Locally Grown - Availability for January 28th, 2015

Hey Local Food Lovers,

A good bunch of the growers for Locally Grown gathered this weekend to break bread together and evaluate how our 2014 year went and lay plans for 2015. The potluck lunch we all shared was as you might have guessed, delicious (one of the best meals I eat all year), the company about as good as it gets, and the discussion exciting!

Locally Grown grew a lot this year, with sales increasing by over 65% from the year before. We also had 8 new producers join the market adding new products. I’m not sure exactly how many customers joined in 2014, but we have a total of 827 people who receive these e-mails once a week. Right now that breaks down to 457 of you in Clarkesville, 255 in Tiger, and 115 in Gainesville. Gainesville is very much still in the startup phase, but we don’t anticipate that lasting long. We’re beginning to organize some pretty big plans to let folks in and around Gainesville know we are there in time for Spring and Summer.

Part of those plans are to begin attending some special events in and around Gainesville to meet people and pass out business cards and explain who we are, how it works, and how cool it all is. A few of you have already offered to volunteer to help represent us, and give your own testimonials about your experience shopping and eating from Locally Grown. Having local folks in Gainesville talk us up will be key so don’t be shy. We’re trying to come up with a fun term to refer to our crew of LOCAL FOOD LOVERS.

The Buy Local Safe and Green EXPO is the first big opportunity to do this and it’s coming up on Thursday February 5th. Let us know if you’d like to help at that, or other events and give us ideas of how to get folks attention. Chuck and Amy refused to dress up as a giant talking Sweet Corn and Snow Pea. They said that those veggies aren’t even in season at the same time so it just didn’t make sense.

We’ll be looking for other events to attend too, and may occasionally ask some of you to go and attend for us. This is a great way to not just eat the food, but become a part of the growth of the local food movement. We’re open to creative ideas.

Start thinking about what types of veggies and other products you’d like to see more of in 2015 and any other tweaks or improvements in the market you can think up. Sometime in the next several weeks we’ll be making a survey available that will help us to evolve as best we can to some of your ideas and suggestions.

I could tell you more about all our technological advancements behind the scenes, but we’ll save that for another night.

Thanks for eating good all winter long.

EAT WELL and BE WELL,

Justin, Chuck, Teri and Andrew