A Central City grocery store that received a low-interest loan under a city-funded program to bring fresh foods to under-served neighborhoods has been closed and placed on the market.
Owner Doug Kariker said the store was too much work. “I can’t do it anymore,” he said. The store was not profitable, he said, “but in our business plan, we didn’t expect it to be” in the first year.
First recipient of Fresh Food Retail Initiative closes, puts store on market | The Lens.
Thanks to new NYC friends Anna and Manuel of Zago for sending this. Whenever I see an article on mobile markets, a few questions immediately come to mind, here are some in no particular order:
• How can people use these initiatives to leverage good food coming into their area more regularly? Has there been an example of a mobile truck initiative that led to food security? It would seem to me that if paired with some other food and social initiatives either in concert or in succession, this might be a powerful tool.
• Has anyone figured out a good business model yet? I believe that there is one out there, yes have not read of it yet.
Possibly using it as a simultaneous delivery mechanism for middle or upper income food orders might help offset the costs.
Or maybe mobile trucks can be a meal service that offers healthy food also as healthy prepared meals sent out just before and during non-traditional meal times (for those working people with typically odd work schedules) at low prices, along with some information. Sort of a combination of the food truck with the mobile market.
Or one of those ideas on our “someday” list at my last organization in New Orleans-to create a “useful” mobile market with non-food items like paper products, juice, simple hardware items etc along with those food items.
• Along those lines, is this type of thing best used as a temporal idea that to begin to promote good food and to gather initial data to then get the area to the next more permanent idea or is there a long term strategy as to their use?
• Finally, when farmers sell to these outlets, does it increase their reach or decrease it? In other words, have farmers begun to grow or make products just for these endeavors or are they taking products from other outlets? And if they have added this to their sales reach, is it financially viable for them to do so? And from the standpoint of the organizers, are many of these using their very mobility to share gleaned or seconds from those market farmers that these mobile trucks can reach easily and in some quantity on market day?
or as Manuel eloquently wrote in the conversation we had via email around this topic:
One of the biggest challenges for me when thinking about scale and community, especially when thinking about underserved urban populations, is the problem of density and offerings. The smaller and more challenged the environment the more difficult is to build volume, presence and relevance.
YES.
I look forward to the continuing conversation around this idea and connecting these initiatives to market organizations whenever applicable.
Better Health for Food Deserts: Are Mobile Farmers Markets the Answer? | Health on GOOD.
YES.
I think this “less waste and more uses” of local food is exactly what it will take for a small store to re-imagine itself as a source of healthy food. To simply move itself into local sourcing through distributors is not going to be enough. Stores like the Saxapahaw grocery outside of Raleigh Durham are also taking the closed loop seriously and combining gourmet takeout and diverse food stuffs with nearby local sourcing so that even the scraps go back to the animals and compost heaps that supply their store.
I’m still not sure the business plan is completely figured out, but it will certainly help these stores bottom lines to be more waste conscious and to build nearby farms and cottage industries to supply their shelves.
A Grocery Store That Takes 'Local Food' to Its Logical Extreme – Bonnie Tsui – The Atlantic Cities.
Orion Magazine published a piece in this month’s issue by author Rowan Jacobsen that extols the virtues of the emerging food hub as the next welcome part of our movement.
Much of what is in this piece is spot on and well crafted to explain why the addition of local infrastructure and aggregation is quite necessary for many farmers and vital to the goal of building regional food systems. However, calling farmers markets “window dressing” as was done in this article shows an extremely abbreviated view of the role that grassroots, low-capital farmers markets play in this still-emerging food system.
When we talk about building more farms from an idea to full production, farmers markets are still the best place to give those new farmers the space and time to build their businesses while they watch their peers and learn from them, from shoppers and from other leaders that stop by. When attempting small amounts of new products that are not yet clear winners in the marketplace, where better to test those varieties but with diverse, ever-changing weekly populations such as those found in a market? When a local community wants to have healthier citizens, where else than a place that allows everyone to enter it just as they are and allows each participant time to get to their own version of local food awareness and civic engagement?
Achieving the moment where communities truly value local food production is a long strange trip and takes many seasons and a multitude of different organizing attempts to build even enough of those “early adopters” much less the early majority that will surely need to at least pass through tents on more than a few sunny days to begin to change their habits.
In case we have forgotten what the different market eras have done already:
The earliest markets that started in the 1970s brought small family growers and eager buyers together (mostly organized by farmers themselves) and did so using very little infrastructure or investment from outsiders. Many of those markets began because farmers were stymied by indirect buyers, even those buyers that worked on behalf of natural food stores and locally owned supermarkets. “Grow it to sell it” was a very powerful statement and maybe even a revolutionary one back then.
That era was followed by neighborhood leaders adding markets designed to invite a whole new group of community members (for example, senior citizens), and THAT was followed by small rural communities using farmers markets to revive their Main Streets and hold on to their towns.
