|
Developing a Local Food System
Lessons from the organizing campaign of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative
By Robert Waldrop, president
A local food system starts in local kitchens, as individuals decide to take personal responsibility for the food they eat.
The permacultured kitchen is the essential foundation of a local food system. If we want a more sustainable and just food production system, then there must be a market for the products of sustainable and just food production systems. Personal and household choices about where and how we spend our kitchen money and time are critical to the design of the permacultured kitchen. This design process begins with observation of your present situation and an inventory of what you have and do, what you need, and the challenges of getting from here to there.
A local food system is about distributing basic foods; it does not look like Wal Mart. Don’t expect all the ersatz “convenience” offered by manufactured foods. The good news is that while the process is not always easy, the change that the permacultured kitchen brings to your household is uniformly positive. The food will be more nutritious, it will taste better, you will feel better about your work in the kitchen.
Basic principles of the permacultured kitchen:
- Form and function follow food.
- Eat with the season.
- Be temperate in your selection of foods.
- Prepare meals from basic ingredients.
- Develop the organization and systems of your kitchen.
- Recycle resources and energy
- Process and preserve foods at home. Practice food storage.
- Grow some of your own food.
- Buy foods from local farmers and producers.
- Never buy meats that originate in confined animal feeding operations.
- Design for economy.
- Design for catastrophe
Organizers must be people who have advanced through the beginnings of this “permacultured ktichen” process and who are already actively buying, or looking for places to buy, local foods. In the case of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, Robert Waldrop had more than 20 years experience in preparing meals from basic ingredients, growing food, and preserving, processing, and storing foods. A year prior to the organizing campaign, he began to look for sources for local foods, and by the time the organizing campaign started, he was getting 80% of his household’s food from his own gardens or from local farmers. This gave credibility to his “buy local foods” message.
The first step outside of the home kitchen is to collect and share information. Waldrop started a website, www.oklahomafood.org (it is now www.oklahomafood.coop ) to share the information he was finding about local food producers.
Where to look for local food sources?
- Directories. Some state departments of agriculture maintain directories of local food producers.
- Farmers markets.
- County extension agents.
- Custom butchers.
- Classified ads in newspapers.
- Word of mouth.
The Oklahoma Food Cooperative organizers made extensive use of the internet. Besides the website, they organized a listserv to discuss organizing a local food cooperative, and joined many local internet discussion groups. (okfoodret@yahoogroups.com, whose archive contains a complete written record of the development of the cooperative from the first announcement of the idea to the present time.)
Where to find more people:
- Local and state chapters of environmental organizations, in particular, look for Sierra Club chapters.
- Homeschoolers
- Weston A. Price Foundation local chapters
- Churches
- Local and regional internet discussion groups.
- Food editors
- Restaurant owners
- Slow Food conviviums/contacts
- Peak oil discussion groups
- Doctors and medical professionals
- Support groups for people with allergies
The fastest way to create jobs in rural areas is to help farmers sell food directly to local residents.
Besides internet discussion groups, the Oklahoma organizers held a dozen meetings, in many different parts of the state. Usually the primary publicity was through free notices published in local newspapers. The meetings were held in churches and libraries, the best attendance at any of these meetings was 12. The people attending each meeting elected one person to serve as a member of the “Oklahoma Food Cooperative Organizing Committee.”
The organizing committee incorporated as an Oklahoma Non-Profit Organization, and began holding monthly meetings. At each meeting, they had a potluck lunch. The organizers believe that this was critical to the group’s success.
The group determined it was not feasible to open a store, so we invented an order delivery system with the following features (features are as of 2006, not all of this was present at the beginning).
Features of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative Order Delivery System
Organized as a cooperative under the Oklahoma statute for consumer cooperatives.
The cooperative has designed its on online operating system, the Local Food Cooperative Management System, which will be available free of charge to others via the General Public License System.
We do a monthly order delivery service. The order opens on the first Thursday (generally) of the month. Customers have a week to enter their orders. Customers order by browsing the product lists and clicking to add items to their shopping cart. Or they can order by phone, by postal mail, or email. 99% of orders come through the online system. When a customer orders, the system creates two invoices: one for the customer, and one for the producer informing him or her what people have ordered. The order closes the second Thursday. Producers can then log in and click a link to access their orders, in two formats, sorted by customer, and sorted by product.
Producers and customers are members. Everybody pays the same, and has the same rights. Producers can buy, and customers can sell. One member, one vote, one class of membership stock. Each member is assigned a unique membership number (in sequential order, starting with 001, we are now over 550). 75 of our members are also identified as producers.
The relationship between the cooperative and its producer and customer members is an agency relationship. We act as agents of the producers in listing their products, collecting the customer orders, arranging for delivery, collecting from the customers and paying the producer. We act as agents of the customers in finding producers with products to sell, providing an order system, collecting their payments, and delivering their groceries. In our sorting operation, we are a cross-docking operation. The cooperative never holds title to any of the products. The products are always owned by either the producer or the customer. This is important for regulatory reasons.
The cooperative has been almost totally self-financed by the sale of membership shares, sweat equity volunteer workers, and in-kind donations. In our organizing campaign we received a few hundred dollars in donations (from the Sierra Club and the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House), in-kind donations from Epiphany Church in the form of free use of church space for meetings, delivery day, and banquets, and we received one small grant, most of which we were unable to use because we had requested the grant when our goal was to open a store and not all of the money could be re-programmed to fit our order delivery service.
Producers set their own prices.
