Alan Reed reveals how Chicagoland Food and Beverage Network, Bigger Table are reshaping the city’s food landscape

When Alan Reed took the executive director position at Chicagoland Food and Beverage Network (CFBN) — and later at its charitable arm, Bigger Table — he already believed in the organization’s mission: to use Chicago’s thriving food and beverage sectors to give the local economy a chance to thrive, too.

Launched in 2017, CFBN connects and supports more than 4,500 companies in the Chicago area, facilitating collaboration among a diverse array of industry players, from large international manufacturers to small startups. It operates similarly to an industry association, but with a focus on entrepreneurship and neighborhood revitalization. Bigger Table is a charitable organization that leverages these connections to fight food insecurity.

I sat down with Alan Reed to discuss his contributions to CFBN and Bigger Table — and how those contributions are redefining the Windy City’s bustling food and beverage scenes.

SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal: To start off, could you share with us some of the key achievements of CFBN since its inception?

Reed: Well, we put on about 25 events a year with the idea of bringing people together to talk about the key issues in the food and beverage industry here in Chicago. We want to take up the mantle of being the heart and soul of the food and beverage industry in the U.S. and very much around the world. So, we talk about overall trends, and we talk about what's happening in the industry, the concerns, the issues. And frankly, we want our events to be a nice cross-section of what's happening in the food and beverage industry and especially in Chicago. We talk about topics like supply chain; We just did an event on culinary trends, [another] on crisis management and it continues to evolve. These are all the things that food and beverage companies worry about, and these factors impact what they do every day.

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SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal: It sounds like your events have been crucial. Could you elaborate on how these gatherings foster industry connections?

Reed: We're introducing large companies to small companies, companies that work in the confection industry to the people who work in the meat industry, to the people who work in the bakery industry, to the people who work in the dairy industry, and that hasn't happened before. We have 125 corporate members, and we have a database with 35,000 food and beverage industry professionals who've opted into our database because they want this information. We just had one of our bigger events of the year. There were foodservice people, ingredient people, bankers who serve the industry, attorneys who serve the industry, ingredient companies, flavor companies. When you look at that, you're like, ‘Wow, this is such a great cross-section of what's happening here in Chicago.’ And again, it is a diverse and dynamic group, and we're excited that we're able to bring that together.

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SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal: With such a broad membership, how does the network tailor its resources to meet the varying needs of its members?

Reed: It starts with building a personal relationship with our contacts at each of those companies and then looking for where we think those connections might be. And I'll say, events are a great place for people to run into one another and we're finding ways to do that virtually as well. But first, my team and I read everything just to stay up on top of what's happening. And the other thing is, we listen. We listen to our members. We ask, ‘What are you worried about? What are you facing? What's happening?’ We try to listen really carefully, and then we try to reflect back exactly what we're being told, hopefully in a way that's strategic and smart.

SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal: Can you share more about Bigger Table and its impact?

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Reed: A big ingredient company and a smaller ingredient company came to me and said, ‘We want to donate healthy ingredients to food banks.’ But [food banks] can't take them because they're not a finished product. I said, ‘Oh, that's interesting. So, you have healthy ingredients you're willing to donate, but they don't want a truckload of soy protein isolate, right?’ And I wondered whether all ingredient companies have this challenge, so we put together a meeting … where we brought all of our ingredient company members together and put them around a table and said, ‘Does everybody have this problem where you have excess ingredients and you would donate them, but nobody really wants them?’ The answer was, yes, that is a problem. We said, ‘You know what, not that anyone's asking for it, but we could make a hot cocoa mix.’ And then as we started to navigate that, we realized, well, we can put more cocoa into it because we have the cocoa, and we can make it with real milk, we can lower the sugar, we could put more protein in it and we could put fiber in it. We said, ‘Let's do it; Let's put 40,000 servings together.’ And there was real interest from all of those companies in participating. But what we needed was an organization that would pull these things together on an ongoing basis and continue to do this. And as we dreamed it up, we said, ‘It needs to be a nonprofit, needs to have a facilitating function, needs to continue to have connectivity across all of these ingredient companies and continue to expand that,’ and from that we launched Bigger Table.

SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal: Looking ahead, what are the next big goals for CFBN and Bigger Table?

Reed: We have the same goal we have every year at CFBN, and that is to provide members with more value. More, more, more. The first question is, ‘Where do they find value?’ We're looking to launch more engaged concierge services that help to make these connections happen. It's the connections that are key, so to the extent that we can pull those together in more interesting ways, we're absolutely going to do that. We love events and we'll continue to do events, but we see events as one way to connect people, not the only way to connect people. So, I'll say more connectivity, more members, more value for those members, more insights, more good stuff from industry that you just can't get anywhere else. And on the Bigger Table side, it's about impact — more impact all the time. It's not just companies donating ingredients. The real insight and impetus behind it is that we make more than enough food to feed everybody, but it's almost always in the wrong place and in the wrong format to help the people that need it most. At Bigger Table, we will do the thankless work of finding where that is, piecing it together and getting it to where it needs to go because that's how we solve food insecurity.

SupplySide Food & Beverage Journal: Finally, any advice for other regions looking to replicate your success?

Reed: There are lots of places where I do think this can happen again. And we took a page out of Naturally Boulder’s book — as I told you, I think the key for us has been to create a community based on what that community needs, which means you have to listen to it. Every industry is different. We've had people tell us, ‘We want to do what you're doing with CFBN or Bigger Table where we are.’ And I always say, ‘Start with the companies who really define the industry there and decide, what is the personality of it? Is it more about manufacturing? Is it more about ingredients? Is it more about big CPGs? Is it more about startups? Is it more agriculture-based? Is it more restaurant-based?’ So, really taking a step back and understanding what the industry is there because it's not all the same, and what we do probably doesn't make sense in other markets. Listen, deliver value and be fun. I love lots of organizations here, but there have been times when I've been to other events and I'm like, ‘This is so boring.’ Don't be boring.