Website opens portal to locally grown food

As people put more importance on shopping for food that has been grown or produced locally, a new statewide website is offering a way for people to connect with Community Supported Agriculture organizations.

The Eat Local First website at eatlocalfirst.org has a “Food and Farm Finder” search option that allows people to search by ZIP code, city, category or keyword. People can also search specifically for farmers markets in their area.

A centralized website has been under discussion for a while, said Sheryl Wiser, director of outreach for Tilth Alliance, one of the organizations that founded the Eat Local First Collaborative last year.

“We had been having conversations in 2019 about how to make it easier to connect with regional and local food providers,” she said.

CSA organizations exist around the state to help consumers buy food directly from participating farms, but they were scattered.

“We believed having a unified online program was more efficient,” she said. “We’re able to combine our efforts, our resources. We just wanted to be able to have a collaborative platform.”

The pandemic that began last year moved the discussions into high gear and the website went live in November.

“When the pandemic hit, there was a huge demand for local products,” Wiser said. “We had to launch it pretty quickly.”

One of the organizations featured on the website is LINC Foods. The Local Inland Northwest Cooperative is a worker- and farmer-owned food hub based in Spokane. Visitors to its website can sign up for weekly farm-to-table boxes that include produce, dairy, meats and artisan items. There’s also an online marketplace for people to shop and order specific items that can be picked up in one of several locations in Spokane and Spokane Valley.

“It’s almost like an online farmers market,” said LINC Foods Crop promotions director Michelle Youngblom.

Though LINC Foods has its own website at lincfoods.com, Youngblom said the cooperative is happy to be on the new statewide site.

“We’re really glad to work with Eat Local First on this website,” she said.

She believes the new Eat Local First site will make it easier for people to buy directly from local farmers.

“A lot of times people want to support local but don’t know where to find it,” she said.

Youngblom believes the site has already increased business for the farms that are part of LINC Foods.

“I do think it has helped,” she said.

The Eat Local First site also isn’t limited to CSAs. “A number of our member farms are listed on the website as farms,” Youngblom said.

It’s up to farms and CSAs to promote themselves because Washington has no state tourism board, Wiser said. The Eat Local First website has listings for 230 CSAs, each of those representing dozens or hundreds of local farmers.

The collaborative is still actively looking for Eastern Washington farms and restaurants that commit to using local sourced food that want to sign up to be featured on the website, Wiser said.

“It’s free to list on the website,” she said. “We’re slowly getting the word out. We do have listings for Eastern Washington, but we’re trying to grow them.”

———

Nina Culver can be reached at nculver47@gmail.com