Food Hub
The Food Hub
This project’s vision is a community hub for local food – a place where we work with the community to grow, process, store, cook, and purchase good food, here at home.
Speaking with community members we are hearing food security, affordability and selection of local groceries, and facilities to process and cook community food are concerns. Through this project we are setting out to address those needs.
The project
With funding from the National and Research Council and Food Banks of Canada we have developed a plan to build a food hub with several modules, using modified sea cans, at the Old Madley lot. We are on track to open the first module in summer 2026 – a modified sea can with a butchery, cold storage, year-round growing in a hydroponic unit, and commercial kitchen. We have plans for additional modules in the future - engaging with the community to gather input on the specifics.
Once that first module is open hunters and farmers will be able to rent space in the butchery, which will also be available for community groups to use when providing meat to elders and schools. There will also be cold storage for that meat and a rentable kitchen for processing food and small business development. Tarek Bos-Jabbar, former owner of Cold Acres, is designing the building for our specific needs and climate alongside our colleagues at the National Research Council of Canada.
This first module will have enough space to support some indoor food growing – a project we will get underway once the building is ready next year.
Food for the North
Food Banks of Canada is supporting our project as a pilot, part of their work determining how food can be made more available in the north. We’ll share our learnings with them and the National Research Council so they can be applied in other northern communities.
Future possibilities:
Grocery store – While everyone we’ve spoken with appreciates the existing community store, many expressed a need for more selection and fresh produce, as well as other goods, fishing gear, and hunting supplies. We’re investigating how we might add a grocery store to the hub, perhaps a general store or co-op. We have spoken with citizens about what they’d like in a store and conducted demographics research, and from that are preparing a feasibility report.
Outdoor growing. We are studying the history of growing food at the Pine Creek Experimental Farm, speaking with elders who worked at the farm and investigating archives. We are doing some predictive modelling around climate change, looking across the Haines Junction region to get a better sense of how climate change may impact or improve our ability to grow food.
