Good Food Box is sourcing local produce for a weekly food box program. The program is available to all, and any money made goes into providing free food to Greater Victorians in need. We speak to the coordinator to learn more.
Good Food Box is sourcing local produce for a weekly food box program. The program is available to all, and any money made goes into providing free food to Greater Victorians in need. We speak to the coordinator to learn more.
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Disclaimer: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Jackie: Hi, my name is Jackie Lamport. Today is Friday, June 18. Welcome to the Capital Daily Podcast. A local food box program is using their affordable service for all to feed those in need around Greater Victoria. For good news Friday, we learn more about the program by speaking with the coordinator.
Jackie: Good Food Box is a nonprofit program that provides affordable local fruits and vegetables to folks of all backgrounds across the scriptorium. The program is run by the Fernwood Neighbourhood Resource Group. It works by selling boxes for pickup or delivery once a week and using any money made to fund their gift of good food initiative, which provides the same products to people in need for free. Through COVID-19, the program grew a lot, and it hasn't shown any signs of slowing down. Ruben Anderson is the coordinator. He joins us for today's good news Friday. To help us learn more. Ruben, thank you so much for joining us.
Ruben: It's a pleasure to be here.
Jackie: Can you tell me what your role is at Good Food Box?
Ruben: I'm the coordinator of the Good Food Box. I've been doing that for about a year and a half. I took over a few weeks before we entered lockdown last year.
Jackie: What made you interested in it?
Ruben: Well, I was a very minor character in the 100 Mile Diet book. So my best friend wrote the 100 Mile Diet with his partner. So I've been interested in local food. I was raised on a farm by hippies with goats and chickens and stuff like that. So I'm interested in food. And I've been associated with local food now for a while. So I have a natural interest.
Jackie: So, can you explain what exactly the program is?
Ruben: The Good Food Box is kind of like a bulk buying program. So we buy pallets and pallets of produce from farms and wholesalers. And then a huge team of volunteers repacks it into grocery bags, which we both sell and give away as part of a charitable program. So we have the gift of good food, which is a big fundraising effort that we do every winter. And that money then goes to buy vegetables for the entire next year. So last year, in December, we raised $150,000. And that's going to pay for over 300 families to get a bag of groceries every two weeks for all of 2021. So that's a huge amount of produce, obviously going out to folks who have difficulty accessing fresh fruits and vegetables. And we support that, you know, we make the numbers work, we leverage our buying power by also selling good food boxes to folks who want to support the program.
Jackie: Is the overall goal of the program to have that charitable end?
Ruben: Yeah, I think you know, maybe that's a 50/50 question like that, that charitable. This is a program of the Fernwood Neighbourhood Resource Group. We're a neighbourhood focused on profit. And we operate traditional social programs out of a community center. So we're very interested in helping our neighbours live happier and healthier lives. But the bigger picture aspect is the kind of food access and food security programs that is more long-term. People are hungry now, and we try to help that, and food access and security are the longer-term programs that are very important to us.
Jackie: Who is the Good Food Box accessible to?
Ruben: The big focus of Good Food Box is to provide a stigma-free supply of fruits and vegetables. So people come to pick up their gift of good food boxes. And there's no way to tell whether they're a customer or a gift of good food recipient or anything. So it's just a stigma-free way to get fruits and vegetables. It also remains an affordable way to buy fruits and vegetables. Every now and then, I compare it to the grocery store. And because we have, you know, this huge team of volunteer packers, delivery drivers, you know, volunteers working distribution, we can keep prices down. And that provides customers with a more affordable way to buy vegetables as well. So it's kind of multiple levels of affordability here from absolute. Your gift of Good Food recipient is just a more affordable way to buy vegetables because we're buying in bulk and packing with volunteers.
Jackie: So how exactly does that work when you order as a patron or as a gift of Good Food Box recipient?
Ruben: So the gift of good food folks are selected, mostly by community centres. We do have several other community partners. So it's, it's kind of a people that are embedded in the community. So they kind of sort out, they kind of filter out the folks who could most use the fresh fruit and veg from the community they're accessing. So instead of us in Fernwood trying to make a list of 300 people around the region, every community centre maybe picks ten people or a dozen people. Then a few other community groups as well might pick between five and ten families that they know need the support. So it's really community embedded partners that select the folks, and the people in those communities can say, "Hey, I could really use a Good Food Box," and then the names come back to us.
Jackie: Awesome. So then the people who are purchasing are just supporting the ability to do that?
Ruben: That's right. So you go to thegoodfoodbox.ca. The ordering deadline is Saturday, and you get your bag next Wednesday. There are basic costs that are always the same as I gotta rent a photocopier to copy our newsletter. So there's just the basic cost that we have, the more bags we can sell, the more the program is supported, and the more can be devoted to buying more veg from farms and wholesalers.
Jackie: It's definitely a win-win. Because everybody who wants to buy affordable food, they can do that. And at the same time, they're supporting people who need the food. There's no downside.
Ruben: No, it feels great. I was exhausted working through the pandemic, and it was huge; we got slammed, which is another great thing to talk about. But every day, I was getting up and thinking, I feel really good about this work. It's sort of like, “what did you do during the pandemic?” stories. I moved a lot of vegetables to folks who needed it. And that was fantastic. And in addition, last year, I think almost a quarter of our spending went to local farms in Saanich. And almost 70% of that 69% of our spending was with a 200-mile radius of Victoria. So that's Vancouver Island, the Lower Mainland, and the potato and onion plains of Washington, so that's a huge amount of money going to local farmers, BC farmers. That also feels fantastic. It feels like good work.
Jackie: I was gonna ask because it seems that one of the focuses is sustainability. What other ways are you keeping this sustainable?
