Find Hyperlocal Farm Food Delivery Services To Connect Farmers and Customers In Your Community
Do you use hyperlocal farm food delivery services in your area? We have one that helps us connect with local farmers and food producers as well as reduce the carbon footprint of our meals. Read on for more about the company we use, how we found them, and how you can find hyperlocal farm food delivery services in your area!
Each Friday afternoon, our doorbell rings to announce the arrival of our weekly food delivery from Logical Living. I pop out the front door to grab a crate of frozen beef and chicken, eggs, cheese, butter, and other grocery staples. My boys look forward to the pure and delicious Whiskey Hallow maple syrup they douse on pancakes that they whip up themselves.
Over the last few years and the last dozen months, in particular, delivery of food to our doorstep has become commonplace. Everyone is jumping on the food delivery bandwagon, but Logical Living is different and has been at this long before it was ultra-trendy.
Logical Living is a family-run, local company right in our neighborhood. While far too much of our food travels thousands of miles around the world before landing on our plates, Logical Living delivers an abundance of high-quality food and grocery products from local farmers and artisans. It’s like a modern-day milkman, and I’m here for it.
Meet Our Hyperlocal Farm Food Delivery Team
Kevin and Tobi Quinlan are the brains and brawn behind Logical Living. They have a 13-year-old son who is the resident salmon fillet weigher and occasional delivery companion. As the customer base and delivery calendar grew, they added Charlie to their team, who helps make deliveries to customers.
Logical Living is a food delivery service that sprouted from Kevin’s regular trips to Baily’s Dairy to pick up milk for his family on his way home from work. As he stopped in for fresh milk, he suspected others might enjoy creamy deliciousness from a local dairy too but didn’t have the time to make it part of their routine.
After emailing a dozen or so friends to gauge interest in (and hopefully a few paying customers for) a hyperlocal food delivery service, Logical Living partnered with Baily’s Dairy and began the journey of becoming our local milkman. The partnership with Baily’s Dairy continues to thrive and be a cornerstone of the service today. Logical Living picks up fresh dairy for customers several times per week and even stores some of their other refrigerated products at Baily’s.
Over the last eight years since Logical Living was born, the Quinlan family has connected with many hyperlocal food gurus, farmers, ranchers, and producers to gather the fruits of their labor and deliver them to the doorsteps of local residents in and around our area. Logical Living offers an additional channel for many of these farmers and makers to reach customers and remain strong small businesses in our community.
Agility and Resiliency of Local Food Providers
As we found out during the early part of the pandemic, global food supply chains are quite fragile and can be stalled with just one break or bottleneck in the supply chain. In so many communities, local food suppliers stepped in to fill the void and meet consumers’ demands with grace and tenacity.
In our local area, farmers and restaurants quickly found new ways to feed the community even when grocery store shelves were bare. You likely saw something similar in your town or community. Small businesses and local companies are incredibly dynamic and agile, and it behooves us to support them to keep our local economy robust and resilient.
Environmental Benefits of Local Food
Bringing local food directly to our doorstep also significantly reduces food miles, an important step toward environmental sustainability as we strive to reduce global carbon emissions. Instead of traveling thousands of miles across multiple continents before landing on our plates, food from local farms and producers travels as few as a handful of miles from farm to table.
Understanding The Origin Of Our Food
Last fall, on our way to a little league baseball game, we drove past North Star Orchards, a farm from which a variety of fruit is delivered by Logical Living. It is so neat to help my boys connect their beloved homemade apple chips to the trees on which they were born. On the way home from the baseball field, my boys made nearly the same journey home as the North Star Orchard apples that landed in our kitchen.
This year, we drive right past Baily’s Dairy on our way to baseball practice. The boys can see the pastures where the cows live that produce the milk for the cheese we eat.
With modern grocery stores overflowing with colorful food no matter the season, it’s easy to forget (or never learn) how our food arrives on our plates. There’s so much work and so many resources used to produce food. Many of our kids don’t realize that food doesn’t miraculously appear on grocery store shelves, and I think we experience a lot of food waste as a result of the disconnect between farm and fork.
Filling a Void For Community Connection
Before I discovered Logical Living, I started compiling a list of local produce farmers, ranchers, bakers, and soap makers with the intention of exchanging many of our grocery store purchases with local alternatives. It sounded quaint and romantic to fill my kitchen with the fruits of labor of my neighbors. But it just never fit into our lives.
Finding time to drive around town for bits and pieces of our grocery list between sports practices and school events never came to fruition. When Logical Living showed up in our lives, however, we could easily place our weekly order online and have a variety of local goods delivered to our doorstep.
Although we still shop at the grocery store, we’ve been able to replace many items with local alternatives to support small businesses in our community and reduce the carbon footprint of the food on our table. Pricing is comparable to organic alternatives at traditional grocery stores and delivery is a breeze. Kevin even shares tips in his weekly email newsletters about how best to use their products in tasty recipes. Pro tip: Grass fed beef cooks faster than most feed lot, grain fed beef so be careful not to overcook it.
Sourcing our food from local vendors, to the extent possible, helps us connect with our community, eat more seasonally, reduce food miles, and stimulate our local economy. Each Friday, when our doorbell rings, I know our modern-day milkman helps us bolster the local economy and support a stronger and more resilient community.
Find Hyperlocal Food Delivery In Your Area
Do you have a hyperlocal food delivery service in your area that can help you more seamlessly connect with local food producers in your community? Maybe you have a CSA or farmers’ market that could provide easy access to local food in your area?
I’ve had luck finding local food producers through Instagram and Facebook. Honestly, many of them are small and don’t always have great websites, especially ones that are optimized for Google Search, so they aren’t always the first things to pop up when looking for local farm food delivery.
On Instagram, for example, I use hyperlocal hashtags to find sustainable brands, local farm to table restaurants, and local farms and flower shops, and more. Then I use the the small drop down arrow under their profiles to find other accounts “Suggested For You” by Instagram. These can be a gold mine for finding local sustainable brands and local food producers or hyperlocal food delivery services.
If you have hyperlocal farm food delivery, how did you find it? Share in the comments so we can help more people connect with their local farmers and food producers for more sustainable food consumption everywhere!
