Locally Grown Availability for March 5th, 2014

Hey Local Food Lovers,

There’s so much I want to say about what’s going on in the Local Food world, and so little time. Apologies for being late or absent in the messages the last few weeks, but 2014 is shaping up to be an impressively busy year for local food and farms.

Where do I begin?

Well let me start with the most exciting news. Locally Grown will be expanding to Gainesville with a 3rd pickup site this year, probably by May! This is something we’ve been talking about for about a year and hall, and everything seems to be coming together to make it happen this year.

We are very excited to announce our new partnership with the Northeast Georgia History Center! They agreed on Friday to serve as the drop off / pick up site for the expansion market. About a month ago we had some Gainesville Friends drive us around town looking at different places we might locate a market. Hands down our favorite place was the History Center. Why? Because it’s just a block or two from the core of downtown, yet is in a very pedestrian friendly and lovely area, very close to Brenau College. Most important, the covered Portico at their front entrance just looked perfect for setting up the market. Highly visible, attractive, there’s even a skylight for nice daytime ambient light and electric lights for after the sun goes down. The Parking Lot is cute and just looks like the kind of place people might hang out chatting with one another. It’s perfect.

Perhaps most of all, we love the people behind the History Center. They instantly identified with our efforts, and had already been thinking of similar ideas as ways to enhance the communities use of the facility, which is a real community gem. There is a reconstructed log cabin in the back that I anticipate we’ll co-host some special events with the Center one day soon. The center also sports a Victory Garden built and managed by a very active Master Gardeners of Hall County Group. We’re looking forward to what we anticipate will be a long and fruitful relationship here.

Just in case you’re a tad nervous about what this means to our existing markets. Have faith! The reason Locally Grown exists today is because two communities of growers in Rabun County and Habersham County teamed up to collaborate. The result has been that more food is available to more customers. By adding a 3rd, much larger area to this collaborative we are 100% confident that new farms and new farm products will be drawn to participate. In the next year or so we expect that you’ll have more options than ever before. There may be a little more competition for exceedingly rare items, but we’re also going to try and start getting very detailed information on what products you want to see more of, and working with all the participating farms to encourage production of items in high demand.

That brings me to the next interesting topic. We’ve applied for a USDA grant that would help us make this expansion more professional. It was a complicated grant process (about 90 pages long), but it forced us to really think about how to grow and improve the market….like a real business plan. We won’t know if we get the grant for another couple of months, but just thinking through what we’d like to see the market do was incredibly helpful.

One of the things we did in preparation for these big changes was go visit the Athens Locally Grown market a week from last Thursday. The ALG gave birth to our market in that they invented the software and kind of laid out the process.

The day I went for a visit and to volunteer to see how their system works was a big day, about $8,000 in sales. That’s 8x bigger than our average day this time of year. The first thing that strikes you about the whole thing is how efficient the Locally Grown model is.

Just like us, farmers come and drop off their orders first. IN this case they layout all their items on temporary shelving that is constructed and broken down each week in the basement of Ben’s Bikes. Farmers neatly arrange their items on a shelf or several shelves with their farm name written on the shelf in erasable ink (which is really cool stuff). They also arrange their items by type. All carrots might go on one shelf, bok choy the shelf beneath. Items in coolers are the same way, farm names written on the tops of the coolers.

After the drop off, a small fleet of volunteers (about 7 altogether) prepare for the onslaught of customers (I think it was about 500 this day). The way they do this is meet customers as they arrive and ask their name. They then have an internet connected device (I-pod Touch, or other small tablet) that they pull up the customers order. After their order is found the volunteer says “I’ll be right back with your order”, grabs a plastic tub and heads to the shelves and starts grabbing orders. Since all the shelves are in alphabetical order by farm (and the order sheet is organized the same way), it’s very easy to start at the beginning and weave down the aisle of shelves grabbing everything with the customers 3 digits of their first name.

Here’s the key. After you grab a bag of arugula that has SPE (for Spencer) on the label, you then touch that item on the I-pod. If the item turns green then that item is now packed. If it turns yellow, then you know they actually ordered more than one bag of arugula. This is one of the most common mistakes when packing orders. Every item packed gets checked off on an electronic checklist. That way if something is missing, the bill is automatically adjusted before you go to the cashier to pay.

Average wait time for customers is less than 5 minutes and in Athens while they wait they can grab a cup of free locally roasted free trade coffee, yummy and hang out with other local food lovers.

ALG also accepts credit cards and EBT (or food stamps). All this is done through I-Pads at the checkout. The beauty is that all the accounting for market is done for you right there, no adjustments later.

So why is all this so interesting. Think of it this way. It probably takes you at least 20-30 minutes or longer to go to grocery store to get primarily nutritionally inferior foods. With this system it only takes you 10 minutes tops, it’s more social and interactive, you get better quality food, you support local farms, and it’s fun.

From the farmers perspective it’s a dream. We saw probably 50 or more farmers drop items off that day in a 30 minute window. The market itself ran from 4:30 to 8pm, but farmers were only there for 30 minutes. So what at a conventional farmers market would normally require the labor of 50 farmers over 3.5 hours was able to be replaced by 7 volunteers.

Ok, think I may be running on a little too long here now….trying to compensate for my tardiness. But it really is an exciting time and exciting new season here.

We are gonna need a lot of help and support from a lot of people this year to kick things into a higher gear. If you’d like to be involved somehow let us know. We will recruit some market volunteers and back-up volunteers at each of our market locations so if helping out with the customer pick-up aspect of Locally Grown appeals to you let us know.

Last but not least. If you haven’t had the Swiss Chard from Mountain Earth Farms, you’ve got to get some. I’ve eaten it the last two weeks in a row and I promise it’s the best swiss chard I’ve ever had. Don’t know what kind of fairy dust is making it so magic, maybe it ‘s just because it’s been so young and tender but It’s fantastic. Buy some!

EAT WELL,
Justin in Habersham
and
Chuck in Rabun