All around the country, Edible Communities publications honor the pillars of their local food scenes each year with the Local Hero awards. You voted on Edible Philly’s 2026 nominees, we tallied them up, and now it’s time to meet the winners. We’re proud to profile our 2026 award winners. They join the ranks of past Local Heroes and we think as a group they make the local food community here more vibrant every year!
2026 Local Heroes nominees and winners include organizations that partner with and/or advertise with Edible Philly. These relationships were not considered during the nomination and voting process.
FOOD ARTISAN
Fishtown Pickle Project
WHAT STARTED AS A PASSION PROJECT in a home kitchen now reaches more than 100 stores. Fishtown Pickle Project is co-owned by chef Mike Sicinski and dietitian Niki Toscani, who met teaching healthy-cooking classes for the Food Bank of South Jersey. They began making pickles for fun in 2018; when Sicinski was furloughed in 2020, the couple turned the project into a lifeline.
“It was always part of our personal value system,” Toscani says of the mission they settled on: Create joy, give back to the community, and protect the planet.
The giving is more than a tagline. The company currently donates 5 percent of its profits and has pledged to ultimately reach 10 percent of net profits, organizing its work around four pillars: hunger relief, education, mental health, and equity.
Much of it happens through the pickles themselves. The Preston’s Pick flavor, a collaboration with radio host Preston Elliot, raises money for Philabundance through its Camp Out for Hunger drive; a summer ginger-lemonade batch benefits the Attic Youth Center. Each October, Fishtown Pickle Project joins the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration’s Food for Thought campaign— a cause that is personal for Toscani, whose father passed away from the disease. The owners have also funded a scholarship for Fishtown neighbors. All told, they have given back close to $20,000 to date.
Sustainability and seasonality run on parallel tracks. Toscani calls it a zero-waste kitchen: Misshapen cucumbers get chopped into the spear jars, ends are left on rather than trimmed, and anything that can’t be pickled gets composted. The company has diverted nearly 20,000 pounds of food waste from the landfill—an energy savings, Toscani notes, equal to driving from Philadelphia to Los Angeles and back three times. Cucumbers come from Vineland, New Jersey, in season; the rest of the year, the team pickles whatever local produce is at its peak in limited runs. Jars come back through a partnership with Bottle Underground, shipping boxes pull double duty, and every recipe sticks to real ingredients—no dyes, no crisping agents.
The pickles now sell in Wegmans and ShopRite and dozens more independent retailers and ship nationwide, and a larger production space is in the works. Growing a values-driven business in a tough economy isn’t easy, Toscani admits, but she sees that as exactly the reason to keep going. “It’s important to do it when things need to change.”
FISHTOWN PICKLE PROJECT
fishtownpickles.com
RETAILER
Philly Foodworks
DYLAN BAIRD READILY ADMITS that for a business leader, he’s a reluctant capitalist. He runs Philly Foodworks, the online local-food marketplace he started in 2014 after years of urban farming in West Philly, delivering produce, meat, dairy, and pantry goods from more than 200 small producers to homes within about 30 miles of the city. Profit has never been the point. “We only seek to make profit so that we can sustain ourselves,” Baird says. The real goal, he adds, is a food system that isn’t built on exploitation.
What that looks like in practice is a series of choices someone driven purely by profit wouldn’t make. When a farmer drives a truck into the city for Philly Foodworks, Baird welcomes other growers to fill the empty space rather than charging them for it. He connects his farmers with outside buyers, even big ones—handing them leverage a competitor would hoard.
Baird’s larger project is to make “know your farmer” mean something past a feel-good slogan. “I like my neighbor. I’m not going to screw over my neighbor,” he says. “But I have no problem buying a product that screws over an invisible person I can’t see.” Cheap food, he argues, almost always has something to hide— an underpaid worker, a consolidated-out farm, a wrecked ecosystem—and opting out of that system is worth paying for. Food, in his view, is unavoidably political.
This spring tested the model in a way Baird didn’t expect. A hard April frost wiped out Pennsylvania’s stone fruit for the season. Orchards here and across the Mid-Atlantic lost their peaches, nectarines, cherries, and apricots. Rather than go without, Philly Foodworks is buying peaches farm-direct from a family grower in Georgia, the same way it sources at home.
