Sara Clow on Growing a Food Hub in South Carolina

This time of year, the GrowFood Carolina warehouse in Charleston, S.C., is hot. The door is open wide to a gravel parking lot and train tracks beyond, and in the mornings, farmers pull up from all over the region, having loaded up their produce or foodstuffs even earlier in the day in communities such as Johns Island, Nesmith, McClellanville or Georgetown. Much of the rainbow hues of produce go straight into huge coolers to await delivery to more than a hundred different outlets, many of which are the fancy restaurants of Charleston you read about in almost any publication these days.

The staff of GrowFood Carolina constantly buzzes with activity: fielding phone calls, checking
invoices, answering questions from chefs and coordinating deliveries. This is South Carolina’s first food hub, and Sara Clow is its general manager. Paste sat down with this unsung hero of a revitalizing food system to understand the process.

Paste: How did you get involved with GrowFood Carolina?

Sara Clow: I was recruited by the Coastal Conservation League to helm this new arm of their food and agriculture program. Lisa Turanksy, now the Chief Conservation Officer for the League, had laid a lot of the groundwork, and so I was brought into get things up and running.

Paste: How do you work with farmers?

Sara Clow: We have a couple of phone calls and tell them how the model works. If it sounds like we can all work together, then we go out for a visit. We won’t sell produce for a farm we haven’t visited. It’s really important to create a relationship with the farmer because we work with these growers to align supply with demand, to come up with a crop production plan, and we do sales/marketing, and distribution for them. And we communicate with them a lot so that they understand the market.