Company description

Kitchen Sync Strategies is a social enterprise brokerage and consulting company dedicated to supporting small producers. We launched in 2019, and we are driven by the belief that a smarter, healthier food economy is built around people being in relationship with their food and farmers. We work with buyers, suppliers, and supporters of local food.

Kitchen Sync believes there is immense, untapped potential in the institutional food market channel, and through our work brokering sales opportunities for small farms, food hubs, and food companies, we have created systems that help realize the promise of farm-to-school and farm-to-institution efforts nationwide.

Job description

The Director of Regional Growth is an exciting new role for Kitchen Sync Strategies.

We’re seeking an established, charismatic leader who understands first hand the critical role food hubs and regional food businesses play in the farm-to-institution and farm-to-school movements, who has a developed strategic sense of how to improve local and regional food systems, and who has a firm commitment to building a fairer, more sustainable food economy.

The position is focused on 3 core work areas:

• Providing high quality consulting services alongside the Kitchen Sync team,

• Increasing local food sales through our partner food hubs, and

• Guiding our regional strategies in our target geographies (CO, the PNW, and New England)

The position will play a central role in value chain projects Kitchen Sync Strategies is currently managing focused on farm-to-school and farm-to-institution work across the US. It will be responsible for supporting existing team members on active consulting projects, developing new business in each region in service of local, values-aligned small farms (especially small-scale and BIPOC-owned farms and food businesses), and supporting the company to expand its client base in our target geographies. We are currently working with leaders of several publicly and privately funded regional food systems development projects, and the Director will be tasked with ensuring those projects remain successful.

As a representative of Kitchen Sync performing many different value chain coordination roles, the Director will support team members to complete deliverables for these projects and work closely with the CEO to strategize ways to continue our work beyond the life of each project.

The sorts of projects this Director will support immediately include (in no particular order):

• Supporting School Food Authorities to seamlessly shift their food purchasing to increase local, sustainable, and values-based procurement
• Documenting our existing Standard Operating Procedures and best practices that support our food hub and food hub network clients to sell to schools and institutions
• Refining and launching a purchase planning tool that supports K-12 and institutional customers of our food hub clients to better plan procurement from our producers/hubs
• Conducting market research that supports our Regional Food Sales Leads to make in-roads with foodservice management and distribution partners in their regions
• Build strong relationships with emerging Regional Food Business Center teams and state-level agencies implementing Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure programs to share KSS services and generate regional pilot projects
• Co-facilitating farm-to-school, value chain coordination, and farm-to-institution workshops with CEO

What you’ll need to do

• Develop strong, personal relationships with our Regional Food Sales Leads (RFSL), institutional customers, sustainability leaders, and/or local procurement leaders in regions where Kitchen Sync sells products
• Collaborate with CEO to successfully complete existing consulting projects including report writing, research, and a range of project-specific deliverables
• Support RFSL duties including CRM maintenance, generating reports with data from food hub clients, and attending key meetings in-region
  • Gain a mastery of food hub operations, food hub network development, and challenges facing the ‘Ag of the Middle’ in each of KSS’ regions of focus
• Generate innovative ideas and content to engage a broader range of food hubs and companies in our brokerage
• Use G-suite platform and tech tools (inc. Canva, Instagram, and Mural)
• Maintain a high level of integrity as a representative of KSS & be about it

Compensation

this position is: salaried, $75,000 - $100,000

Location

job can be done remotely

Application instructions

Deadline

November 15, 2023