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Not that kind of food truck

This truck delivers fresh, local product, grown or made by producers in the region, to your door or close to it.
04072018-EatLocal-OS
Eat Local Grey Bruce has developed a distribution system and online store to allow more consumers access to locally grown and made food from across the region. Contributed photo

This local food movement has wheels. 

Eat Local Grey Bruce has figured out a way to give local producers a distribution system to take farm-fresh product further afield.

Eat Local Grey Bruce is a food co-op that allows consumers to buy from local farmers across the region and provides the distribution system to get the food from farms to tables.

The co-op, based in Owen Sound, is connecting consumers and producers in an effort to give consumers more choices when it comes to fresh, local food and to give farmers a way to distribute their product without shouldering all the costs themselves.

Amy Kitchen is part owner of Sideroads Farm, a Collingwood area farm growing produce year-round. She is one of a group of local farmers who helped Eat Local Grey Bruce expand service to Collingwood. The first official delivery to Collingwood was made June 29 this year.

“It’s the kind of thing I really think is important if we are going to expand the local food system,” said Kitchen. “It addresses this issue of distribution and allows us to access customers who aren’t able to get to farmers’ markets or the few local food stores in our areas. It helps expand local food.”

The Eat Local co-op works like this: a local producer drops their product off at the warehouse in Owen Sound. Consumers browse the online list of food and products available and place their order. All orders are shipped from the Owen Sound warehouse and delivered via the Eat Local staff. The orders are delivered to a consumer’s home or to a nearby pickup location, complete with cooler bags and ice packs.

Consumer memberships are available online at the Eat Local Grey Bruce website for $35. The list of products available can vary from week-to-week but includes 300 products such as produce, meat, milk, butter, bread, prepared meals, cheese, eggs, ice cream, kefir, yogurt, preserves, and tea.

Every producer is vetted by a board of local consumers and producers before they are included on the list of items for sale. Currently, there are 27 producers in the Eat Local Grey Bruce co-op. Preference is given to ecologically-produced local food, which means whole food products grown within a 120-km radius of Owen Sound and free from GMOs, chemical pesticides, fertilizers, growth hormones, and sub-therapeutic antibiotics, and all meat must be humanely raised.

Eat Local Grey Bruce began as a pilot project in October 2015, and became incorporated in January 2016. The warehouse was set up by Spring 2016 and deliveries have gone out weekly ever since. Initially, the co-op expanded from Owen Sound into Bruce and Grey Counties. Most recently, the delivery system is moving east to include Collingwood. The co-op is run by three staff and a volunteer board of directors made up of consumers and producers.

The online store is open from Wednesday to Monday at noon, after which the co-op sends out the orders to its producers.

Kitchen said she picks, washes and prepares the orders on Monday evening and delivers them Tuesday. Deliveries start Wednesday and delivery to Collingwood takes place Friday.

“From a consumer perspective, often times if you’re interested in high-quality and freshness in your produce, you won’t find better than this,” said Kitchen. “The products will also last longer than when you’re buying them at the grocery store.”

Amy and Patrick Kitchen have been farming in The Blue Mountains/Collingwood area since 2013, and farmed in Western Canada before that.

“We’ve grown every year that we’ve been here,” said Kitchen. “We’ve brought in staff, expanded our offerings, grown our CSA program, and our booth at farmers’ markets is getting busier. We’re stretched to our limits in terms of what we can do. We can easily produce more product, but the distribution side of things is tricky. The Eat Local Grey Bruce co-op is not a significant portion of our revenue yet, but the potential is there.”

In Collingwood, the Eat Local Grey Bruce pick up location is the Farm to Table Market at 65 Simcoe Street. The fee for pick-up is $3. Home delivery will expand into the area once there’s enough demand. The fee for home delivery is $5 and deliveries would take place on Fridays.

 

 



 

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Erika Engel

About the Author: Erika Engel

Erika regularly covers all things news in Collingwood as a reporter and editor. She has 15 years of experience as a local journalist
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