Organic Middlemen on a Mission
Did you ever wonder where your organic, local food might come from when it appears in a supermarket or restaurant?
In this article I wrote for Edible Portland, I highlighted a couple of wholesalers who are proving vital to the local and organic foods movement. Toooften, middlemen are derided in sustainable agriculture circles, where the emphasis is usually on buying direct from farmers markets and the like. But selling wholesale works for a lot of farmers, as the article points out. A shout out to Portland's EcoTrust for requesting this story!
Here's the lede:
It might be hard to believe that this cold, dank, 27,000-square-foot warehouse in Eugene, Oregon, across the road from several natural gas storage tanks and a giant commercial composting operation, represents a distant ideal of food distribution. But it just might. The cement loading docks of
Organically Grown Company are quiet at 8 a.m., but earlier in the morning, well before dawn, workers here and at another facility twice as big in Portland were pushing pallets of organic produce into waiting trucks. Some are stamped with the
LADYBUG label, indicating produce grown on farms in the Pacific Northwest.
(read on...)