIL CREEK LAMB "I immediately knew I wanted to be a part of the Redd. Our farm is in Junction City. That's 110 miles away and for a small farm-based business and distributor such as ourselves, it's expensive for us to go back and forth like that. Eighty percent of our business is in Portland, and we needed to be here. The Redd is helping Cattail Creek and so many other businesses like ours grow and thrive." |
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Creating Institutional Partnerships
One of the Redd’s principal objectives is to help its clients attain the level of efficiency and cost competitiveness that will enable them to better access the local institutional market. With that goal in mind, Ecotrust and partner organizations launched the NW Food Buyers’ Alliance (NWFBA) four years ago. The NWFBA, a peer-to-peer networking group of buyers for approximately 60 different schools, hospitals, assisted living communities, juvenile justice and corrections facilities, and corporate cafeterias, together represent more than 50 million meals per year served in the region. The Redd sponsors events designed to foster collaborative learning among Alliance members. For example, The Whole Hog Session—a combination training and menu planning event—brought members together to learn how to purchase pigs from local producers, have them butchered into manageable cuts and delivered to their campus by a local distributor, and then to use all parts of the animal in their cafeteria menu. A local vendor fair, dubbed “Local Link,” brought together a variety of midsized producers and institutional buyers for relationship building, for example, to discuss how buyers could procure cranberries or pastured meat in bulk, or order that delicious soup in foodservice quantities from SoupCycle. |
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REDD CLIENT
Joe Miller, founder, NEW FOODS MARKET “The Redd supports our business by allowing us to scale, while remaining small. We are able to utilize the resources of a warehouse, while staying lean in our core operation of distribution, packaging, and production. Being at the Redd has been magical thus far because of the collaboration and community. Every single day in my unit I have met another food entrepreneur. In addition, most of these people share our core missions with staying local, sustainable, and mission based. This allows us to learn a lot from other food businesses very quickly, and become anchored into the center of the local food economy.” |
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Another tough barrier to institutional buying from the emerging regenerative ag food system are the existing and long-standing purchasing contracts with global distributors. The good news, Amanda reports, is that there are more and more in-house champions of local foods in institutional kitchens who are finding creative ways to carve out opportunities from those contracts to spend at their discretion within the local food community.
While there is plenty of room for growth for the local foods market— currently the vast majority of most regional institutional buyers source from industrial agriculture— Amanda acknowledges that there is also an upper limit on growth. Because of volume and efficiencies requirements, the local regional component of a typical large local institution’s purchases are likely to ideally plateau at about 30-45 percent of its total. “From a resiliency perspective it would be risky for these large buyers to be 100 percent dependent on crops grown within a few hundred miles in the event of a crop failure or other disruption,” Amanda reports. |
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REDD CLIENT
Franklin Jones, Owner/CEO, B-LINE “We know from experience that last-mile logistics are expensive and time intensive for rural producers. With the physical infrastructure at the Redd, we are adding tremendous growth potential for suppliers and producers by expanding their capacity and the ability to reach to retailers, restaurateurs and food service operators across the city. The Redd is the perfect spot for B-Line to grow our capacity to meet the needs of the enterprising people who keep us fed and keep Portland on the culinary map." |
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Keeping Food Manufacture local
The city of Portland has been particularly supportive of the Redd as part of its overall strategy to maintain Portland's Central East Side intactness as a base for manufacturing jobs. The city has in mind not to repeat the history of the Pearl District, a former industrial and warehouse neighborhood that has been displaced by class A office space, high-end retail, and condos. Nathan Kadish, Ecotrust’s director of investment strategy and managing partner of Ecotrust Capital Partners, the entity that handles all Ecotrust investments, explains that it is particularly critical, from a food access and equity perspective, to keep food businesses within urban limits. “Food businesses are being pushed further out of urban areas,” Nathan explains, “and when that happens you lose access to those populations you want to serve.”“ What we really want to do,” Nathan maintains, “is provide a place where all the metro school districts and regional hospitals can come together and explore new menu design, interact with ranchers, figure out how to buy different kinds of fish, do all that kind of food hub shopping.”
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Nathan Kadish, Managing Partner, Ecotrust Capital Partners |
Financing the Redd
The $28 million required to purchase and renovate the Redd’s two industrial buildings was raised from a mixed capital stack of private equity and debt (with minimum investments of $250,000), new market tax credits, historic tax credits, foundation grants, and individual donations.
Although Ecotrust would have liked to have been able to offer non-accredited investors a way to participate as early investors in the project, priority had to be placed on raising capital expeditiously and at the lowest transaction cost possible. Once the project is fully funded, however, Nathan notes that Ecotrust may use crowd funding to refinance portions of the project. This will provide both an exit strategy for some of the original accredited investors and an investment opportunity for non-accredited investors. |
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Encouraging a Diversity of Stakeholder Engagement
Since Portland is one of the least racially diverse cities in the nation—76 percent white—the Redd faces the special challenge of ensuring that all races and demographics are engaged in the day-to-day work it undertakes. “We want it to be a place where people mix and many diverse perspectives are explored.” Amanda says. Culturally diverse communities have been engaged in early-stage design and listening sessions, and the team at Ecotrust is eager to continue drawing diverse perspectives into each phase of the planning, development, and implementation of the Redd East and the campus as a whole. |
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REDD CLIENT
Aaron Poplack, Oregon Fellow, FOODCORPS: “FoodCorps is a national service program. We place service members in high-need schools, and they focus on connecting kids with their food through hands-on lessons, creating healthier school cafeterias, and really building an overall schoolwide culture of health.” |
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Defining What it Means to Thrive and Grow in the Regenerative Food Economy
If it achieves its medium-term goals, the Redd and its clients will ultimately need to grapple with perhaps a more thorny issue: what it means to grow a business in the regenerative food economy. Will the Redd’s clients, once they’ve found their footing under its supportive umbrella, be sucked into the commodity food system? The whole point of the Redd is to create the conditions where they will never be forced to make that choice, Amanda maintains. Indeed, she takes issue with those who are quick to pass judgment on farmers who join the commodities system today. “They are actually making very rational choices,” she explains, “responding to the system in which they are operating because there is no viable alternative infrastructure.” |
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REDD CLIENT
Nate Rispler, co-founder, WILDER LAND & SEA “We’re still seeking our niche. ‘Oregon-sourced,’ ‘Oregon only’ – this isn’t easy, but it is new.” |
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Nathan reports that he would in fact like nothing more than to see the Redd’s clients scale to the point where they can compete with agribusiness, as long as they stay true to their own holistic values. “I don't think it will happen any time soon,” he says, “but I don't worry about what happens if these farms turn into big farms, as long as they maintain their practices.”
Successfully reinforcing the values and practices of the regenerative food economy will require resourcefulness and creativity. Nathan frames the challenge: “How do we help these businesses grow, knowing it is a deep commitment to the land first and foremost, and that when they grow to a size beyond which they will compromise the health of their land and animals they will make a decision not to continue to grow?” |
Amanda Oborne, named one of Fast Company's "Most Creative People in Business" in 2017. |
THE REDD'S MISSION ARCHITECT
Amanda Oborne Amanda admits that the Redd can’t offer easy answers to the limits to regenerative growth, nor ready-made solutions for upending the commodities food system. But by creating the physical space for a rich diversity of businesses, individuals, and nonprofits to iterate the solutions through ongoing collaboration she has great confidence that those answers and solutions will emerge. |
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