The cooperative does not limit the number of producers who can sell a particular product. We think this is very important to maintaining the vitality of the cooperative and make it an interesting place for customers to shop. If the cooperative limited producers in product categories, this would totally change the relationship between the cooperative organization and its producer and customer members. The cooperative would find itself in the business of picking winners and losers and second-guessing customer tastes and choices, as well as requiring us to forecast expected demand in order to make sure we had enough producers.
All the producers have a page at our website to tell their story, plus their products are stored in its database. Their products are displayed sorted in various ways. Producers enter and edit their own information and products on the website. 95% of our producers have been able to do this. The cooperative does it at no charge for a small handful who don’t have computer access or whose computer is down. Each product receives a unique number, automatically assigned by the software when it is entered. Producers can specify inventory amounts in their product descriptions. As products are ordered, the inventory declines. If somebody cancels an order, the inventory increases. When all of the product is sold, customers can’t order it, but it continues to appear on the public price list.
We have strict standards about what can be sold through the cooperative. We allow no distributorships, anything sold must be produced by the producer. Producers can buy raw materials, but the producer must add value. “Re-packaging” is not added value. No confined animal feeding operation products may be sold through the cooperative nor may they be used as ingredients in processed/prepared foods. Ingredients for prepared and processed foods may be bought from the regular food system, except that any meats or eggs must come from Oklahoma farmers. Meats, dairy, and eggs must come from free-ranging flocks and herds. No animal products or antibiotics are allowed in feed, nor bovine growth hormones. Products do not have to be organic or all natural, but producers must declare what their production practices are at the cooperative’s website.
Customers and producers are assigned a user ID and password. Their access to the members only parts of the website is governed by this, which enables us to have a basic level of access for everybody, and then various levels of administrative access for cooperative officers and volunteers.
Producers are responsible for getting their goods to the delivery location. The cooperative does maintain 3 routes where one driver picks up products from various producers and brings them to town, and then carries retail orders back. The cooperative pays mileage to the drivers on those routes.
Each product coming in to our central sorting location (a large hall at Epiphany of the Lord Catholic Church) must be labeled with the name of the producer, the name of the customer, the customer’s delivery code, and what the product is. The cooperatives website produces labels in two formats which the producer can automatically download at any time after the order closes, so all he or she has to do is cut them apart and staple, tape, or otherwise stick the label onto the package. Product packaging has been an issue. The cooperative is about to issue required standards for producer packaging. The flimsy plastic grocery bags are not that suitable for our system, since items have to be sorted and moved, and packages inside them can easily fall out. Attaching labels to such bags is next to impossible (well, you can attach them but they don’t always stay). We are probably going to require that all meat items come in packaged in zip lock bags, with the label attached to the ziplock bag. Multiple meat orders from the same producer to one customer will have to be in a box with the label on the outside of the box.
All of the products come to the OKC site, but we have 4 locations where the orders are sorted into customer orders: Oklahoma City (OKC), Tulsa (TUL), Tahlequah (TAH), and Norman (NOR).
Each customer has a unique delivery code which is based on how they choose to get their food (pickup at one of several locations or home delivery).
We have 100+ ice chests of varying sizes (and are about to buy more), most are superinsulated, for moving frozen and refrigerated items. For frozen items, we use food grade dry ice which we buy directly from a distributor, not from a retail store. We have used the re-usable “blue ice blocks” for refrigerated items. Each ice chest is numbered. Keeping track of those ice chests and ensuring that they come back to each delivery day has proved to be a challenge. The same is true only worse with the re-usable “blue ice” blocks. Because of this problem, and the continual expense of the reusable blue ice blocks, we have started using regular water ice for ice chests with refrigerated items. We put the ice inside ziplock bags, as melting ice plays havoc with the quality of refrigerated items.
Each route and pick-up site has a volunteer in charge of it. This volunteer has an administrative access that allows them to see the customers on their route. They email or phone them before delivery day to verify that the customer selected the right delivery method and remind them of the pickup times. Each pickup site has a volunteer in charge of that. Sometimes one person is the volunteer in charge of the route, the pickup site, and the driver for the route (smaller routes, like Midwest City). Norman has two routes, one for home delivery, one for the pickup site, so there are two vehicles headed that way, and several people help at the pickup site to do a final sort of the customer orders and get them ready to be picked up. Tulsa has one route, and has two pickup locations (Tulsa and Claremore), and is about to need a second pickup or a larger truck.
The cooperative charges the producers 5% to sell and the customers 5% to buy, this provides the operating revenues of the cooperative.
The cooperative takes payments in checks, cash, and via the PayPal system, thus allowing us to take credit cards. It is apparently illegal to charge a fee for using a credit card or PayPal, so we add the PayPal charges (2.7% plus 35 cents per transaction), to ALL customer invoices, and then print a second total on the invoice “Discount for payment by cash or check”. Since we only make 5% on a customer transaction, we can’t afford to just eat the PayPal charge, we also do not believe it would be fair to spread the PayPal cost over everybody’s order, since one of our principles is “user pays”.
Our primary method of communication with customers is via the internet. We have one customer without computer access and we send him a fax each month. We do not do regular mailings to members, although we did in the early stages. We no longer maintain a printed customer handbook. We tried to do this early on but quickly discovered that even with donated copying, we could go broke just mailing out updates. Members can subscribe to a monthly mailing, but very few do this.
Monthly sales are presently fluctuating between $15K and $19K/month. Since November 2003, as of the May 2006 order the cooperative has sold $339,258.03 in Oklahoma food products. 95% of that money went to the farmers/producers. Of that total, $207,679.18 was staple foods, which includes $106,556.39 in meats and poultry, $14,281.52 fresh produce, $8,193.20 in eggs. We sold $85,485,70. in “retail foods not staples” (prepared/processed foods) and $48,093.15 in non-food items.
Click here for more information about the software.
|
|