Ruben: I wouldn't say it's sustainable, but we do make efforts. Something that was a real shame is that we used to be able to compost waxed cardboard boxes. And we can't do that anymore because of COVID restrictions. So we're looking forward to restrictions like that being eased because we're really aggressive about reusing and reducing material waste. And focusing locally is such an improvement on that. It is simply mind-boggling to see the amount of packaging that is travelling around the world full of food like you think you're buying a head of lettuce. However, you bought a huge amount of cardboard as well that has come from Mexico or California, or Arizona. So it's just it's incredible for me actually to have a career background in recycling. It shakes me sometimes just the sheer amount and to think that we're a relatively small program, buying a few tons of food every week when you think about the big grocery stores that must be moving hundreds or thousands of tons. And then you go around back, of course. They have massive compactors that compact the cardboard and the wax cardboard and the garbage they're producing, as packaging from this intern, you know, this international globalized food system. So for us to be able to work with farmers that are literally just up the highway or just across the ferry is a big help.
Jackie: Yeah, and not just the waste that comes along with packaging, but also when you're buying locally, you're really cutting transportation emissions, which is huge.
Ruben: Yeah, sometimes depending on the amount, while we're here, we're actually buying this week from a farm that is like three blocks away. That's a very short-haul; sometimes, the order will arrive in a van instead of a giant, five-ton truck. It multiplies the kind of sustainability savings, which is awesome.
Jackie: Have you seen a lot of growth in people who are purchasing this since it started?
Ruben: I think it's probably gone up about a quarter maybe or a third. During the pandemic, of course, our sales almost doubled in the first weeks of lockdown. And then we got a bunch of rapid relief funding. One of the strengths of nonprofits and social enterprises like ours is that we were able to move extremely quickly. We got some federal rapid relief funding. Within a few weeks, we were packing 200 more bags a week and distributing them to people all around the region. So that was great, and the sales doubled. And then we added rapid relief on that, and sales have not dropped back down to the pre-pandemic numbers. There are still many folks who are happy to stay home and have groceries come to them. And we try to support that when we can. Some folks end up in isolation, and they need food; we can help.
Jackie: There's also pickup, correct?
Ruben: Yeah, most of our bags go out by pickup through ourselves or our community partners. So most of these, you know, again, everything changed last April. We used to have many community centers that we would deliver to, and people would buy their bags for pickup from their nearest community center. And most community centres, our community centres are still close to the public. But we distribute out the front door, put the bag on the table, and slide it to the person. So about half of our distribution points are still shut down, which is a shame. But yes, there's still pickup at Oakland and Fairfield, and Saanich can do it now. So, if you go on our website, it has pickup options.
Jackie: Do you have any plans to expand outside of the current area that you serve us right now?
Ruben: I don't think so. Our current limit is Admirals and McKenzie. So it's kind of, you know, central Greater Victoria. And we do have partners out to soup. You know, we work with soup Family Resource society, for example. And we work with Beacon out in Sidney. But I don't see our kind of delivery range expanding. But there is actually a network of Good Food Boxes forming. The person who was organizing the network said there's something like 200 similar programs in British Columbia. Now almost none of them are anything like ours in terms of scale and variety. And that kind of business model is often different. But in terms of a group of people who are buying wholesale and repacking for folks, there's a lot of organizations that are doing something like that. When I see someone that has a problem that I think I've already fixed, I send them off my spreadsheets, or I send them off my worksheets. So it's all just about trying to support anyone trying to get food to folks, and trying to support local farmers and feed local people is great for me.
Jackie: Yeah, it doesn't always have to be about growth.
Ruben: And we're limited as well like we're packing out of the community centre. So, we don't have infinite refrigerator space. We don't have infinite storage space, and we run multiple programs out of the same space. So we got to kind of get in and get out. I think we could pack more bags every week, but we can't pack infinitely more bags every week out of our existing space.
Jackie: For somebody who would be interested in this but has never picked up a box before. What should they expect?
Ruben: Well, one of the quirks of the Good Food Box is that you don't get to pick what you get in it. So this is kind of a big difference. There are two big differences between this and sort of online shopping, as you might from a grocery store or some of the other food delivery services. So one is that we have this huge volunteer team that keeps costs down. Whereas the for-profit businesses, you know, have to pay all their wages, and so the prices are higher. And then the other thing is that you can totally customize. Whereas with a good food box, you can't customize. And so what I do is every week, I look for the best value. So that's a combination, you know, of just taking advantage of somebody who's having a sale to generate a little interest, or it's seasonal, you know, suddenly zucchinis are super cheap, or lettuces really dropping in price or whatever. And so I can take advantage of those prices and bring in huge amounts for folks that, you know, this is an odd little quirk that you don't get to customize your box. Other than picking the size or the type, as you know, if you pick fruit, I'm going to give you all the fruit, but I'm not going to tell you what kind of fruit is going to be in there. But what I found is that, you know, we've had customers that have been buying from us for years and years and years. And they like the kind of a surprise, you know, they say that it keeps them from getting into sort of a cooking rut because suddenly a vegetable shows up that maybe they haven't used ever and you know kohlrabi is always a big surprise for people. So maybe a vegetable shows up that they've never seen, or it's a vegetable that they haven't bought themselves in a while or one that they wouldn't think of buying because it's just not part of their family's normal cuisine. We provide a newsletter with a few recipe suggestions. And so the folks who seem to stick with us for years and years and years are the ones that kind of like being bumped out of their cooking rut.
Jackie: Yeah, I could definitely see how that would be nice. Ruben, thank you so much for joining us.
Ruben: It's been a pleasure. Thanks for asking.