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Local Food Systems

Food systems generate enormous amounts of data but too little of it reaches the people who need it most. Producers, school nutrition programs, food hubs, and policymakers are often making decisions without a clear picture of what is available, where it is, and who it serves. Data Elevates partners with food systems organizations to close that gap. We build data infrastructure, dashboards, and analytical tools that make local food procurement more connected and visible from the farm level to the state level.

Highlighted Projects

Local Food Switchboard

Client: Maine Food Convergence Project

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Maine's farmers, fishermen, processors, and schools were operating in the same food system without a reliable way to find each other.

 

Data Elevates partnered with the Maine Food Convergence Project to build the Local Food Switchboard, a food supply chain coordination platform that connects producers, infrastructure providers, and institutional buyers across the state. The platform verifies procurement data, surfaces available storage and processing resources, and shifts the local food economy from competition toward coordination.

 

For schools it means easier access to Maine-grown foods. For producers it means new institutional markets and fairer contracts. For the state it means smarter infrastructure investment and a replicable model for other regions. Funded by USDA and Full Plates Full Potential as part of the School Food System Transformation Challenge.

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Sector(s): Food Systems and Environment

Service(s): Analytics and Visualization, Digital Transformation

Food and Agriculture Mapper and Explorer (FAME)

Client: Colorado State University, USDA

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Local and regional food systems data existed but it was scattered across dozens of sources and largely inaccessible to the practitioners who needed it most.

 

Data Elevates led the design and collaborative development of FAME, a nationally recognized open-access data visualization tool that brings together over 280 county-level indicators on local food systems, community health, agriculture, and food access across the United States. Built in partnership with Colorado State University and the University of Kentucky through a USDA AMS cooperative agreement, FAME is now used by farmers, food entrepreneurs, grant applicants, researchers, and federal agencies for program design, business planning, and advocacy. The California Department of Food and Agriculture references it as a mapping resource. USDA features it in national webinars. And the underlying data warehouse, hosted on GitHub, ensures the tool remains a living resource as new data becomes available.

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Sector(s): Food Systems and Environment

Service(s): Analytics and Visualization

Colorado Local Food Program Technical Assistance

Client: Nourish Colorado

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Colorado's Local Food Program represents one of the most significant investments in school food in the state's history, directing $14 to $18 million annually to help K-12 schools buy local food from Colorado producers.

 

When Nourish Colorado was selected as the statewide Technical Assistance and Training Provider, they needed a data infrastructure that could track and communicate program impact at scale across every school district in the state. Data Elevates is supporting that effort by developing the program's data strategy, designing the data collection instruments and master reporting template, providing ongoing advisory services in data collection and analysis, and building a program dashboard that tracks progress across key metrics. When a program reaches every corner of a state, the data behind it has to be just as strong as the mission driving it.

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Sector(s): Food Systems and Environment

Service(s): Digital Transformation, Analytics and Visualization​

Working on a food systems data challenge?

Data Elevates partners with organizations at every scale​

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