Community Supported Agriculture - CSA
People have been talking about CSAs a lot lately. But what is a CSA? Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a way for people to regularly source produce or meat directly from farmers. With most CSAs, customers pay a farmer a flat fee at the beginning of the growing season, usually $300-$1000, and receive a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly box of produce or meats from the farmer. In most cases, customers pick up their box at a central pick-up point, on a certain day of the week during a designated window, say, every Thursday between noon-5pm. Usually, the selection of produce or meats is chosen by the farmer, not the customer. This type of uncustomized selection encourages people to expand their cooking repertoire and try new foods. But for those that have strong food preferences, a CSA might not be the right fit.
LolaBee’s Harvest, inspired by the CSA concept, strives to make food from local farmers accessible for a wide range of people that like the idea of a CSA but find it hard to fit into their busy lifestyles. Maybe they have hectic schedules and can’t make the designated pick up time, or they have strong food preferences and don’t like to get items they won’t eat, or maybe they travel and want to be able to cancel orders on certain weeks, or prefer a smaller financial commitment; whatever the case LolaBee’ s aims to make it as easy as possible to eat good food from farmers around the San Francisco Bay Area.
The idea for LolaBee’s was inspired by the CSA model, but LolaBee’s is not a CSA in the traditional sense. We do not have our own farm or grow the food that we offer. Instead we partner with a variety of farmers and producers in the Bay Area in order to be able to bring a wide variety of products from local family farms to our customers, from many types of fruit and vegetables, to meat, dairy and eggs. We also offer home and office delivery and flexibility in allowing customers to cancel orders with a few days’ notice and the ability to pay as you go. In order to help the direct from farm model to fit easily into our customers’ lives we offer the choice of full order customization from our online market, along with Harvest Boxes curated by us that offer the best of the market, which allows our customers to be adventurous and try new foods.
The growth of the CSA movement has shown a significant step forward in bringing local, farm direct food into homes and helping small farmers thrive. LolaBee’s aims to help continue growing the share of people buying high quality, nutritious food from small farmers by making it as easy as possible to buy local.
Contact us at LolaBee's for more information about CSA San Francisco.
