The Unstoppable Growth of CSA-Style Produce Delivery

In truth, The Box did very lit­tle to con­nect me with my food­shed; I didn’t learn any­thing about the farms behind the food nor, I’ll admit, did I care much at the time. On the other hand, it was through this ser­vice that I devel­oped a borderline-unhealthy obses­sion with cook­ing every­thing we’d got­ten one week before the next deliv­ery arrived. I also learned that I liked chard, fava beans, and a few other sea­sonal foods I might not have tried. More impor­tantly, I became a Person Who Got a Box of Organic Vegetables Every Week. And, look­ing back, that was a big step toward becom­ing the per­son I am today (a local food- and farm-obsessed gar­dener and home cook who reads and writes about food pol­i­tics for a living).

This week, I was reminded of those early adven­tures with The Box while explor­ing the cur­rent state of the CSA—a sub­set of the organic food world that is at a cross­roads, much like the larger organic indus­try. What started out as a great way for small farm­ers to reach a direct audience—a way for die-hard loca­vores to “buy-in” to a sin­gle farm and take on the risks and the ben­e­fits of the year’s bounty—has gone main­stream, for bet­ter or worse.

Take Full Circle, for exam­ple. It began as a tiny organic farm with a CSA pro­gram serv­ing eaters in the Seattle area and grew to occupy three Washington state farms total­ing 450 acres. Winter pro­duce in the cool, wet Pacific Northwest can be pretty lim­ited, so the ser­vice added foods from California, Mexico, and else­where, as well as organic gro­ceries from around the coun­try. Full Circle expanded to serve cus­tomers in Alaska, Eastern Washington, Idaho, and—as of this summer—the San Francisco Bay Area. Along the way, the com­pany, which has reached over 15,000 mem­bers and works with 400 farms, dropped the term CSA from its mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial and began call­ing itself an “organic pro­duce deliv­ery service.”

The Full Circle “mem­ber­ship” doesn’t require much more of a com­mit­ment than most online shop­ping sites. And—mainly because it offers food out of season—this new brand of CSA allows eaters to make a broad feel-good stroke at eat­ing locally, with­out truly mak­ing many sac­ri­fices. Once you’ve belonged to a “real” CSA, it might seem a lit­tle like cheating.

As Andrew Stout, Full Circle’s founder and “chief farmer,” sees it, there is no down­side to these changes if they can make mem­ber­ship more desir­able to the masses. “The goal is to make small farms medium-sized and medium-sized farms big. CSAs cap out at a cer­tain size. You can’t fully move the nee­dle that way,” he told me on the phone recently. “I’m more con­cerned about the envi­ron­men­tal impact of the con­ven­tional farm­ing world, that GMO-filled world that is rac­ing ahead. We need to have a coun­ter­bal­ance to that. At Full Circle, we want the indus­try to rise up, not set­tle down.”

Stout has a point. As the good food move­ment picks up steam, ques­tions of scale and access are loom­ing larger than ever. Yes, it’s been five years since the word “loca­vore” made it into the Oxford dic­tio­nary, but Big Food does still have a stran­gle­hold on most of the coun­try. Organic fruits and veg­eta­bles make up only 11 per­cent of all U.S. pro­duce sales and organ­ics added up to only 4 per­cent of food and bev­er­age sales in 2010.

Full Circle is one of many com­pa­nies look­ing to fill the so-called “mid­dle space” between small-scale local farm­ing and the big indus­trial stuff. Brooklyn’s Urban Organic, the Bay Area’s Golden Gate Organics, and SPUD—which is short for Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery, and, inci­den­tally, bought The Box out a few years back—are all work­ing with mod­els that fill out a con­tin­uum. But, as you might guess, the more peo­ple they reach, the fur­ther away each com­pany tends to move from the more inti­mate, farm-based model of the early CSA.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.