News from Common Ground Food Co-op

June 2010

LET'S DEFINE LOCAL AND REGIONAL
Jacqueli ne Hannah, General Manager
food nanny

Common Ground Food Co-op has been a trusted provider of local foods for over three decades now. When I first started working for Common Ground in the summer of 2006, one thing that told me this was a whole new kind of business was the level of trust everyone who came through Common Ground's doors had in the Co-op to bring in local products and support great relationships with local farmers and producers. They were right to have that trust. While I had worked in three other natural food stores before Common Ground, this was the first job where the farmers and producers came right up to me to talk about how we could work together offer more of their products or to ask what they could grow for the Co-op next year. These farmers trusted their relationships with Common Ground and knew that the Co-op walked its talk about local food.

As Common Ground has grown, the trust in our passion for connecting our community to local food has only grown. Not only farmers and Co-op owners trust Common Ground to do its part to support the local food system with integrity. Since opening our doors to the general public in 2008, we've become the go-to source of local food and local food information for thousands of new customers and for the local media. The board and staff here are so grateful to have that trust and proud that our hard work has borne results you believe in.

But we don't want you to just take our word for it when we say a carrot is "local" or a jar of honey is "regional."

We felt it was time to really define what these words mean. This February, a group of four Common Ground staff members started meeting to do research and hold conversations about the way "local" and "regional" are defined at other co-ops and food institutions and to decide what definitions would work best for Common Ground. While we love that you trust us when we say a bunch of broccoli is "local," it's also our job to tell you what that means. If we don't formally define what we mean by "local," we help those that would exploit the word to greenwash their food businesses (have you seen Frito Lay's "Local" campaign yet?) at worst, and confuse Co-op shoppers at best. In May, this team of Common Ground staffers presented the following recommendations for how Common Ground will define "local" and "regional":

Common Ground defines "local" as grown or produced within 100 miles of the Co-op. This definition keeps local close to home without being unduly restrictive. 100 miles is the outside limit of a reasonable drive to make back and forth in one day, and it includes nearly all of the growers and producers that we work with directly on a regular, year-round basis. The Co-op is at the forefront of the local food movement in Illinois, and by defining local tightly and making our definition highly visible, we aim to set the standard for other retailers.

Our definition of "regional" is more expansive, including products grown or produced in Illinois and Indiana (outside the 100-mile local radius), Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Kentucky, or Michigan. This includes all of the states bordering Illinois, plus Michigan, which is easily accessible and provides us with a substantial amount of produce. Many other Midwestern co-ops use similar definitions of the term "regional." Our goal was to have an individualized definition for Common Ground while maintaining consistency within the cooperative movement in the Midwest.

We'll be working this summer to build an education campaign around these definitions and to share them in Common Ground. We'll be putting a "local" sticker next to all products in the Co-op within the next few weeks and will progress to labeling regional products and making posters and pamphlets to put in the store about what local and regional mean at Common Ground Food Co-op.

We'd love your feedback on these new definitions and to answer any questions you might have about them. As always, shoot me an e-mail any time or stop on by the store and ask for me!

From Your Board of Directors