What was once a lettuce field is now the site of a brand new 17,000 square-foot distribution center for the Boston Area Gleaners. On July 16, about 120 people gathered at Stonefield Farm in Acton for the official ribbon cutting. Attendees spanned the range of the Gleaners’ community, from board members, donors/funders, and government officials, to farmers, Food Access partners, and Boston Food Hub customers, to staff and volunteers. All were there to celebrate the construction of this building that will be a game changer for the organization.
What is Boston Area Gleaners?
Boston Area Gleaners is a food systems organization whose purpose is to facilitate a reliable agricultural supply chain that improves the viability of regional farms and the health of historically underserved communities.
It addresses these issues through three main programs:
- The Food Access Program—gleaning and packing produce donated from local farms that it distributes to food pantries.
- Stonefield Farm—growing and harvesting culturally important crops for food access efforts such as The Greater Boston Food Bank. Crops from the farm are not sold in the traditional wholesale market.
- The Boston Food Hub—a wholesale market for local produce that provides income opportunities for small farmers, healthy food access for low-income communities, and a farm-to-institution supply line for local schools, universities, hospitals, and food banks.
To give you a sense of how much they’ve grown, in 2021, they distributed 2.5 million pounds of food across those programs. This fiscal year they are on track to hit 10 million pounds.
The vision
The founder of Boston Area Gleaners, Oakes Plimpton, had a front row seat at the event. Without his initial vision and leadership 22 years ago, none of this would have happened.
The Gleaners started as a modest community farm in Waltham at the UMass Field Station, which used to be a UMass Agricultural Extension School facility. They had one mini-van to make deliveries with and used an auditorium for storage and packing space. Now they have a fleet of 24 trucks and are on track to operationalize a state-of-the-art distribution center with walk-in coolers with subdivisions for different temperature needs and a third zone to support tall stacked apple bins, solar panels to offset the energy consumption, and two loading docks with a total of seven bays.
When Executive Director Usha Thakrar started in 2019, the Gleaners’ Director of Operations and Strategy, Dylan Frazier, told her point blank that her highest priority was to get them into a new space. He apparently had his eye on Stonefield Farm all along.
Frazier had also envisioned this new building from the get-go. The plans were sketched out five years ago and meant to be implemented in phases, aligned with fund-raising abilities. Earlier infrastructure projects that enabled this capstone achievement included moving a greenhouse, building an access road, constructing the loading dock at the correct angle so it would align properly with the future distribution center, and paving the area in front of these structures to improve access.
Always resourceful, they used the loam displaced from the building of the loading dock to fill in a waterlogged field along Martin St. so that it can actually grow a crop this year.
Getting the new building built
In his speech at the ribbon cutting, Frazier admitted that he was “terrified” when they were awarded the Food Security Infrastructure Grant for the building from the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR) because of the compressed schedule attached to the funding. Buildings of this nature typically have a two-year timeline. Boston Area Gleaners needed to complete it in nine months to meet the requirements of the grant.
Thakrar and Frazier were quick to point out the support and commitment of Town officials in Acton for expediting the process and permits once they learned of the constraints the Gleaners were under. The building commissioner, Building Department, Select Board, Fire Department, Agricultural Commission and other town departments all backed the project right away and moved things along at a record pace.
Bruce Ringwall, the site engineer from Goldsmith, Prest, and Ringwall, played a key role in helping Thakrar and Frazier navigate all the rules and know who to talk to, and Pete Flynn, their general contractor from Flynn Construction Corporation, managed the many subcontractors and made sure the steel order was fulfilled correctly and on time.
Fun fact: Every piece of steel for the building was prefabricated, drilled, and numbered offsite by a company in Massachusetts. It came like an erector set that a special crew from North Carolina assembled.
Supply, demand, and throughput
Boston Area Gleaners has always known that the linchpin in a food system that connects farmers to consumers and aims to increase access to healthy foods, particularly for vulnerable and underserved populations, is the infrastructure and logistics. On the supply side, there is a near-infinite amount of food that would otherwise go to waste that the Gleaners has access to. The demand has always been there and is only getting stronger.