For Baird, the workaround points somewhere larger. As climate change scrambles growing seasons, he sees the strict “local” of the early movement—nothing from more than 150 miles away—giving way to more resilient regional networks. When Pennsylvania’s crop fails, it buys from Georgia; when Georgia’s fails, as it did in 2022, Georgia can buy from Pennsylvania. The effect, he hopes, is to keep small farms alive against the consolidation that has erased so many of them. “What we’re talking about is creating mutually beneficial networks,” he says.
PHILLY FOODWORKS
phillyfoodworks.com
FARM
Roots to River Farm
AT ROOTS TO RIVER FARM in New Hope, you can sit down to a wood-fired pizza topped with sauce the kitchen jarred from last summer’s tomatoes, sip an aperitivo made from the farm’s own radicchio and fennel, or you can take a class and learn to preserve the harvest yourself. The on-farm space, Amara Kitchen & Tasting Room, looks like a restaurant but since everything on the plate and in the glass is grown out back, it’s also a farm market.
Farmer Malaika Spencer started growing here in 2014. She also grows veggies for Row 7 Seeds, founded by celebrity chef Dan Barber. Chef Ian Knauer, Spencer’s partner, ran a farm cooking school alongside her. Selling raw vegetables, Spencer is the first to say, rarely sustains a farm. So they merged their talents: She grows vegetables Knauer rates among the most beautiful he’s seen (and he used to shop for Gourmet magazine photo shoots) while he turns the harvest into entrees, soups, and jarred goods, folding anything unsold back into the kitchen rather than the compost.
The result has become a prized third space for neighbors. What began as a Wednesday CSA pickup now draws crowds for brick-oven pizza, small plates, and drinks—200 people on a recent night, half of them not even CSA members.
Knauer had a single felled tree on the property milled into long communal tables, and strangers sit together. “What happens is what always happens when you eat with strangers,” he says. “You’re not strangers anymore.” One family of regulars, offered a table to themselves, chose to squeeze in beside another group instead for the community vibes. Local, here, means a web of neighbors. What the farm doesn’t grow comes from close by: meat from a nearby farm, flour milled two weeks earlier at Castle Valley Mill, fruit from orchards a halfmile away.
Spencer farms with the long game in mind, having rebuilt depleted cornfield soil with tons of compost and cover crops and pulled half the land out of production to grow only where it grows well. The payoff is obvious in everything they produce.
ROOTS TO RIVER FARM
3175 N. Sugan Rd., New Hope
rootstoriverfarm.com
WILD CARD
Growing Roots Partners
ASK CHRISTY CAMPLI of Growing Roots Partners what makes a farmers’ market a farmers’ market, and her answer is bracingly simple: the farmers. “If farmers aren’t present, it’s not a farmers’ market,” she says—and she has watched the term get borrowed by events with no growers in sight, “a trendy marketing tactic” she thinks misleads shoppers. Keeping actual producers at the center is, for her, nonnegotiable.
That conviction has a backstory. Campli fell for local food in 2015 managing the restaurant, butcher shop, and market at Wyebrook Farm, a 360-acre sustainable operation in Honey Brook, Pennsylvania; she went on to run a hyper-local, whole-animal concept in Charleston. She was a regular at the Malvern Farmers Market long before she ran it. When Growing Roots founder Lisa O’Neill (a longtime family friend) was ready to retire to Charleston in 2021, the two essentially swapped lives: Campli came home to Chester County to take over Growing Roots Partners, the farmers’-market coordinator and event company O’Neill had built since 2013. O’Neill told her she was the only person she’d trust with it.
Growing Roots runs three year-round weekly markets—in Eagleview, Malvern, and Downingtown— and produces a calendar of community events around them. Five years into her tenure, Campli has shown that producer-only purism and growth aren’t at odds. Her three seasonal theme markets (Strawberry Market, Tomato Fest, Pepper Palooza) turn an ordinary Saturday into a mini-festival, free yoga and kids’ programming included, that pulls in newcomers who stay to shop. She also built up Craft & Mercantile, a series of monthly artisan night markets that travel among Chester County towns with 30 to 40 handmade vendors, food trucks, live music, and local beer, cider, and wine.
Growing Roots Partners’ marquee event is Good Food Fest, the organization’s annual gathering in Kimberton, which Campli has roughly doubled in both vendors and attendance. The stakes there are concrete: At the 2025 event, the producers who reported back logged more than $213,000 in sales in a single day. To protect that impact, she’s working to turn the festival into a nonprofit and is adding a sustainability push for this November’s edition. “We’ve grown this event to be a beast,” she says. Now the job is making sure it lasts.
