Last week I had the great honor of making a presentation at the 55th annual North Willamette Horticultural Society meeting at the Clackamas County Fairgrounds. (That’s right, fifty-fifth annual, think about that.)
With no access to the internet I had to help a room full of organic farmers understand the benefits of FoodHub. The old adage about looking for a needle in a haystack came in handy.
When talking about FoodHub I often recount a conversation I had a few years back with a retail grocery buyer. Said retail grocery buyer said to me, “Why can’t I just walk to my computer and type in the word cranberry and get a list of all the cranberry producers that might want to do business with our stores?”
Why indeed? This conversation was, in many respects, the start of FoodHub.
Here’s the tale I told at the Clackamas County Fairgrounds:
I wanted to test the theory that it’s hard to find local farmers on the internet so last night I sat down at my computer and typed in the word brocoli.
Google: Did you mean broccoli? (Why yes, I did, thank you.)
There were 4.2 million results for broccoli. Among the highlights: wikipedia informed me that broccoli is a plant of the cabbage family Brassicaceae; cooks.com let me know that if my broccoli turns olive green in color I’ve overcooked it; BBC News encouraged consumption of broccoli at least once a week to reduce the risk of prostate cancer; and I learned that Erin Brocoli is on Facebook. (Aw, somebody found their high school sweetheart.)
I narrowed my search to ‘broccoli in Oregon’ and got 672,000 results. I was immediately invited to see Broccoli Man sing and dance and surprised to learn that the Oregon Hazelnut Board popped up on the main screen. Why? They had a recipe for Zesty Oregon Hazelnut Broccoli. I also discovered that I didn’t need to suffer through eating broccoli in its original form thanks to some nifty 250 mg broccoli capsules.
What about ‘broccoli for sale in Oregon’? It took Google .27 seconds to return 167,000 results. There is a Broccoli Lane in Roseburg, Oregon; lots of shops are selling things on that street. Powell’s Books is also selling The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen, a classic if ever there was one.
I got closer at 139,000 results with ‘broccoli farmers in Oregon.’ My favorite? Learning that “miracles can happen and kids will actually eat broccoli” by way of a story about K-8 students in Corvallis who actually ate the Stahlbush Island Farms broccoli florets. Way to go Bill and Karla Chambers!
I tried ‘direct market broccoli farmers in Oregon’ and got closer still with 34,200 results. But honestly, what food buyer has time to sort through 34,200 results? Frustrated and just wanting to order some local broccoli I went with ‘Oregon broccoli available from Sysco’ and watched my results shoot back up to 503,000.
And that was the precise moment in which I decided it would be much easier to find broccoli farmers who deliver direct and broccoli farmers who deliver via Sysco by using FoodHub.
Don’t believe me? Type broccoli into the search box above.
