The Food Hub Breakeven Analysis Tool is an Excel spreadsheet that can help food hub operators determine if it is viable to pick up products from local farms.

This spreadsheet calculates the dollar amount of product that needs to be picked up from a farm and sold by a food hub in order to reach the breakeven point. The tool can be used to look at the breakeven point for products that are picked up and/or products delivered to the food hub warehouse/distribution point.

The model was created using an economic “long-run” perspective, so it incorporates the fixed costs of the food hub. Costs can be averaged across seasons or the costs for a particular season can be chosen with different breakeven points generated for each season.

Maggie Mills, a FLEdGE research assistant in 2017, worked with 100km Foods, based in Toronto, to create the breakeven analysis tool.