The Common Market Turned 48 Million Servings Into $57.1 Million

In 2025 The Common Market moved 12 million pounds of food. The figure Harry Hayman keeps returning to is not the weight but what the weight became: 48 million servings of fresh fruit, vegetables, grains and proteins landing on trays in school cafeterias, hospital kitchens, college dining halls and community pantries across 19 states. The nonprofit distributor’s 2025 annual report sets a second figure beside the first, and the second one is the whole argument. Those purchases generated $57.1 million in total economic impact. Hayman has known one of the organization’s founders for close to thirty years, and his reading of the report is that the food and the money are not two separate achievements. They are the same achievement counted twice, once on the plate and once in the ledger.

What the 2025 Report Actually Reports

The report opens on strain rather than celebration. Public funding commitments that had helped schools, healthcare providers and community organizations buy fresh local food were revoked during the year, and the document spends its first pages describing what that withdrawal does to a farmer deciding what to plant and to an institution deciding whether local sourcing survives the next budget cycle. The title the organization gave the year is Rooted in Resilience, and the framing is deliberate.

Against that background the operating figures held. Twelve million pounds of food distributed, representing 48 million servings, moved through four regional hubs serving institutions in 19 states. The economic page breaks the impact figure into its parts rather than presenting a single headline: $32.6 million invested directly in local economies through food purchases, $9.6 million in labor income circulating through the economy, and $24.4 million in induced and indirect activity, summing to the $57.1 million total. Those components matter, because a total economic impact figure with no visible arithmetic behind it is the kind of number a reader is entitled to distrust.

Hayman’s point about the pairing is simple enough to state in one sentence and hard to act on. A food dollar spent inside a region does not stop moving when the tomato is delivered. It pays the grower, the packing crew, the cold storage operator, the driver and the kitchen, and each of those people spends a portion of it again nearby. What the annual report calls induced and indirect impact is that second and third circulation, measured rather than asserted.

How a Total Economic Impact Figure Is Built

The report names its method, which is more than most impact claims do. The calculation follows the practitioner guide written by Todd M. Schmit and Becca B. R. Jablonski and published through the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, which sets out a step by step approach for running a regional food hub’s expenditure and sales data through IMPLAN, the input output modeling system used across regional economics.

The reason to care about the citation is that impact numbers are easy to inflate. An input output model takes a change in final demand, in this case the money institutions spent on food routed through a regional hub, and traces it through the supply chain relationships of the local economy. The direct effect is the purchase itself. The indirect effect is what the suppliers of those suppliers buy. The induced effect is household spending by the workers whose wages the first two effects paid. Adding them produces a multiplier, and the honest version of the exercise publishes the components so a reader can see how much of the total is direct and how much is modeled circulation.

In The Common Market’s case the direct food purchase component is $32.6 million of a $57.1 million total. Slightly more than half the reported impact is money that actually changed hands for food. The rest is the modeled ripple. Hayman treats that ratio as the interesting part rather than the caveat. A distributor that buys $32.6 million of food from small and midsize regional farms and can show where the remaining $24.5 million of activity comes from is describing a mechanism, not making a claim about virtue.

From Strawberry Mansion to Four Regional Hubs

The organization began in Philadelphia in 2008. Haile Johnston and Tatiana Garcia Granados, a husband and wife team who had moved into the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, started with the observation that the produce available near them was poor while farms an hour outside the city were struggling to find reliable wholesale buyers. Wharton Magazine traced that founding in a 2017 profile of the two, and the organization’s own account of its origins describes the same gap: two markets that needed each other and no infrastructure connecting them.

What grew from it is a wholesale distribution business that happens to be a nonprofit. The Mid Atlantic hub operates from 428 East Erie Avenue in North Philadelphia and posted $8,259,575 in sales during 2025, the largest of the four regions. The Southeast hub in East Point, Georgia recorded $7,732,130. Texas, working from a renovated 29,000 square foot warehouse in Houston, recorded $4,964,114. The Great Lakes hub, which moved into an 85,000 square foot facility in Bedford Park, Illinois during the year, recorded $4,681,909. Total revenues across the organization reached $32.7 million against $27.9 million in expenses, with $8 million in capital investment.

