NY Brand Lab Radio | Karen Karp

Karen Karp is an enlightened entrepreneur. A broker in the public interest with an uncanny ability to creatively tie strands together to make a positive difference, she's also an innovator in the business of food. As a child, her punishment for misbehaving was to visit local farms with her father, a sales rep for the family’s Long Island fertilizer company. It connected her to the land in ways that would, one day, set her future career course. She moved from studying art at college back to agriculture, and has emerged as influential voice for New York City’s good food movement. Both the Mayor’s office and the Speaker Quinn’s office seek her counsel when it comes to food policy. Through her firm, Karp Resources, Karen has helped New York City schools procure locally grown food. She is organizing a regional supply chain to help bring fresh, local produce to a major New York City supermarket chain, and is overseeing the Green Cart initiative. For the past 15 years, she has helped City Harvest reach or exceed its targets to feed hungry New Yorkers. Her feasibility study and business plan for a New York City Wholesale Farmers’ Market at Hunts Point for the NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets and the USDA set the gold standard for quantifying how to scale up production and distribution of local food in the U.S. Her real success is measured by her ability to change the way a wide range of people – corporate executives, school officials, distributors, and farmers – think about how food can be produced, processed and distributed, and how she encourages them to innovate in challenging times. www.karpresources.com