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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Fwd: The Amazing Portable Food Cooperative
  • Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 05:33:47 -0700


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On 12/19/2003 at 12:08 AM Robert Waldrop <rmwj@SOONERNET.COM wrote:

"The Amazing Portable Food Cooperative."
A report on the December Order Week and Delivery Day of the Oklahoma Food
Cooperative
www.oklahomafood.org

That was my thought about 11 AM this morning as I looked around the
gathering space in front of Epiphany Church's gymnasium
at the 23 tables arranged along the walls and in the center of the space,
with 43 bags set up ready and waiting for our December Delivery Day
order pickin'.

There were 2 grocery carts and 3 kitchen carts ready for work. The
producer areas on the tables surrounding the walls were labelled with
the producer's names, organized in alphabetical order, so one circuit
around the room would access everybody's products. One table had
extra brown paper and plastic grocery bags. We bought a bunch of
superinsulated ice chests,and they were arranged on top of the tables,
in the producers' areas that would be bringing in refrigerated and frozen
foods. The tables in the center, with the customers' bags to be filled
with groceries, were arranged by delivery/pickup area. There was one
office table, with a clipboard with lists of producers and customer
invoics,
notes, paperwork from the producers to us, pens, pencils, binder clips,
tape, staplers

The order pickin' went smoother than November Delivery Day, and took less
time. We did decide that before we start picking the January order, there
will be a short orientation regarding the procedure, and we will implement
a better system of checking to make sure each order is complete, both when
it is picked and when it leaves to be delivered or picked up. We had 43
orders, with 994 items, $4457.12 product value. We had 7 order pickers, 13
labor hours to pick 42 orders, for an average of 18 minutes/order, $342
product value/labor hour. In November we had 36 orders, and our gross was
$3221. The number of orders increased 16% in December over November, and
the gross value of the December order was 38% higher than Novembers. Our
total gross sales for our two month history total $7678.

We used 13 ice chests, plus several brought by producers, and we needed
every one of them. Most were the 36 quart size, one was 100 qt.
The superinsulated 36 quart ice chests worked very well. They were more
expensive, but well worth it. When we opened the one we brought home with
our household order, after 6+ hours in the ice chest, there was still
frozen ice on the outside of the rolls of hamburger. In many of the chests
we packed refrigerated items with frozen items, and the frozen items kept
the refrigerated items very cold. But note "we needed every one of them."
We probably will need to buy more if the January order is much bigger
than the December order.

In addition to the order picking time, there were 3 labor hours of setup
(putting up the tables, preparing the customers bags, setting up the office
area, etc. There were 9 coop admin on site hours today (Jonalu doing the
finances and bookwork, and me answering questions and finding/getting
things, making adjustments, making phone calls, and other general
administrivia). There were three round trips (Tulsa, Waynoka/Enid, and
Webbers Falls) bringing producer products inbound and customer orders
outbound, about 800 miles and 12 hours between three vehicles/persons.
There were four home deliveries, and seven pickup
locations had orders: OKC NW, OKC Central, Norman, Edmond, Tahlequah,
Enid, and Tulsa. Three of those locations (Tahlequah, Enid, and Tulsa)
were part of round trips that included producers. OKC Central, Norman,
and Edmond had drivers. Take down, pack up, and clean up at Epiphany
Church was 2 labor hours.

Customer pickup and delivery hours total about five (this was is a bit
fuzzy for various reasons, but it's needed for "accounting" purposes).

Another fuzzy area is coop admin for Order Week: receiving the orders
from the customers, processing them into order for the producers,
communicating that information to the producers, getting the information
we needed back from the producers. This was primarily Sandra and me, with
Emma blazing away building
the online invoice creation software. I'm pretty sure my time for that was
in the neighborhood of 10 hours. Sandra is estimating her time for this
at five hours.
I'm thinking that is a low estimate, but part of both of our problems is
differentiating between "capital expenditure" time and "operating expense"
time, since often we were doing both at the same time. There were times
when the three way emails between myself, Sandra, and Emma were covering a
dozen different
subjects at once and it seems to me like that about every other email we
would discover something new that had to be done. hehehe.

The total "operating effort" for this order therefore would be,
APPROXIMATELY:
Order week: 15 hours
Site setup: 3
Order picking: 13
Order admin: 9
clean up: 2
Retail Pickup and delivery: 5
Out of area routes: 12
Labor hours: 59
Route Mileage: 880 miles

If we use a pro forma value for the labor hours of $7 (which would be our
cost if all of the volunteers turned in their time for compensation in the
form of credit towards future orders), that would be $413 for labor,
mileage at 36 cents/mile would be $316, for a total coop pro forma cost of
$729. Actual out of pocket costs were considerably less, of course. the
purpose of this exercise is to show the extent of effort involved with
Order Week and Delivery Day. This helps us understand
where we need to work on procedures and systems to bring down the "cost of
doing business", whether it be actual dollars expended or volunteer hours.

It also tells us how we need to increase our revenues to cover irreducible
expenses. It's going to cost X amount to do the Tahlequah run, whether it
involves $200 in product or $2000, the latter would obviously be more
profitable and sustainable for all concerned.

