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Growing entrepreneurship in local food system

By Miles Flynn | Southern Indiana Business Report

PAOLI — A town of 3,600 people that’s located an hour from the nearest metropolitan area just isn’t the first place that comes to mind when most folks think of food cooperatives. Despite the pitfalls, though, Lost River Market & Deli has been chugging along for nearly 14 years on its mission of connecting the people of Orange County and surrounding locales with healthy food choices. Now the establishment is busy on several new initiatives to expand community partnerships and grow entrepreneurship within the local food system.

Roots in the farmers market

“We don’t match the demographics for a food co-op,” Debbie Turner, management team leader at the store, readily admitted.

The October 2007 launch of the venture owed a lot to the relationships built between consumers and sellers at the Orange County HomeGrown Farmers Market, she said. (That Saturday morning institution — with its produce, homemade goodies, crafts, music and other weekly activities — has called Orleans Congress Square home for the last several years after getting its start in Paoli.)

From that core group behind the events, a conversation began on the importance of eating local, and Turner said the effort coincided with a nationwide push for the establishment of food cooperatives. With help from the Indiana Cooperative Development Center, a 16-member steering committee navigated the process of bringing the store to reality.

Just east of the square, a building that had been been a JayC Food Store much earlier in its life was available, thanks to owners Terry and Brenda Cornwell. Funding for the new undertaking came, evenly, from member support, grants and a loan. Turner said it’s a feat that could not be easily replicated today; the climate was just right at the time.

Still, the road has been rocky, and only very recently has Lost River Market & Deli seen a positive net income. What’s kept the effort hanging on, Turner explained, is a dogged determination from people who are truly committed to the store’s mission. That spirit has pushed membership in the co-op up from 344 people at its opening to 1,243 today.

Lost River Market & Deli in Paoli has been open since 2007 in a building that had been the town’s JayC Food Store earlier in its history. (Miles Flynn / Southern Indiana Business Report)

New efforts connecting with local growers

Lost River Market & Deli’s partnerships launched in the last couple of years with organizations like the IU Center for Rural Engagement, Purdue Extension, and the Orange County Community Foundation are helping drive several initiatives in community supported agriculture (CSA), and some of the people seeing the most visible immediate economic impact are local growers — many of them members of Orange County’s Amish community. Previously, Turner said, it wasn’t unusual for the store to get occasional visits from Amish growers selling produce. However, it was a haphazard affair. Now, there’s a system in place to ensure what produce, and how much of it, is available from week to week. It’s all built solidly on trust, both on the part of the suppliers and the store.

“Pivotal in all of this is Pat Hall,” Turner said.

Hall’s longtime association with the Orange County HomeGrown Farmers Market makes him a familiar figure to many local growers, including Amish families. Under the new system, Hall visits local producers on Mondays to find out what will be available. He and Turner’s husband Bob then return on Wednesdays to pick up store-provided crates that growers have filled with that week’s produce.

The program includes accountability when it comes to food safety, too. Turner noted Purdue Extension-Orange County is acting as the store’s “first line of defense” and is also available to serve as the program’s voice if cases must be made at higher levels.

“They were fantastic,” Turner said.

She explained Abby Heidenreich, the local office’s agriculture and natural resources educator, boiled down the required regulations and condensed the essential information into a more user-friendly form.

“She wrote them a new book, basically,” Turner said.

Then, Heidenreich took the finished product, with Hall’s assistance, directly to the producers at their farms. And she helped with water tests that would reveal any need for further testing.

Overall produce purchases from local growers have grown from approximately $4,000 in 2019 to more than $25,000 so far in 2021, and the number of participating CSA partners has grown from 15 in the program’s first year to 55 in 2021.

Offerings do vary, of course. Strawberries have been huge recently, Turner said, and Lost River Market & Deli has spent $1,000 in 2021 with just one strawberry vendor.

“It’s been wonderful,” she said of the new system. “And they don’t have to drive it here.”

More vendors, including non-Amish growers, are always being sought. Turner explained while many potential partners are locked into growing perennial cash crops of soybeans and corn today, their pattern could change with the knowledge of what demand there is locally and that there’s now a system in place to bring the produce to market.

No matter the source, Turner said Lost River Market & Deli is anticipating 50% growth in its demand for local produce in the next year.

Innovative new programs for consumers

That expansion in demand is being fueled in large part by several programs catering to consumers.

The store offers CSA subscription boxes of local produce. Customers in Paoli come in to pick up their weekly box, and deliveries are also made to neighboring communities, including Bedford and Mitchell in Lawrence County. Recipes are included with the boxes. Customers can also opt for add-ons of local eggs and breads.

