With over a billion pounds discarded annually, food waste and scraps are the largest contributor to landfills, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. However, despite the alarming amount of food waste, one-in-seven households face food insecurity.
Alena Joling wants to not only decrease food waste, but also to help support farmers in the off-season with her storefront Farmer’s Market To Go. With around 50 vendors and 100 shelves of fresh produce, the store offers local growers an alternative to traditional farmer’s markets — allowing them to sell their produce year-round.
Joling’s store was featured in this month’s Milwaukee Magazine. She joined Lake Effect’s Audrey Nowakowski to share more, starting with Farmers Market To Go’s unique business model.
“Technically I'm the owner, but all the vendors own their own shelves,” she says. “They keep 100% of their profits, so it’s organized more like a cooperative — without some of the legal challenges that cooperatives face.”
Joling says many farmers face declining profits when it gets cold out, even though they often have plenty of produce left over by the time winter rolls in. They often struggle too with finding time for weekend markets during the warm months and with getting their produce to big-name grocery stores for year-round sale, she says. But Joling’s business is helping more than just farmers.
“I think it’s important to rent a space like this and not do it to make a profit because it makes it unaffordable for the customers who want to shop there,” she says. “[Making a profit] makes it really, just too expensive.”
As an entrepreneur, Joling got her start running a knife-sharpening business that received most of its business from farmers markets. As the busy season came to a close each year, she was struck by the surplus of produce many vendors had left over.
“My farmers market friends, they would find out that I was a farm kid and suddenly I'd be giving gifted these obscene amounts of produce,” she says.
Joling comes from a farming family, and she looks back fondly on memories of growing up with fresh, garden produce and high-quality, butchered meat.
“What really motivated a lot of it too was going from the country, growing up on a farm, and then moving to the city and noticing the biggest difference between country poor and city poor: the food,” she says.
With help from friends, and taking inspiration from people like Venice Williams of Alice’s Garden, Joling hopes that Farmers Market To Go can bridge the gap between farmers, restaurants and the general public with fresh, affordable produce.
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