Coop revenues from this order total $182.50 from coop charges, out of
central area charges, and home delivery fees. Actual expenses will pretty
much
balance that revenue, as I am proposing that after taking care of those
expenses we divide anything left from this order's coop fee among the
drivers of the three routes in order to reimburse for some of those costs,
since those routes benefitted everybody in the coop, as nearly every order
has one or more products that originate along those routes.

I think all our volunteers are happy to be doing what we are doing, but I
know 2 volunteers (Sandra and I) who are very eager to see our systems and
procedures and practice develop to the point where the coop admin "cost of
doing business" decreases considerably. Sustainability is one of our
three prime values, and this is as important for our human resources as it
is of our financial resources. We are of course still making things up as
we go long, and while that
is working fine for us, it is time consuming. I see a definite light,
though, at the end of that tunnel, and I am reasonably certain that it is
NOT the headlight of an on-rushing train. The effort that has produced
this December Delivery Day (a 3 D Day for sure) produced a considerable
amount of permanent capital infrastructure, in the form of both our
developing online ordering/invoicing software and our standard operating
procedures and experience.

The second critical area of sustainability is our out of area routes;
Waynoka/Enid, Tulsa, and Webbers Falls/Tahlequah/Muskogee, also Ponca City
(new for January), Ada (just getting going), and Stillwater (presently
producer only). Of the total "cost" (including volunteer subsidies) of
our operations, those routes are a significant proportion: most of the
mileage, plus at least 12 delivery hours (this is probably a low estimate,
I'll try to get more precise figures after Christmas). The primary
practical way to increase their sustainability is to recruit more customer
members and producer members in those areas, a second strategy is for the
producers on those routes to increase their gross orders.

After the January order, we will have enough information (I think, anyway)
to make an assessment of our method of financing the operations
of the cooperative. We established the basic coop charge as a best guess,
after next month we will have 3 months data that we can use to analyze
whether we need to charge more, less, the same, or charge differently.
There are so many things to consider in that regard that I won't enumerate
them here and now
but this is something we need to be thinking about so we can discuss what
we are going to do.

Besides these operating costs, over the last few weeks, and rather
intensively for the last ten days or so, Sandra Storey and Emma of
Red Earth Design have been involved with creating our online ordering and
invoicing architecture, and this process is on-going, the goal being (I
think anyway) to have a shopping cart available for customers for the
January order. I am peripherally involved with this mostly in the process
of figuring out what we need
our systems to do (I barely understand the technical talk).

The inbox is conspicuosly absent of any complaints, although we did have a
couple of "oopses". One long distance route left behind some items for
one person, and we have some mystery products left over when all the
customer's bags had been prepared, mostly pecans. 5 bags belong on the
route we know had an
incomplete order, but 5 bags are complete mysteries at this point (all
customers who ordered pecans, make sure you got what you ordered and paid
for and if not, let me know). There was a missed connection on one route,
and one package or product that was shipped to us wasn't delivered today.

Order week itself was a bit stressful on the coop "staff" (such as we
are). We are still having communication problems. 3 producers didn't
receive timely notice of their orders because our faxes and emails went
astray, one of those was caught early by a phone call, the other two
weren't caught promptly. There were several other more minor but still
vexing communication problems. This is probably my highest priority for
resolving for the January Order Week and Delivery Day as
these communications snafus can burn staff time like it crazy and are
problems for both producers and customers.

There are an increasing number of "details" to keep track of -- consider
the number of items that went through our hands this December Delivery
Day, nearly 1000 items, each with a price, a unit, an amount, a producer,
a customer, a delivery area, maybe a pickup route, and often details, such
as "mostly red", or a flavor.

For January, we need more redundancy in our communications with producers,
and we have some ideas on that and streamlining the rest of the order week
process. We hope, for example, by then for producers to be able to enter
their own weights for the random weight items such as packages of meat or
produce.
Not all producers have internet access, but enough do that this will take
a tremendous load off of coop staff during Order Week.

I also think we need to divide up the responsibility for communicating
back and forth between producers and the coop. If all 33 producer members
need to communicate with the coop, that bottlenecks with me and also
Sandra. And this is also potentially true for customer members, 67+ (I've
lost track of our total membership, but we are either at or above 100,
with 33 producers and the balance customer members). If everybody needs
to ask a question, on the same day, at some hypothetical time in the
future, well, that's a lot of phone calls or emails.

So we need some additional volunteer coop staff. After we send the
producers their orders, instead of me calling 33 producers to make sure
they
received the fax or email, we could have five people contact 6 or 7 each.
We can help this process also by further defining our procedures and doing
producer and customer education to ensure a high level of understanding of
those procedures and compliance with them. Maybe group our customer
members by "neighborhoods" (i.e. geographic locations) and inviting
someone to be the coop staff for that neighborhood. This could also help
recruitment, i.e. someone calls us for info, I send them a packet and then
their name and contact info to their neighborhood coop staff, who could
then maybe give them a call.

