Welcome to the National Good Food Network's monthly "Cluster Calls” series—interactive webinars that give you the opportunity to learn and connect with on-the-ground practitioners and experts, brought to you by the Wallace Center at Winrock International.

The August Cluster Call features Red Tomato, a small nonprofit business in Massachusetts, is the marketing agent for a network of 40 mid-size farms in the Northeast. Red Tomato orchestrates their supply into more than 200 supermarkets in the greater Boston area, and as of recently, in the greater NYC metro area. To satisfy farms and deliver high-quality produce to distributors, Red Tomato's value-added strategy is to differentiate products, or decommodify them, through branding, local and farm identity, packaging, variety choice and diversity, eco certification, aggregation, and through intense focus on quality control to maximize flavor and freshness.

Can Red Tomato build a regional supply chain that maintains the highest quality, and satisfies both farmers and consumers alike? This cluster call (webinar) will explore this question as well as some of the contradictions in the system, such as seasonality vs. the year-round supply that is required to compete in the produce industry.

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