LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In the middle of a “buy local foods” movement across the country, the idea of growing a local food economy via a food hub could not come at a better time.

The West Louisville Food Hub will be situated where three neighborhoods meet, if all goes according to plan. The announcement came last month that Seed Capital Kentucky (SCK) was being granted an option to finance and develop a 24-acre site in the west side of Kentucky’s largest city.

SCK is a nonprofit that conducts research in support of developing a local and regional food economy. Caroline Heine, SCK project director, said the hub venture is the development of a campus of businesses related to getting local food to consumers.

“The idea for the West Louisville Food Hub came as an evolution of the work that SCK has been doing since 2011, to try and support the growth of the local food economy,” she explained.

Much of that support has come from Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer, who promised to partner with SCK early in his administration. According to his office, the hub will be built to serve businesses that aggregate, distribute, process and store food sourced from the region – and could bring nearly $50 million in investment and 170 new jobs to three of Louisville’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“This project is a green, job-creating machine that has multiple benefits, including helping revitalize the neighborhood and connecting farmers with processors and customers,” said Fischer. “It is a model public-private partnership for our city.”

In the early concept of the project Heine said data were collected to quantify the demand for local food in the area. “We did both a consumer and a commercial buyer survey and found that there is a significant unmet demand for local food in Louisville that can be extrapolated to have a potential economic impact of about $800 million on our local economy,” she said.

In finding a place big enough to accommodate the infrastructure needed to create such a place, Heine said a parcel of land once home to a large tobacco warehouse was obtained from the city.

In addition to the businesses that would locate within the hub to sell, distribute and process food, an anaerobic digester (waste-to-energy facility) will be there, along with a demonstration garden operated by Jefferson County extension, which will also relocate to the hub.

The idea of such a facility isn’t new and there exist other such operations through-out the coun-try.

But Heine said the Louisville project model took pieces from a number of hubs to decide what was going to be done locally. She said talks are ongoing to get the local food bank to locate within the hub.

“We’ve been in conversations with them for over a year about how we could leverage their assets to help make the food hub run more efficiently,” said Heine.

The idea with the food bank would be to use its delivery trucks, which go out into 13 surrounding counties, to bring back food from local farmers.

While Louisville is one of the larger metropolitan areas in the Midwest/South, it is surrounded by rural areas, giving farmers access to the largest market in the state.

“It’s an important market for the farmers. There are local foods being produced in and around Louisville, and a lot of these local farmers are interested and really need better access to the market,” said Heine. “Right now the main way they access the market in Louisville is through the farmers’ markets or CSA (community supported agriculture) and there is just not enough scale there.”

Not only would the food hub sell those local goods to individual consumers, but to commercial operations such as restaurants, hospitals, schools and grocery stores. Groundbreaking for the West Louisville Food Hub is planned in early to mid-2015, with the possibility of some businesses operating by end of next year and the majority of businesses being open by the end of 2016.

The project already has the support of many organizations and continued support will be sought through grants from government and national foundations as part of its capital campaign. For more information, go to www.seedcapitalky.org