While investigating local food options, often you find yourself with a choice of CSAs. It can be difficult to pick which to join, as each supplies different produce throughout the season. Plus, you have to pony up a chunk of change up-front, which can be harder to swallow than lettuce gone to seed.
Enter the "food club", as described by Plenty magazine:
The way it works is fairly simple: Customers sign up to be members for a low fee of $5 a month that helps to cover overhead. Each week, a group of organic and sustainable farmers provide a list of their available products to an order coordinator. All of the products are listed in an e-mail that goes out to members. Members respond with what they want to order for the week and buy from the farmers they choose. Farmers drop their goods off and pick up a check from the ASN.
As a consumer, that sounds awesome. But, what if you're a farmer who has a lot of kale this week, but no one orders it? Sure, the free-market's invisible hand will teach you not to grow so much kale next time. Maybe next week folks will buy your collards. Or not.
The CSA farmer, on the other hand, still has has $500, which was pre-paid, at the beginning of the season.
And the middleman takes a portion of the proceeds.
The author of the article claims:
The food club system is also a better business model than farmers markets because it concentrates the most important kind of buyers.
Then again, the farmer is trading certainty (pre-paid CSA shares) and revenue (direct-to-farmer) for uncertainty and a reduced take. The upside is hopefully broader exposure to a larger market.
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