When he graduated from Le Moyne with a bachelor’s degree in management and leadership, Phil Bianchi ’11 did what many newly minted alumni do. He hit the job-search circuit hard, shadowing several family friends at work and going out on interviews before deciding upon a career in financial services. Bianchi eventually found himself working for a well-respected mutual fund company in Rochester, N.Y. He was successful, earning a bonus for surpassing certain milestones, but he struggled to find meaning in that success. He wanted to help others, to make the world a better place.
Bianchi did what he knew he had to do. He “pulled the ripcord” and resigned, respectfully telling his boss that he had to find a career that “enriched (his) life and passion for sustainability.” Bianchi spent the next few months figuring out what exactly made him happy. To support himself, he remodeled homes, landscaped and completed odd jobs for family and friends. He spent his free time resurrecting his parents’ garden to its “former glory” and cooking extensively.
It was during this time that Bianchi accepted a job with the Good Food Collective (GFC), which works with 55 local farmers and producers to get fresh, sustainable food to 1,400 area individuals and 70 wholesale buyers, including schools, grocery stores and restaurants. If Bianchi had a motto, it would be: “Think Globally. Act Locally.” The work nourished and inspired him. Beyond providing nutritious local food to people at a reasonable price, sustainable agricultural practices reduce pollution and waste and promote biodiversity and social equality. It was a perfect fit with what Bianchi had been taught at both Le Moyne and the Jesuit McQuaid High School about “lifting up others.”
“I was intimately learning about where our food came from and how to utilize it,” he recalled. “More important, I was exposed to sustainability in food. I found myself injected into an alternate model of local community supported agriculture. I was enjoying where my life had taken me.”
After his first season at the Good Food Collective, Bianchi was asked to start and lead the GFC’s wholesale division, Headwater Food Hub, where he now works. He is responsible for aggregating, marketing and distributing crops from a network of farms to local institutions. His day-to-day responsibilities include generating new sales and managing accounts ranging from small farm-to-table restaurants to the large dining halls at the University of Rochester.
“I love what I do because I am building relationships around local food while cultivating a more sustainable, regional food system that has farmers at its core,” he said. “Every case our food hub sells goes straight into the local economy. We are helping a farmer pay for his or her daughter's ballet lessons, not helping some CEO buy another beach house in the Hamptons.”
Now in its third year, the Headwater Food Hub is pioneering strategies that are being used nationwide to build more sustainable food systems. In short, Bianchi said, they “are bringing back the old ways of food, but upgraded for the times with today's technology.” For example, when a small farmer wants to scale up and generate more revenue, he or she often finds it hard to find a market for the harvest, partly because they don't fit neatly into the industrial supply chain. The owners of small farms likely cannot afford a $ 4 million liability insurance policy to sell to the school down the street; they may not have access to storage and transportation or have the capacity to market and sell their wares to more accounts. That is where the Headwater Food Hub and Good Food Collective come in –performing these tasks so that the farmer can focus on cultivating food.
Bianchi said that as it exists now, the industrial food system is not designed to nourish and enrich communities. However, there are approximately 33,000 small farms in New York and 235 CSAs within a 140-mile radius of Utica, or throughout the majority of the state. Through his work, he is hoping to encourage people to think deeply about what is on their plates.
“The health of our people, the planet and our economy are in need of a serious shift,” he said. “Those working in food hubs across the country aren't in this business to get rich; they are here to make the world a better place.”
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