- Michael Gebert
- Ryan Kimura, Dave Rand, and Gary Lazarski in Local Foods’ future space
“There are things that are like Match.com for farmers, to connect them with restaurants,” says Andrew Lutsey, founder of Local Foods Grocer & Distributor, a start-up distributor for, well, locally grown foods. “But distribution was missing. Farmers were reluctant to hand over what they raised because they were afraid distributors wouldn’t represent them properly or care for the product properly. So we set out to build trust with farmers. Everything we distribute is 100 percent source identified. We say to farmers, we are a platform for you to sell product.”
What’s left of the gutted space (besides a lot of concrete rubble) is a vast bow truss building without internal columns, allowing maximum flexibility. Rand explains the advantages of the location: “Elston is a great north-to-south thoroughfare. We’re thirty seconds off the Armitage exit on the freeway. And a central location, smack dab between Lincoln Park and Bucktown for this wholesale-retail location that we’re building, with quick service out to our restaurants and a captive audience for our retail.”
“When you’re entirely a midwest local business, you need to get creative,” Rand says. “For example, last year at the end of the summer, we froze 4,000 pounds of heirloom tomatoes that we’re still selling. We did pumpkin puree, we froze sugar snap peas. All that stuff was a trial, and we’ll probably tweak some things. But it’s an insurance policy, for us, to make sure that we have new and unique things to sell in the winter and spring, so it’s not all beets and potatoes and onions. But it’s also a way to ensure that we don’t have as much spoilage and our farmers aren’t composting stuff. I mean, bumper crops of tomatoes happen like that. So you need to have outlets to process them and preserve them.”
