About 14 people gathered tonight and dined on gazpacho garnished with goat cheese, corn and parsley, a zesty roasted eggplant-creole tomato dip served with blue tortilla chips, a chopped salad of kale, cukes, and avocados in a tangy vinegarette, cold cucumber soup, fresh watermelon, fresh baked brownies, water and red wine. People attended from mid-city, downtown and uptown.

After munching for a while and enjoying some casual conversation, we fired up the projector and walked through how to use the Coopshopper website to place an order. The website is geared to splitting cases of grocery, splitting bulk commodities, refrigerated and frozen goods as well as health and beauty and household goods like toilet paper and cleaners. By shopping for staple items this way, members can usually save a few dollars and also get to meet other folks in their neighborhood.

There was a bit of time afterward where we had a group discussion about growth from a Buying Club to a grocery storefront. Everyone realized that it takes a lot of folks to put a storefront together, so starting small as a buying Club and evolving our club into a cooperative group that owns a grocery store makes sense. We are and will always be a volunteer group, organized by our members.

Many new faces had some good suggestions about marketing the Club and tending our growth. Tim had an interesting idea about running neighborhood based delivery service on bikes pulling trailers. And Lynn spurred a good discussion about marketing to growth.

One good question was about how much interaction members have with each other, since ordering from a website is not exactly a face-to-face exchange. And a few current Buying Club members pointed out that the divvy when the order arrives is always a fun social affair, and that there is a regular monthly get together like tonights pot-luck. Additionally, picking ones staple and case items up at a fun purposeful gathering is usually a lot more nicer than packing a grocery cart till it is too heavy to steer, trying to navigate crowded aisles, unpacking it all at the cash register, repacking it all back, pushing to your conveyance, loading it in your car or bike trailer and unloading it at home and putting it away. I mentioned that I still go to the store for last-minute items or specialty items, but I hardly ever struggle with a load.

The Buying Club now has a new scale to divvy bulk items. Here we asked Armor to test the scale out for us, he rated it high for ease of use, but kind of low for comfort.

The NOFC started development of an innovative Mobile Market project last year and it has evolved into a larger partnership. We proudly announce the project is now under the management of marketumbrella.org in partnership with the NOFC and Second Harvest Food Bank of greater New Orleans and Acadiana.

The NOFC is proud to be a part of this partnership, and we are pleased that a project that we have envisioned for some time has attracted these more capitalized partners.  The essence of the partnership has marketumbrella.org operating the front-end, which includes the point-of-sale, the retail management and the day-to-day money handling. Second Harvest –which had been exploring the model already using the example of a similar project operated by another Second Harvest food bank in Arizona– is preparing to utilize their massive transportation and warehousing assets to operate the back-end. Both organizations are currently working out the finer points of the project operations within their respective organizations. The NOFC will provide a steady flow of volunteers looking to learn aspects of market operation as well as investigate and foster contacts within community groups around the New Orleans area as the partnership looks for market locations.

The Mobile Market is designed to provide quick access to under-served neighborhoods, whether because of an actual lack of standard grocery retail services or because of the disruption of a natural disaster. It is modeled somewhat on the People’s Grocery in California as well as various mobile pantry operations operated by Red Cross organizations or other food banks.

To further develop the Mobile Market Project and start operations, marketumbrella.org has formed a Working Group comprised of a variety of folks. We are currently working on an informational packet that we expect to market around to potential community groups in neighborhoods around the city. If you are interested in contributing to this innovative and unique project, the NOFC has a few seats reserved on the marketumbrella.org Mobile Market Working Group, and you are welcome to get involved, simply email us at info@nolafoodcoop.org.

If you are interested in finding out more about the Mobile Market as it was being developed by the NOFC alone, you can check out the wiki pages for the project, although bear in mind that these pages no longer represent the current development of the project. (although if you would like to join the Working Group and take the role of a maintainer to keep the wiki pages up-to-date, let us know!)

There is also a new category in our news posts for the Mobile Market, so check back periodically if you are interested in following the development of this unique and creative project.

We have started a project section on the wiki in which to develop the Mobile Market. If you are not familiar with wiki pages, they are a special kind of web page that you can edit from within your web browser. Wiki pages make great tools for online collaborative projects, and are quite common. The most famous wiki is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

To find our Mobile Market wiki pages, and to contribute or simply to follow the developmnet, go here

When the New Orleans Food Cooperative first began meeting to talk about and develop plans for growing cooperative grocery in New Orleans a couple of years ago, we split our efforts into several committees to investigate different aspects of the problem. One of those, the Supply Committee, met regularly to learn more about how groceries end up on the store shelves. We wanted to know more about production, transportation and availability.

We discussed local and/or organic food availabilty, the inelegant homogenization of the grocery industry, the environmental impact of national and international distribution, the loss of family-owned farming operations, the environmental and economic un-sustainability of corporate farming, labor practices that rely on underpaid and uninsured laborers, the impact on the local economy of grocery suppliers that are owned and controlled from outside the area and the insecurity of centralizing food production in the hands of a few national distributors.

When one considers grocery stores, it is apparent that we are all involved in the selection of the products available to us and the practices by which they are made available. Without consumer demand, the food industry will neither take steps to create a unique local identity in any grocery store, minimize the environmental impacts of long-haul transportation and wasteful packaging, nor invest in sustainable farming operations that do not pollute the environment. Without a concerted demand from consumers, unfair labor practices will persist and industrial farming will continue to chip away at the disappearing heritage of small family-owned farms. The only proven way for consumers to affect change is via demand by supporting organizations, suppliers and products that reflect these issues. This is evident today in the increasing number of organic products appearing on grocery store shelves as a result of consumer demand. Consumers are demanding them, and food producers are responding. Consumers expressed their reluctance to buy genetically modified potatoes, and the fast-food industry virtually eliminated the use of GMO potatoes in this country and Europe by refusing to use them in their fries. However, supporting organic products does not even begin to address all of the inequities and potential disasters befalling our national food production.

In time we became overwhelmed. When we learned of the details of many of these issues, we realized that the chances of just a few of us of effecting change were slim. To top it off, we didn’t even have a platform from which to address these issues credibly. This fact, combined with advice from a few local progressives interested in supporting the growth of local cooperatives, led us to begin operation of a Buying Club.