For the last 13 years, the Common Market’s mission has been to get healthy food to people who have limited access to produce. It did that by purchasing produce from local farms that use sustainable practices and selling it to schools, hospitals, and universities, first from its home base of Philadelphia and later from Atlanta and Houston.
The pandemic upended the food landscape with lightning speed.
“Most of the institutions that we work with more or less shut down,” says Haile Johnston, chief development officer and one of the group’s co-founders. “We were very unsure about what the future was going to hold, but we decided that this was the moment when people needed access to good food more than ever.”
The nonprofit overhauled its operation to focus on emergency food aid. In the past, roughly three-quarters of the organization’s $9 million budget was earned income from the sale of food. During the pandemic, it won contracts from cities like New York and Atlanta. Then it won two contracts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers to Families program to provide boxes of produce in the mid-Atlantic and the Southeast. It was a wild ride. At the height of its emergency food work, the Common Market was distributing 10 times its usual volume of produce. The experience — by turns exhausting and exhilarating — opened leaders’ eyes to the importance of advocacy and policy work to bring about the changes in local food systems that they want to see.
“The pandemic was a wake-up call for everyone,” Johnston says.
‘They Fought’
The organization didn’t know what to expect when it started providing produce to people in need. The group’s first contract was with the city of New York, and it started during that city’s terrifying Covid outbreak in the spring of 2020.
“We were sending five trucks a day full of these boxes,” says Tatiana Garcia Granados, chief operations officer and another of the Common Market‘s three co-founders. “The National Guard would meet our trucks and then put the boxes into taxis, and that’s how it would get to the people who had requested the food.”
Putting together boxes of produce for individuals and families was very different from distributing food to large commercial kitchens. No more 40-pound bags of sweet potatoes. The organization had to set up assembly lines, which required a lot more labor. Its staff swelled from 30 people prepandemic to more than 150 at the height of the emergency food operation. Most of those workers were temporary. The group’s staff currently numbers 32.
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The Common Market’s facilities were running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Garcia Granados says the Common Market had long identified inadequate infrastructure as one of the hurdles in creating a thriving regional food system. For years, the organization had been building its cold-storage capacity, fleet of refrigerated trucks, and food-safety protocols, and the pandemic gave the group a chance to see what the system it had developed could do.
“We were able to use this moment to really use our infrastructure at the limits,” she says.
The nonprofit’s ability to expand operations quickly to meet the demand for emergency food was a boon for the farmers the group works with. Before the pandemic, many sold 10 to 20 percent of their produce to the Common Market and relied on restaurants or wholesalers to buy much of the rest. That business fell off precipitously at the start of the pandemic.
“It was terrifying,” says Steve Frecon, owner of Frecon Farms, a third-generation orchard in Boyertown, Pa. “When you’re dealing with a perishable commodity, it’s not as though you can lay off your employees and just stop producing a crop. The crop does not care that there’s a pandemic.”
Because of the emergency food contracts, the Common Market was able buy much of the farmers’ unsold goods — and build relationships with farmers it hadn’t worked with before.
Frecon says the organization is a true partner and that weathering the crisis would have been a struggle without the purchases the nonprofit made. Faced with the challenge of the pandemic, he says, it would have been easy for the leaders of the Common Market to pause operations until conditions improved.
“But they didn’t; they fought,” Frecon says. “They tried hard to expand and build up their organization. That’s special.”
Lightbulb Moment
Most USDA food contracts are decided solely on price. But for the Farmers to Families program, the Common Market benefited from a different policy that allowed USDA officials to take other factors into consideration, such as whether the bid supported local farmers.
This was the moment when people needed access to good food more than ever.
That meant leafy greens, broccoli, and fresh milk instead of the canned goods and processed food that usually constitute emergency food aid.
“What we saw in that moment was, OK, when the criteria is changed, even just incrementally, it can have a huge impact,” Garcia Granados says.
The group now wants to advocate for new policies to make the food in government programs more nutritious and higher quality. It sees policy as a powerful tool to boost the amount of local produce in school lunches and other government programs — and it’s optimistic about what’s ahead.
“One of the things that’s beautiful about our organization is that we work from upstate New York all the way through the Rio Grande Valley in Texas,” Johnston says. “We have such a diversity of partners in our work across that geography with diverse experiences and a profound potential to impact the direction of public policy to improve urban and rural communities.”
