By Genevieve Sartor
On February 26, more than thirty people from across Northwestern Ontario’s food system gathered at Lakehead University’s PACI Auditorium to talk about something deceptively simple: how to get more local food onto institutional and restaurant plates in our region. Around the room were farmers and long‑term care buyers, food businesses, aggregators, and community organizations, all trying to solve a shared puzzle—how to match strong interest in local food with the stubborn realities of distance, cost, and logistics.
The Think Local Food Procurement event, co‑hosted by NOFIA (Northern Ontario Farm Innovation Alliance), FAN‑NWO (Food Action Network of Northwestern Ontario), and the Sustainable Food Systems Lab at Lakehead, combined short presentations from Jodi Belluz (Superior Seasons), Marcelle Paulin (Sleepy G), Jacqueline Buonocore (Pioneer Ridge) and Genevieve Sartor (Lakehead University), along with facilitated discussion and hands‑on activities. Producers spoke frankly about thin margins and the risk of scaling up for institutional sales; buyers described rigid contracts and food safety rules that make it hard to try smaller suppliers. Between them sat a lot of goodwill—and some missing infrastructure.
An anonymous lunchtime survey helped put numbers to what people in the room were already feeling. Most respondents said they already use regional food often or almost all the time, and every single person described themselves as optimistic about the future of local food in Northwest Ontario. At the same time, they identified the same bottlenecks again and again: gaps in distribution and delivery, the lack of shared aggregation and storage, and procurement rules that were never designed with small, regional suppliers in mind.
In the afternoon, a “Needs/Wants/Barriers/Opportunities” exercise turned those themes into sticky notes and concrete ideas. Participants called for backbone infrastructure—processing capacity, regional hubs, coordinated delivery routes—and for practical tools that would make local buying feel less risky for institutions: clearer templates, more flexible contracts, and someone whose job it is to connect the dots.
What emerged over the day wasn’t a call for one big new project so much as a hunger for targeted, intentional coordination. The people, products, and demand are very much here–what’s missing is the connective tissue that can move food from farm to facility door in a way that works for both sides. The hope is that this event is a starting point, and that conversations and connections from this event helped to sketch the outlines of plausible concrete pilots towards a more resilient and interwoven local food system in Northwestern Ontario.