“It’s a local version of Hello Fresh,” noted Brandon Query, Lost River Market & Deli’s marketing and media manager.

Turner added the service solves a dilemma for folks who like the idea of a mailed meal kit but don’t like the waste of all the packaging and national shipping.

Brand new for this season is the addition of farm stands operated by Lost River Market & Deli personnel outside Love Never Fails United Christian Church in West Baden Springs on Thursdays from 3-6 p.m. and at Paoli’s Superburger on Friday afternoons. The French Lick-West Baden Springs area has been hungry for local food for a long time, she said, and the inaugural event there on May 27 drew an encouraging response from shoppers.

Perhaps the most outside-the-box idea from Lost River Market & Deli, though, is the store’s prescription food program with Paoli-based Southern Indiana Community Health Care. That program began in 2020 and sees doctors refer patients to receive food boxes, recipes and meal planning help. (The packages, for the patients’ households, are covered by support from the Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement, the Orange County Community Foundation, and private donors.) For 2020, Turner reported there were approximately 75 households participating.

In addition, IU utilized the program as a research project to examine the difference access to healthy food and meal planning can make in people’s lives over the long term. In the experiment, besides the group receiving the boxes and help, control group members received food cards and were otherwise left on their own. Participants in both groups had their biometric data recorded at the beginning of the 12-week session, at its conclusion, three months later, and 12 months later.

“They were thrilled with the results,” Turner said of the still-unpublished study. She noted the information will be helpful as a baseline for future flights of the prescription box program.

Seeing the positives in COVID adjustments

While Lost River Market & Deli hasn’t been immune from the effects of COVID-19, and has seen its lunch crowd decimated and its $2,000 to $3,000 of monthly income from catering dry up almost completely, Turner and Query both said the pandemic actually provided a big push in the right direction when it came to community programs.

For instance, the immediate need to help feed people led to the expansion of the store’s bag of basics idea. Funded by donors, it allows people in need to choose $25 of items.

“That has never run out of money since COVID started,” Turner said.

Feeding people, and working around the pandemic, also fostered connections with other community partners, and those connections created more strength.

“These programs are getting us a lot more engaged with our community,” Query said. “… It feels good to just be building relationships with people on that level.”

One example can be found in the prescription food box program outlined earlier. Cooking classes are included, and prior to COVID-19, in-person classes were held and participants were able to sit down to enjoy their own communally prepared meals.

“They were wonderful,” Turner said. “We had just a great time with them.”

At first, the pandemic forced some quick technological creativity, including recorded lessons presented to groups via Facebook. However, it didn’t take long for the Lost River Market & Deli crew members to conclude their talents and limited time are more productive when applied to areas besides a crash course in the technical ins and outs of being online educators. The realization led to another partnership with Purdue Extension. Now, that organization’s regional nutrition education program assistant, J.J. Goldsberry, and Karina Moore, the county office’s health and human sciences educator, are helping spearhead the effort.

“That connection,” Turner said, “that has just changed our world working with them.”

And the required move of Lost River Market & Deli’s annual meeting to Zoom opened it up to a much wider audience and led to a private donor from Bloomington pledging $10,000 a year for the next three years. The contribution will help fund the prescription program and vouchers to allow users of the food pantry serving French Lick and West Baden Springs to buy fresh produce they might not otherwise get in their diets.

“COVID was, in a lot of ways, a big kick in the butt for these new things,” Query said.

Empowering tomorrow’s entrepreneurs

For Lost River Market & Deli, the next step forward in building capacity in the local food system is in added value through processing.

One way the group is helping to open the door for food entrepreneurs is through its artisan chef boxes program, which connects store customers to local chefs. Purchasers get some “really high-end gourmet items,” Turner said. The store’s goals, other than facilitating the connection, are creating a new market for local ingredients and then recapturing those costs. The rest of the proceeds go to the chefs themselves.

Another example of how Lost River Market & Deli is working to empower those entrepreneurs who lack their own brick-and-mortar establishments is the new community kitchen that’s now operating at Paoli First Presbyterian Church, across the street from the business. The facility, a certified kitchen, was funded as part of an implementation grant through the Orange County Community Foundation. It offers not only a site for food preparation (and access to shelf space in the store itself) but also a free ServSafe class on Aug. 4 and other how-to training.

Up next, organizers would like to hold a day-long open house to introduce potential users to the kitchen and, just as importantly, to regional service providers who can help with essential know-how, including crafting a business plan and identifying financing opportunities. Lost River Market & Deli is working with the Orange County Economic Development Partnership on the effort to make the community kitchen into an “entrepreneurial hatchery,” Query noted.

“We’re really looking at the whole food system,” he said. “It kind of keeps rolling like that.”

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