Last but certainly not least, the public health community invited by markets to help bridge serious food access issues and pilot innovative programs has brought new energy to every market over the last decade and built partnerships that work tirelessly together in the halls of Congress and with other policymakers to show what local food can do, can accomplish where hospitals on wheels by themselves cannot. Each of these eras added an important piece to the food system movement and is still needed to curate it and don’t doubt it, future market eras will do more in areas not yet imagined. To paint the farmers market as “one size and one goal fits all” misses the continued evolution of this efficient and elegant mechanism.
To accomplish the big goals of behavior change for everyone (farmers, shoppers, policy makers etc), farmers markets have invited every food system idea into their midst, allowing never-ending tests in the only place that they were all really possible: the democratic town squares of food where personal yet collective transformation happens.
Can all farmers and buyers fit into markets? Of course not, nor were they meant to. But to speak anecdotally about sales at markets declining and there being “over saturation” when the entire community food system has reached (by most estimates) one to four percent of the population is shortsighted at best. Have sales declined for some farmers? Certainly. Maybe because serious infrastructure or rule changes were needed or maybe because markets needed some help along the way to manage their multiplying productions, help that mostly never came.
Let’s put it this way: the need for infrastructure is an argument that markets themselves have been making for a few decades, and in some cases, actually made happen for their farmers. It is not counter to the idea of the tented market in any way and when community infrastructure is added all producers will benefit. The need for capacity is also an argument that has been made by market organizers for decades; however, if it only comes at the sight of shiny new buildings and asking farmers to scale up-without eradicating the barriers that still exist for some of them-then has capacity help for them truly arrived?
The core truth is that the entire community food system remains immature. It is immature because it has not connected its networks and built collaborative communities of practice everywhere (using the terms of Meg Wheatley and Deb Frieze’s Emergence Theory)
All systems need appropriate stages of improvement to lift all in its rising tide. In order to work on economic, cultural and environmental levels, new leaders must be allowed to emerge and to connect. New ideas have to be allowed in alongside of those already present. Markets have needed help to make their case to newer and larger audiences for some time and see that food hubs can help make that happen. The business baseline of good food hubs is one that markets can learn from while sharing their community-building lessons in return.
Therefore, to style the farmers market field as a static anachronism is a dangerous idea to the health of the entire food system, without even recalling the very deep work done by its direct marketing sister-CSAs, which have certainly pushed forward the economic boundaries for intermediate farmers and allowed their infrastructure to grow.
Let me state it clearly: for farmers market communities, food hubs are welcome. (I wonder if the opposite is also true? And if not, why not?)
Food hubs will not replace the need for farmers markets in the case of many farmers and for many eaters; they will expand the idea for some of those farmers ready and willing to negotiate with wholesale concerns and most likely attract the farmers who were never deeply interested in retail sales or in introductory relationships with constantly changing buyers. The true hubs will stand alongside of markets and CSAs to share the responsibility of changing the way that all producers are valued. They will help encourage and expand needed investments and updates in food handling that do not ask small family farms to hand over their farm to large corporate interests.
The need to change the power structure and allow farmers to LEAD the negotiations over what price, product and types of appropriate growth that each farm needs is the goal for farmers markets, for CSAs and for food hubs too. With all respect to a favored author of mine, to separate us into what was and what is next is very wrong.
This article is from the beginning of the year:
“The idea of bringing in a private company to run the operation comes less than a year after a review from Metro’s finance department that was critical of the market’s finances and management. Then-market director Jeff Themm stepped down from the role in June of last year, shortly after the review, and Nancy Whittemore, director of Metro General Services, has been serving as interim director ever since.
Comer says the market board has worked with General Services to address most of the issues brought up in the report, including better enforcement and compliance with civil service rules, and more thorough housekeeping and maintenance. She says they’re still working through the report, and part of that means looking at “all possible options” when it comes to making the market financially sustainable.”
I have not heard or seen any updates to this since this article and RFP were published.
One of the activities that the group has done at the Sustainability Conference in Cleveland is to tell the story of both personal and municipal transformation through moments lived and remembered. This is the earliest time period (1969-1989) on the personal transformation wall. This is another idea that food organizers may want to use when working with communities. How wonderful to ask them to think about how and and when healthy regional food became important to them.
Here is an interesting link that came to me through the smart people at Food Tank.
An online site to help farmers sell the produce at “come and get it” prices that is not sold through their marketing outlets.
This is a new Vietnamese-led growers initiative in New Orleans. I hope we begin to see more production cooperatives among farmers, especially urban and peri-urban farmers.
As some of you know, I believe that the era of mission-driven farmers markets has just begun and that how we view our work needs to expand to help the farmers and buyers that we work with. In that mindset, we should begin to examine the idea of public markets entirely devoted to restaurant/grocer (then wholesale) sales of local goods, curated with the same intention and mission by those of us that currently manage retail farmers markets.
In order to do that, we should learn from wholesale terminals such as this one in Canada. I found a couple of things within this article about the Ontario Terminal fascinating. My notes are in italics.
