Overview of the Wallace HUFED Center
The Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development (HUFED) Center, managed by the Wallace Center at Winrock International, supports and enables greater access to healthy affordable food in limited resource and historically excluded and/or traditionally underserved communities across the country. The Center provides grants and technical assistance to support enterprise development and business-based approaches to getting more healthy food into communities which have limited access, with an emphasis on sourcing locally and regionally produced food. HUFED is unique because it is focused on developing solutions that create jobs, offer economic incentives to farmers, and that can be all or partially self-sustaining beyond the grant period. The Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, proudly supports 30 awards totaling over $885,000. The 30 grantees span a wide range of approaches, business strategies, and geographic areas.
“The HUFED program has proved to be invaluable in LA CAUSA's efforts to create a community-based approach to addressing issues around food access,” says Robert Zardeneta, Executive Director of LA CAUSA, a 2010 HUFED grantee that is working on a “market makeover” called PALOMA, which aims to increase the availability of fresh, locally grown produce in East Los Angeles corner stores.
The Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center is important to USDA’s efforts to increase access to healthy and affordable food, including locally produced foods. According to Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, “We’re proud of the work being carried out by our partners like the Wallace Center and many other organizations in both urban and rural communities. These investments in healthy food access are creating jobs while contributing to healthy communities.”
Featured Grantee
Gourmet Gorilla is a privately held business that provides more than 80 preschools, elementary and high schools, and other institutions with local and organic breakfasts, lunches, and snacks delivered daily. Building alliances between local farms, urban agriculturalists, dietitians, nutritionists, chefs, and organic food manufacturers, they are able to provide quality ingredients as well as links to educational resources on healthy food curricula, the value of organic foods, garden projects, and ecological awareness. Working with around 21 farmers and distributors, Gourmet Gorilla obtains 60-70% of its ingredients from local, sustainable, and certified organic purveyors within the Midwest. Gourmet Gorilla is also beginning a CSA box program in June 2012 using 300 schools as hubs to deliver fresh produce to underserved communities.
Read more about the Gourmet Gorilla HUFED project ...
Grantee News
Several HUFED Grantees attended national events in April, including the NGFN Food Hub Collaboration Conference and the Green Microenterprise Symposium
The NGFN Food Hub Collaboration is a partnership between the Wallace Center at Winrock International, its National Good Food Network, the United States Department of Agriculture, and others. The Collaboration hosted its first conference this month in Chicago, IL, which encouraged a national conversation around the emerging role of food hubs across a diverse array of food value chain practitioners: food hub managers, funders, technical 
assistance providers, researchers, and practitioners. The convening successfully accelerated the energy around food hubs and solidified their role in local/regional food systems and in improving access to healthy, green, fair and affordable food. 15 HUFED grantees attended the conference and HUFED grantee Gourmet Gorilla hosted a tour of its facilities.
The Green Microenterprise Symposium was an invitation-only event hosted by Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs (ACE), a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), and sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration. The conference took place on April 18 and 19 at the Emory Conference Center in Atlanta, GA, and was designed to fill a gap in national information sharing and peer learning. To bring attention to underserved business communities and people of color, the organizers hosted a panel discussion on Creating Sustainable Food Enterprises in Underserved Communities and asked the HUFED Center to nominate five participants from its national network of food access colleagues. HUFED nominees and people of color in attendance included: Michelle Frain Muldoon (HUFED Program Manager); Rubi Orozco (Centro Obrero/Mercado Mayapan in El Paso, TX); Shirley and Charles Sherrod (Southwest Georgia Project, economic development in the Deep South); Brenda Buck (agricultural economist and County Administrator in Southwest MS); and David Milliner (East Baker Historical Society in GA). Other HUFED grantees also in attendance who served on the above panel included: Gary Peterson from Agricultural Land Based Training Association (ALBA) in Salinas, CA, and Carol Coren, representing Farm to Family in St. Louis, MO.