By Sara Atencio-Gonzales, The Paper. – A new food aggregation center opening in Albuquerque’s South Valley aims to give small and medium-sized New Mexico farmers and their homegrown food products greater access to schools, senior centers and other institutional markets.
The Delicious New Mexico Aggregation Center is scheduled to open Sept. 18 as an addition to the South Valley Economic Development Center. The facility will provide a place to process fresh produce while helping connect local growers and potential buyers.
“So, day to day, what we’ll be doing is washing, cutting and packaging produce. The point of our facility is to bridge the gap between the markets and the local farmers, and to create more accessibility for them,” says Luis Nunez, facilities manager for the Delicious New Mexico Aggregation Center.
Delicious New Mexico already provides refrigerated transportation and distribution services for small and mid-sized farms and food producers across the state. The organization uses refrigerated vehicles to consolidate pickups from multiple farms, helping producers save time and transportation costs.
The new aggregation center will expand on those services by providing processing capabilities that Nunez explains many farmers do not have access to themselves.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is less than – up to but less than – 30% of our farmers here in New Mexico actually have the ability to field wash their produce,” says Nunez.
Nunez emphasizes that the center can also help farmers meet specifications required by larger buyers. For example, a farmer with a contract could pay the center to receive produce and prepare it according to the buyer’s requirements.
“What they can do is they can pay us a small fee, and we can take in that produce, wash it, cut it, bag it to the specification that Albuquerque Public Schools is asking for,” says Nunez.
The South Valley was selected, in part, because the Rio Grande Community Development Corporation already operates the South Valley Economic Development Center. Nunez explains that the organization had the land available to construct the aggregation center as an addition to the existing facility. The area is also home to local farmers and agricultural activity.
Nunez described the aggregation center as a one-of-a-kind facility in New Mexico and said the project dates back to around 2019 or 2020.
While the facility is just preparing to open, Nunez is already looking at what its success could mean beyond the South Valley. “Honestly, I hope in the next five years, that we’re able to put another facility somewhere else in the state,” says Nunez.
Nunez hopes the South Valley center can serve as a working model for similar projects elsewhere while giving smaller producers a better chance to reach markets that may previously have been inaccessible.
“I would say it gives hope to the small and medium-sized farmers that they can, you know, eventually compete with others,” says Nunez.