For some, the scariest part of October isn’t Halloween, but the last day of the farmers market. Des Moines area residents, however, need only pay a visit to www.iowafood.coop to buy fresh, local produce all year long.
“We’re focused on small, local, independent producers,” Karen Davis, general manager of the Iowa Food Cooperative, told Little Village. “Our goal is to have 99 percent of what we sell be produced, raised, grown in the state of Iowa by small independent producers.”
The Iowa Food Co-op is different from most people’s idea of a “co-op.” It is member-owned, but doesn’t model itself after a standard grocery store. Instead, the co-op lists available items for its producers on its website, and members assemble their orders over a two-week period, which closes at 11:59 p.m. on the second Sunday of a cycle. The orders then go out to the producers. They’re delivered to the co-op’s storefront headquarters a few days later.
“We go from being pretty much completely empty to, over the course of 48 hours, being completely full,” Davis said. “Then three days later we’re completely empty again.”
“All day Thursday, we’re doing home delivery. Then all day Friday and Saturday we are distributing from our physical location, next to the Franklin Avenue Library.”
Then the empty-full-empty cycle starts over.
Most members come to the storefront at 4944 Franklin Ave, but there are pop-up distribution sites around Polk County (“Usually in church or library parking lots”). Members don’t pay until they pick up their orders, because occasionally an item doesn’t show up.
“Things happen sometimes when you’re working with very small producers,” Davis explained. “A truck could break down. Slugs could take over the kale.”
Slugs can happen when an organic farm really is organic. According to Davis, the co-op works with an average of 80 producers from around Iowa each two-week period. They carefully assess who those producers are. For example, Iowa Food Co-op only sells meat from producers who own and raise their animals for at least two-thirds of the animal’s life leading up to processing.
“That way we can feel very confident when we convey what practices were used in the raising of those animals,” Davis said.
Aside from the quality and freshness of the food, what really attracted Davis to the co-op is how its two-week ordering cycle keeps waste to a minimum. She spent 30 years managing restaurants before coming to the co-op, and was already troubled by the amount of food that wound up being tossed.
The USDA estimates that restaurants and grocery stores end up throwing out more than 30 percent of the food they buy, on average.
“We produce maybe four bags of garbage a month, because we only bring in what’s been ordered,” Davis said. ”I know our two-week ordering cycle is very different from how people typically shop, but I think if more people understood how this model is so low-waste, they might be willing to adapt their shopping habits.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2024 issue.