GROWING ROOTS PARTNERS
- Year-round farmers’ markets in Eagleview, Malvern, and Downingtown
- Craft & Mercantile
- Good Food Fest
CHEF
Sonny Ingui
HOTEL RESTAURANTS can sometimes feel like an afterthought. Not at Urban Farmer, where chef Sonny Ingui runs one of the most thoughtful local kitchens in Philadelphia. Urban Farmer is the steakhouse attached to The Logan, a Hilton property. It has every excuse to be a corporate amenity. But Ingui, its executive chef for more than a decade, has made it the opposite.
“I don’t want to be the chef of a hotel restaurant,” he says. “I want to be the chef of somewhere that makes good food.”
The proof of his commitment is in how the kitchen works. Whole pigs come in from Lancaster County and leave as almost nothing: chops for dinner service, pork belly cured a week and braised for hours, legs and butts ground into house-made andouille and pâté, bones simmered into stock. Ingui does the same with chicken and beef. “If something is essentially giving its life for us to eat,” he says, “I’m not going to put anything in the trash I don’t have to.”
His passion for local food goes back to his upbringing in South Jersey, where Ingui grew up vegetarian and didn’t taste beef until he was 19. It’s an unlikely origin story for the executive chef of a steakhouse, but starts to make sense as you learn more about his style. Back on the farm, his Sicilian father taught him to grow tomatoes, can the sauce, and pickle whatever was left. Nothing went in the trash, because there wasn’t money to waste it. It shocked him when he started working in professional kitchens and saw how much everyone else throws away.
The sustainable sourcing efforts run deep. Ingui grows 10 to 12 pounds of mushrooms a week in a back room, plus their own microgreens. Urban Farmer is one of only a handful of Philadelphia kitchens that dry-age beef in-house, with a bandsaw on site for their own bone-in cuts. The grits in the shrimp and grits come from Castle Valley Mill in Bucks County. And the cheese board is entirely regional, sourced from local purveyor Third Wheel Cheese.
For Ingui, the standard is all about how an ingredient was produced. “You can’t always get the best product locally,” he admits. “I’ve surrendered to that fact.” So he vets ranches the way other chefs vet wine lists, refusing anything pumped with antibiotics or hormones, or salmon whose color comes from dye in the feed. The only thing he imports is A5 Wagyu from Japan; everything else is domestic, from farms he’s visited and trusts. When he can buy close to home, he does, both for the superior quality and to keep the money in the community.
URBAN FARMER
1850 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia
urbanfarmersteakhouse.com
NONPROFIT
Reading Terminal Market
SIX MILLION PEOPLE pass through Reading Terminal Market each year, and most have no idea it’s run by a nonprofit. Since 1995, the Reading Terminal Market Corp. has stewarded the 1893 public market as a 501(c)(3) with a mission its CEO and general manager, Annie Allman, sums up in the title of the market’s strategic plan: “Feeding Philadelphia’s Heart and Soul.” That means preserving a diverse, welcoming public space, bringing fresh food downtown, and—crucially—building economic opportunity for small businesses.
Those small businesses are the point. The market has roughly 75 independent merchants, many family-run or first-time entrepreneurs, and its day stall program gives newcomers a low-barrier way to test an idea on the floor. Some graduates: Really Reel Ginger and LUHV Vegan Deli both started as part-time day-stall vendors, became full-time merchants, and have since expanded their footprint inside the market. Along the way, the organization helps with capacity building, grant opportunities, and consultants—and is now working with the City’s Commerce Department to formalize that support.
The nonprofit also works to keep good food within reach for everyone regardless of income level. Seventeen merchants accept SNAP/EBT, making Reading Terminal what Allman believes is the largest redemption site in Pennsylvania, and a new produce vendor, Lancaster Produce Co., was just approved to take Farmers Market Nutrition Program and Senior FMNP checks. It’s part of a deliberate link between city shoppers and regional growers that matters more as supply chains wobble.
For all its fame, the market’s vitality depends on us locals: More than half its visits are from Philadelphians, and Allman wants that share to grow. The clearest sign of the mission at work may be the new Plaza at Reading Terminal Market, a covered outdoor space that added 77 percent more seating. “I can walk outside and see locals and visitors from all walks of life elbow to elbow,” Allman says. “There is nothing more authentic than that.”
READING TERMINAL MARKET
51 N. 12th St., Philadelphia
readingterminalmarket.org