Those are trucking and warehousing numbers. Coolers, routes, food safety audits, forklifts and roof repairs appear in the 2025 report as often as mission language does, and Hayman regards that as the reason the model works rather than a distraction from it. The Texas hub achieved SQF food safety certification on its first audit in June 2025. The Great Lakes hub scored 100 on its first. Institutional buyers cannot purchase from a supplier that fails those audits regardless of how much they support the idea of local food.

Who Ate the Food

The report breaks the 48 million servings down by the kind of place that served them. Fresh local food reached 378 school cafeterias, 126 healthcare sites, 121 universities and colleges, 253 community organizations and 12 early childhood education centers during 2025. Forty seven institutions made forward commitments to farms, purchasing agreements made before the season rather than week by week, up from eight such institutions in 2022.

That last figure is the one worth sitting with. A forward commitment changes what a farmer can plan. A grower who knows in February that a university will buy a specified quantity in September can plant accordingly, borrow against the agreement and hire with some confidence. A grower selling week to week into a spot market cannot do any of those things. The organization’s case study on institutional partnerships and supply side investment, produced with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, documents how the Georgia ACRE Collective built that practice with metro Atlanta buyers over three years.

The purchasing standards behind it are not unique to this organization. The Center for Good Food Purchasing has spent a decade helping public institutions write food contracts that weigh local sourcing, labor conditions and environmental practice alongside price, and cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston have adopted versions of the framework. What a regional distributor supplies is the piece that makes such a policy executable. A school district can adopt any purchasing standard it likes and still have nobody able to deliver against it.

The Money That Went Back to Farms

Beyond the food purchases, the 2025 report records $282,800 in loans issued to seven family farms, including working capital loans offered at no interest, and 10 infrastructure grants totaling $130,000 distributed through the Georgia ACRE Collective at an average of about $11,500 each. A ten year term loan went to Eagle Road Farm in Quarryville, Pennsylvania for cold storage and handling equipment. A refrigerated storage room went into DaySpring Farms in Danielsville, Georgia to cut grain loss.

These are small sums next to the $32.6 million in food purchases, and Hayman’s argument is that their size is the point. A deer fence, a pre cooling system or a shared cold room is frequently the single thing standing between a farm and a wholesale contract it could otherwise fill. Capital at that scale rarely comes from a bank, because the underwriting cost exceeds the loan. A distributor that already knows the farm’s volumes and reliability is one of the few lenders positioned to make the assessment cheaply.

The organization also expanded routes into Charlotte, Columbia, Detroit and the Dallas Fort Worth metro during 2025, and the Great Lakes hub launched individually quick frozen products so that a Michigan carrot harvested in October can reach a cafeteria in March. Co founder Haile Johnston presented on regenerative school meals at the second UN Food Systems Summit Stocktake in Addis Ababa in July 2025.

The $125 Billion Question

The report closes on a figure that dwarfs everything else in it. Institutions in the United States spend more than $125 billion on food each year. Against that, $32.6 million of regional purchasing is a rounding error, and the organization says so plainly in its own forward looking section.

Hayman reads the gap as the actual proposition rather than as a deflating comparison. The question a school district, a hospital system or a university faces is not whether to spend money on food, because that money is already committed and already spent. The question is where it goes. If a measurable share of institutional purchasing moves toward growers inside the same region, the arithmetic in the 2025 report scales with it, and the multiplier applies to a much larger base. Nothing in the model requires new philanthropy to make that happen. It requires procurement decisions.

The counterweight is the funding volatility the report opens with. Federal programs that helped institutions absorb the cost difference of local sourcing were withdrawn during 2025, and a purchasing commitment that depended on those programs is now exposed. The organization’s answer is diversification: more institutional buyers paying from operating budgets rather than grant cycles, more forward commitments, more farm level infrastructure so that regional supply can compete on reliability instead of on subsidy. Whether that holds through 2026 is the open question, and the full library of reports and case studies the organization publishes each year is where the answer will show up.

For Hayman, the sentence that survives the whole report is not any of the figures. It is that the people changing how a region eats are not the ones announcing it from a stage. They are loading the trucks.