In less than 40 seconds, DiLiso has placed his order: cabbage, cipollini onions, bean sprouts and bok choy. Na enters the data on a hand-held digital device then, with a mutual nod, moves on to another client, leaving DiLiso to gather up his vegetables.
That’s how deals are done at The Ontario Food Terminal, the giant U-shaped building on 16 hectares off the Queensway in west Toronto: friendly, no-nonsense, fast.
(Notice the ability to enter sales on a hand held device?)
———————————–
DiLiso and his small crew criss-cross the market to find sellers they trust who have the best deals on vegetables.
“It’s all about relationships,” DiLiso says.
(I dunno- it sounds like it is as much about price?)
Blueberry pie from Windowsill Pies and gluten-free pizza and shrooms from the Rue family, all from Covington Farmers Market..
Take a long look at that picture. To many, it may only show another dang food picture that was posted online but to me it represents something else entirely.
All of those goods came from the Covington Farmers Market, which is a parish (to most of you outside of Louisiana, parish=county) seat market located 40 miles from downtown New Orleans and across Lake Pontchartrain in an area of what used to be called the Ozone Belt for its pine tree greenery.
The gluten-free pizza was sold to me by a teen who was selling them on behalf of her family business and could tell me what was in their pizzas and why, could take my money and offer change with a genuine smile and good wishes. The mushrooms were on their table too and collected as a side option to their prepared food sales, as well as used in their goods.
The pie was sold to me by 2 entrepreneurs that buy their ingredients locally as often as possible (literally pointing to the honey seller that provided the basis of this pie’s lack of refined sugar). This vendor’s artistic tendencies suit their product list well, all of the way to the windowed boxes for their pies and their oil cloth tablecloth and vintage aprons presentation.
What is important to me as a shopper about this picture is that it represents a (still) unusual way of buying food; I can ask each of them exactly what is in their goods and how they were made. They are working to replace industrial ingredients with natural and closer-to-home versions that offer more taste. And of course, not only did I get a chance to talk directly with the makers of these goods and to encourage them further, but that I was able to buy from young women, all just beginning farmers market sales. All of the made goods were delicious and will be bought many times again. I may buy them for myself on a week in which I know I am just not going to feel like cooking or they may be used to share with friends when they come to spend the day at the pool or may even be brought to a party I am invited to as my gift.
Market managers know that farmers markets are THE incubator for businesses that are not ready for or do not want storefronts. The chance to take a small idea and grow it slowly and carefully is a necessary step for any entrepreneur, yet the places one can do this are so limited that markets are among the only ones that regularly offer that opportunity. Many experienced market shoppers know that when they see new goods at markets that are advanced in their ingredients and presentation, they must immediately support them vigorously and talk them up to their friends. In turn, market managers need to monitor these vendors and introduce them to those shoppers (as this market’s manager did to me) as well as search for those vendors’ new shoppers, who may not already be present.
In other words, these vendors often represent a new age in a market. Its important to remember that young vendors trying items that can only be sold at farmers markets are who we want to see more of in markets. These folks cannot (or do not) sell their goods to Whole Foods or ship them worldwide; they design products for the type of person who stops and asks about their ingredients and their process. Therefore, they are an indicator species, which is defined beautifully in the Encyclopædia Brittanica as an organism that serves as a measure of the environmental conditions that exist in a given locale.
If indicator species show the health of an environment, then their low activity can alert to danger in a market’s health or when increasing, can show vitality. Encouragement of diversity of products, gender, age, ethnicity and business goals is exactly what each market must be setting as a goal daily, weekly, monthly and so on. To me, the presence of these indicator vendors and others at this little market show its emerging strength. And offers some damn tasty research at the same time.
“By rejecting reforms and doubling down on mean-spirited cuts in nutrition and the SNAP program, a critical mass of people across the political spectrum couldn’t stomach this bill. The result was a strong ‘no’ vote, leadership looking embarrassed, and the House in disarray.”
FOOD POLICY AND PROGRAM MANAGER
Background Information
The role of the Food Policy and Program Manager is situated within the larger Propeller Social Venture Accelerator program with a focus on food systems and land use. The two primary goals within the Propeller Food Systems sector are: 1) Providing access to healthy, affordable food to disadvantaged residents and communities in New Orleans, and 2) Equitable economic development for food-related entrepreneurs in New Orleans and the surrounding region.
Job Opportunities · Propeller.
(scroll down the page to find this listing)
Jenga is the founder of Backyard Gardeners Network in Lower 9th Ward, raw food entrepreneur and in this video, is talking about her excellent work in the lower 9th ward section of New Orleans. Jenga’s garden will be on my Slow Food tour May 18th. If you believe in community food systems at their most collective and grassroots level, you may want to check her work out more and support her efforts:
This is one of my favorite pieces about New Orleans, written by Jenga as a response to a unworthy story by NYT about lower 9:
Jenga’s response to NYT
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 