Wine Country Times

FEED Sonoma, the first farmer and employee-owned fresh produce cooperative in California, adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic with a switch to working as a growers cooperative distributing produce from growers directly to consumers.

Tim Page, FEED Sonoma co-founder, recently spoke with KSRO’s Michelle Marques, about how they helped farmers who were losing commercial customers such as restaurants to expand into the direct-to-consumer market. Page said that, as a food hub, FEED Sonoma currently acts as a distributor for over 70 small farms in and around Sonoma County.

“Primarily, that’s always been wholesale, such as restaurants and corporate campus kitchens and retailers such as Oliver’s, in Sonoma County,” Page said. “And now we obviously have this massive, public-facing front end.”

Page said that, when many of their traditional outlets were shutdown during the pandemic, FEED Sonoma lost approximately 90% of their revenue. So, in March of last year, they launched the FEED Bin program, where a box is distributed directly to consumers with produce from a variety of farms around Sonoma.

“We were able to average about 900 to 1,000 FEED Bins per week for those first 12 months that we just concluded, and our goal is to double that in 2021,” Page said. “We would like to be feeding 2,000 local families every week.”

Given the costs local farmers face, Page said that they present the purchase of a weekly FEED Bin as not just a way to get quality food for their customers, but also as a way for those customers to invest in their local food system.

“FEED is simply building this infrastructure to support the farm community,” Page said. “Unfortunately, this year, we have witnessed two or three farms that have shut their doors.”

While multiple factors lead to those problems for farms, Page said that he thinks it’s important for the community to know, with the high cost of doing business in Sonoma, local farmers are hanging on by their fingernails.