We also need to more carefully define our product units. Some products
are better defined than others, and we need to get everybody to a higher
standard by the January order. e.g., if you order say 3 packages of pork
chops, what is a package? Is it one pork chop, or is it perhaps two or
three pork chops weighing maybe 1.5 to 2 pounds? This is necessary on
multiple levels: customers need to know how much they are ordering so
they order enough, but not too much or too little/
Coop staff need accurate information so invoices can be calculated and
orders assembled. Better definitions will help reduce errors, and every
error or mistake costs the coop staff time and attention. One or two is
not a problem, but 20 or 30 or more issues starts to burn time and energy.

We also want to do a better job of communicating with our customer
members. We have been focusing a lot on producer issues, and that has been
necessary, but we have to do the same job for the customer members that we
are doing for the producer members. Customers can help us by
offering feedback, what is working, what isn't, and ideas for improvement
are always welcome. In January we will mail the January price list to
everyone besides posting it on the internet, and we plan at this point to
do this in a more timely manner. The January Order Day will be Thursday,
January 15th, and Delivery Day will be Thursday, January 22nd. We want to
have the price info and product availability in the customer's hands by
Thursday, January 8th, which means we have to finish whatever
updating/additions/deletions that we have by January 5. So the producers
need to get us that info in advance of January 5.

So now I am sitting here, looking at one of the fruits of this day. A
gift box I made for my father: a cedar box made by Don McGehee of PDH
Farms,
packed with Honeysuckle Hollow's Calendula Comfrey salve, Honey Hill
Farm's honey, Whipporwill Farms pecans, Swinging Gate Farm and Honeysuckle
soaps, Vans Pig Stand Barbecue sauce, and Country Sunshine's Wild Sand
Plum Jelly.

It has been a lot of work to get to the place where I can so easily make a
gift like this to send to my father (not to mention the many meals I will
cook from the foods we bought for this month), but this work is beginning
to return dividends already. I am also happy to report that we did not
forget the poor this month. Coop mnembers provided $391 to buy food from
Oklahoma farmers for the poor, and additional food was donated by
producers and customers alike, so about 10% of
our gross was ear-marked for those who are in need in the midst of our
abundance. Curious thing, how this spontaneous order of self-governing
people united for a common cause works out. This could catch on.

The conversation that goes on during these delivery days is also
interesting. Much of course pertains to the job at hand, but these days
are also gatherings of people from all over the area, producers and
customers. Today Sean Kay and me (of OKC ) and John Herndon (Buffalo Roam
Farm, Norman) did the set up. Order pickers included Leava Major (who is
becoming the Official Order Pickin' Honcho, no doubt about that), Walter
Kelley of Norman, Pamela Harmon of Tulsa (whyo also brought the Natural
Farms order down and carried 2 retail orders back up to Tulsa), Kim Barker
of Waynoka (who brought producer products in and took retail orders out),
, Mark Parman of Redbird Ranch, who also did the Tahlequah route, Jerry
Logan of Honey Hill Farms. Jonalu Johnstone of OKC, our treasurer, was
on-site keeping track of what was going on, writing checks, collecting
invoices, and making adjustments. John Herndon did the Norman
pickups/deliveries. David Inselman of Kygar Road Greenhouses brought his
stuff in, and his tomatoes btw were really beautiful, he and some of the
others were talking aquaponics for a while. We saw Mrs. Steppe (Wichita
Buffalo) and one of Ron Bechard's boys who brought the Sleeping Bear Creek
Bottling. Styxx Company showed up and I was glad to see the two bottles
of Hells Kitchen bbq sauce, hehehe. I hope I didn't forget anybody, if I
think of anyone else I will have more to say tomorrow. Many many thanks
to all who worked so hard to make this December Delivery Day such a great
success.

The high holiday season is upon us. On Christmas our household will feast
on a PDH Farm ham, Worley Farms butternut squash pies (I've been saving
some squash from the November order for Christmas), pecan pies made with
Whipporwill pecans and Honey Hill Farms honey, Christian cheese, home
garden
sweet potatoes, Redbird Ranch deviled eggs, rolls made from PDH wheat,
dressing made from Horn's corn, and of course green bean casserolle.
We'll use supermarket canned green beans, but we'll make our own mushroom
gravy uising Lost Creek Mushroom Farm's shitaake soup mix and our own
homemade onion rings. We'll wash it down with a hot wine wassail drink I
make every Christmas. Mix one part red wine (I use a value priced
sangria), one part apple juice, 1/4th part orange juice, sugar to taste.
Place in a kettle and put on the stove, add cinnamon sticks, whole
allspice berries, and whole cloves. Simmer over a low fire for about 2
hours,
but don't let it boil. Serve hot. Refrigerate leftovers. Regarding
amount of spices, if I am making a gallon, I will typically add 2 or 3
cinnamon sticks,
a dozen whole cloves and 16 whole allspice berries. Strain out the spices
before serving. Drink a toast to absent friends and world peace and good
food.

May prayers of peace, joy, abundance, wisdom, and serenity for all y'all.

Season's Eatings,

Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma Food Cooperative




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  • [Livingontheland] Fwd: The Amazing Portable Food Cooperative, Tradingpost, 12/19/2003

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