COVID-19 has highlighted just how fragmented and opaque our food system is. Restaurants, institutions, and other food service closures left many farmers with surplus destined to be tilled under, while food insecurity rates and the demand on the emergency food system skyrocketed. In many areas, local farmers have been able to pivot quickly to feed their communities, and innovative solutions such as ripe Community, are popping up to support those connections and avoid unnecessary waste in the supply chain.
Speaker:
Hannah Leighton Value Chain Manager, ripe.io
Hannah Leighton is the Value Chain Manager at ripe.io where she supports projects dedicated to tracking local and sustainable food, and leads the ripeCommunity project. Hannah has spent a decade working in the local food systems space, including several years writing about food, working in hospitality, and farming on vegetable and small-scale livestock farms across the country. She has a Bachelor's degree in Creative Writing from the New School University and a Master’s degree in Sustainability Science with a concentration in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.