Ashley Randle, commissioner of MDAR, noted in her speech at the ribbon cutting that “the middle of the supply chain is the missing link. Boston Area Gleaners meets that need” through aggregation, distribution, and working with numerous partners.
Julianne Stelmaszyk, Director of Food Security at MDAR, commented that addressing market failures in the middle of the supply chain is critical to hunger relief efforts since 90%–95% of food comes from outside the region.
The new distribution center and eventual new cold storage units (four large built-in coolers are planned) will directly address this problem by increasing the Gleaner’s throughput, which Frazier said is their biggest limitation right now.
How will the new facility do this?
Currently, all the cold storage is in refrigerated truck trailers that have no room to maneuver within. The staff can’t get to bins in the back without removing everything, sometimes leaving produce out in less-than-ideal temperatures. As Thakrar put it, planning and fulfilling orders is like a big game of Tetris. It’s highly inefficient.
The new storage will allow alleys between pallets so staff can go down aisles and “pick orders,” leaving them at the end of a row for someone to pick up.
This efficiency will allow them to move more food with the same number of staff, which is important because it is not sustainable from a fundraising perspective for them to keep growing the operating budget.
Thakrar also noted that this infrastructure will help them grow existing programs. For example, they have seasonal commitments to food pantries. Two years ago, they delivered 1800 cases a week to them. Last year they increased that by 60% and still had a wait list. This year they went up another 15% to 3,000 cases a week and they still have a wait list. With more space and streamlined processes, they can carry more inventory and fulfill more orders to food pantries in response to increasing demand.
This fact was highlighted by Eric Schoen, who is on the Board of Advisors of the Greater Boston Food Bank and spoke at the event, quoting the sobering statistic from the organization’s 2025 Food Access Report that “in 2019 food insecurity in Massachusetts was 19%. In 2024 it grew to 37%.” By 2025 that figure climbed to 40%.
The new cooling units should also help reduce spoilage. The building is heavily insulated (R-49 roof and R-30 walls), so the coolers will open to ambient space, and each will have a human door that opens and closes quickly and a high-speed rollup door to decrease temperature loss.
Yet another benefit is that they’ll be able to store some produce for longer without it deteriorating. Apples and carrots are stored for a long time, but they don’t play well together. You can’t store them in the same room because the carrots get bitter from the ethylene emissions from the apples.
Dedication and partnerships make it work
Love, admiration, and gratitude were the throughlines at this event.
During his comments, Frazier lauded Thakrar for her “superhuman work ethic” and thanked the Gleaners staff who “bust their butts every day.” It’s hard work, and dedication to the mission, that keep an operation like this going (as well as donations and funding).
Collaboration and strong partnerships are critical, too. Food for Free’s CEO, Jessica Cantin, gave a warm and heartfelt speech that spoke to her esteem for Boston Area Gleaners. She noted that the Gleaners share Food for Free’s philosophy that logistics in their line of business is an act of compassion. She also praised the organization for their innovativeness.
“Whether it’s reaching out before a large greens harvest to make sure we can use every pound, delivering produce in reusable bulk containers that reduce unnecessary packaging, or intentionally growing culturally relevant crops like callaloo because they know the communities we serve value and use those foods, every decision reflects care, respect, and dignity,” she said.
While Schoen took a slightly broader view, remarking that the completion of the distribution center is a “win, win, win. A win for neighbors in need. A win for the local economy. And a win for the planet by keeping food out of the waste stream,” State Senator Jamie Eldridge recognized the importance of local government in the long-term success of nonprofits, “I’m just so grateful to the town of Acton for stepping up and providing the support to protect the lands and welcoming the Gleaners, because it is a big operation, and some other towns might have said no, and Acton was on board from day one.”
It takes a big village.
Dana Lissy is a member of the Board of Directors of the Acton Exchange and an occasional writer. She and her husband, Dan Niven, have volunteered for the Gleaners and Dan is now their Food Safety Manager.
Jeff Brown, the Acton Exchange business beat reporter, contributed additional reporting.
