April 29, 2026
There’s a gap between local farms and local tables.
Most Nova Scotians want to eat local. And lots of restaurants would love to serve more local produce. Ask any Chef from a local restaurant and you’ll hear it. The enthusiasm is real. But wanting local food and actually getting it consistently are two very different things, and the difference usually comes down to infrastructure.
I know this firsthand. Before co-founding Food Web, I spent years working as a Chef in restaurants. Sourcing local produce was something we all wanted to do. The problem? Small farms often only deliver on certain days of the week. Quantities are unpredictable. There’s no central place to order from, no reliable cold chain, no easy way to coordinate. More often than not, it was simply easier to call a large distributor and move on.
This isn’t a farmer problem. And it isn’t a chef problem. It’s a systems problem.
The Infrastructure Gap Is Real
In Nova Scotia, only 14% of the food we consume is locally grown, it’s been stuck at this level for over a decade (D’Entremont, 2025). This is despite a growing consumer appetite for local food and a Provincial Government mandate to reach 20% by 2030 (Nova Scotia, 2025).
But investment in local food systems means investing in processing facilities, cold storage, and distribution. We simply do not have the infrastructure we need to support a growing local food economy.
The traditional answer to this problem is to build a physical food hub: a centralized facility that aggregates produce from multiple farms, stores it properly, and distributes it to restaurants, retailers, and institutions. Think walk-in fridges, loading docks, refrigerated trucks. It’s a proven model, but is a very expensive one.
Even a modest food hub requires significant capital to buy/lease a warehouse, and install cold storage. In today’s construction and real estate environment, building new food infrastructure at a meaningful scale is prohibitively expensive. And most of the food hubs across Atlantic Canada are run as non-profits, which rely on consistent grant funding. Which is also risky as funding programs continue to be cut.
We should have been investing in food hubs decades ago. We didn’t, and now the math just doesn’t math. So what do we do?
The Infrastructure Already Exists
Here’s something most people don’t think about: there is already cold storage scattered across Nova Scotia. Walk-in fridges in event centres, sitting half-empty between bookings. Brewery and winery cellars with temperature-controlled space that goes unused for months at a time. Fishing industry cold storage along the coast, built for peak season volumes that only arrive a few months a year. Distribution depots with unused floor space between delivery runs. Grocery and wholesale warehouses operating well below capacity. Farm operations with cold rooms that could hold far more than they currently do.
There is so much infrastructure sitting idle, invisible, and completely disconnected from the small farms and food businesses that need it most. The problem isn’t that the infrastructure doesn’t exist. The problem is that none of it is connected.
What if it was?
Imagine a digital network that maps all of that existing capacity; kitchens, cold storage, warehouse space, delivery routes – and makes it bookable, coordinated, and useful to the small food businesses and farms that desperately need it. Instead of building a new $3 million food hub facility, you activate the one that’s already distributed across every town and county in the province.
This is the vision behind Food Web.
Starting With Kitchens, Building Toward Something Bigger
We started with a simpler but deeply connected problem: small food businesses couldn’t legally produce and sell food without access to a licensed commercial kitchen, and those kitchens were hard to find and book.
Food Web launched in December 2025 as a marketplace connecting food businesses with available commercial kitchen space. Think of it as an Airbnb for licensed kitchens. Caterers, farmers’ market vendors, emerging food brands can now find and book inspected kitchen space by the hour.
But the kitchen rental platform is just the entry point. Nova Scotia lacks the infrastructure to support small farmers, which impacts the ability to expand the local market and that means the solution has to be bigger than any single facility type. Food Web’s broader vision is an asset map of the entire local food system: every kitchen, every cold storage unit, every warehouse with spare capacity, visible, searchable, and connectable.
The future of food hubs isn’t one big building. It’s a living digital network of the infrastructure we already have.
Why This Matters Now
Nova Scotia lacks infrastructure for local food distribution, and improving that could help the province weather shocks to supply chains and markets, especially as global trade becomes increasingly unpredictable.
The American tariff uncertainty of 2025 made this painfully clear. A province that relies on imported food is a vulnerable province. The path toward resilience runs directly through the strength of our local food systems, and local food systems need infrastructure to function.
We don’t need to wait for a government to fund a new building. The building is already there. We just need to connect it.
Food Web is a Nova Scotia-based platform building the digital infrastructure layer for local food systems. Learn more at foodweb.network.
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References
D’Entremont, Y. (2025). Nova Scotia’s food and agriculture sectors in ‘state of crisis,’ report says. Halifax Examiner. https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/economy/natural-resources/agriculture-and-farming/nova-scotias-food-and-agriculture-sectors-in-state-of-crisis-report-says/
Nova Scotia, 2025. Province Supports Local Food in Hospitals, Universities. Press Release: Growth & Development Nova Scotia. https://news.novascotia.ca/en/2025/11/19/province-supports-local-food-hospitals-universities#:~:text=Quick%20Facts:,food%2Dpilot%2Dlaunches%2Dschools