He delivers, from farm to doorstep
Christopher Crandall was bicycling home to Allston from the Harvard Square environmental consulting firm where he worked nearly a decade ago when he caught sight of a small farmers' market outside the Charles Hotel and pulled over to buy some jam.
Affixed to the farm stand was a photo of the farmer, his wife and their children on their farm, with lush berry fields in the background and the White Mountains beyond. To Crandall, the image was blissful.
"I sort of congratulated the farmer on that," Crandall, 37, recalled. "But then he got to telling me about how every weekend between Memorial Day and Halloween, his wife had to travel to New York to sell berries and jam, while he traveled to Boston. How they hardly had any time together during the season, and how hard they had to work to keep things going.
"I was sort of taken aback how much it bummed me out."
So Crandall got to thinking about a business model that could help the farmer preserve what was good in his quiet rural life and make it easier for him to sell what he grows.
That was a time when far fewer farmers' markets serviced fewer deliberately local shoppers around Boston, long before Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" was published, and when the word "locavore" was just a twinkle in the most ethical eater's eye.
Today, it's a different story, and with the local foods movement mushrooming, Crandall realized now was the time to do something with his ideas.
This summer he quit his day job and launched In Season, a service that supplies customers in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, and Newton with local fruits, vegetables, dairy, eggs, meat, and other local products, jam included, delivered to their doors.
Customers select what they want from Crandall's website InSeason.us. Peter Gualtieri, Crandall's sole employee, drives a refrigerated truck to farms around New England to fetch the goods.
Orders placed by midnight on Friday are dropped off in coolers between 5 and 7 a.m. Tuesday by an employee of Cambridge-based New Amsterdam Project riding a tricycle with a large storage cab. In Season is collaborating with New Amsterdam, which calls itself a "human-powered" delivery service, to get the food to customers.
Close to 20 farmers' markets are held in and around Boston every weekday, according to the Federation of Massachusetts Farmers Markets, and several farms offer community-supported agriculture shares to city dwellers, but Crandall said he's facilitating a more convenient relationship between customers and farmers.
"A lot of farmers' markets are open only during the workday," he said. "I want to make it easier for people to buy local food than it is to buy non-local food."
So far In Season is offering food from at least a dozen regional farmers, cheesemakers, jam-makers, pasta-makers, and even a sea salt company in Maine.
Lynne Viera, an In Season customer who lives in Central Square in Cambridge, said it "feels like Christmas" when she wakes up on Tuesday morning to a delivery. She's ordered eggs, fresh cream, pasta, fruit, and veggies over the past several weeks. "Everything is so beautiful," she said. "What I love is that the food doesn't look like it's been handled a lot like in the grocery stores. It seems like the farmer picked it and then it was delivered right to me."
For small growers who don't have large enough yields to make deals with big distributors or stores like Whole Foods, the business model works, says Jonathan Nourse, a Westborough farmer who sells fruits and vegetables through In Season.
While In Season prices are on par with those at a farmers' markets or specialty stores, Crandall said those costs may be higher than people are used to paying in chain grocery stores, and he hopes that as his customer base grows he can lower prices so In Season is within reach for people of all incomes.
Regardless, he insists the products are higher quality and healthier, and customers can drive out to the farms they come from anytime to see for themselves, he said.
"Somehow we all learned that if you see local corn being sold on the side of the road, you have to stop for it, because it is so good," he said. "For some reason, we didn't learn there are lots of other local foods that are worth the same trouble. I want to show people that." 