At Farmers To You we know that right now your food decisions are as important as ever. We are grateful and humbled by your trust in us. In this difficult time, we continue to make decisions based on our care and commitment to you, the farmers we work with, and our staff. We’d like to provide an update on what’s happening at Farmers To You, and what steps we are taking to keep all of us safe, healthy and well-fed.
Sourcing and distributing sustainable and healthy food to our customers is our mission. These past few weeks, we’ve been working overtime to continue to do so, while responding to the increase in safety needs of the moment; we have put in place COVID 19 protocols to keep you and our team safe. At the same, we have experienced a 150% increase in orders over the past several weeks! As you can imagine, this has added necessary, but significant complexity.
While we are challenged by this situation, we won’t compromise our standards of quality and relationships. As many of you know, at this time we are waitlisting new orders; we are working on innovative ways to increase our capacity, but this will take time. We appreciate your patience, and your support as we maintain our commitment to sustainable and quality food.
We want to assure you that if you are a current customer, we are committed to feeding you as best we can.
For current customers, we thought it would be helpful for us to share some of the changes we have made at Farmers To You these past few weeks:
- At our hub (what we call our office and packing facility), we have reduced the team size by splitting the work between two days with largely separate crews.
- In our packing process, our team is wearing gloves and masks and we sanitize surfaces and touchpoints throughout the hub many times each day.
- We are holding the Farmers To You bags for an extra week to ensure they are cleaned, dried, and left untouched for several days.
- At our Boston pick up sites, we have increased staffing to assure minimal physical contact when you come to pick up your orders.
- We have (for now) eliminated self-serve pick up sites or where orders might be handled more than necessary. We have closed other sites that were housed in now-closed facilities.
- We have added an additional truck to both Wednesday and Thursday to accommodate the increase in orders and made changes to our routes to give our drivers more time to be safe and careful.
- We have brought on new staff to give us more capacity and act as ready substitutes in case some need a break or fall ill.
- We have extended our sick pay policy so that any employee can call in sick and get paid to stay home, get well, and help keep the rest of our team healthy.
- We have extended hazard pay to all front-line staff who have been volunteering to take the risks inherent in this crisis.
- We have assured our farmers and small food business partners that we are committed to them and are working with them to safely and reliably feed our customers.
For those of you who know Farmers To You, you know that we love to feed you good food. We are uncompromising in our standards of quality and in our focus on the relationships that keep our food system vibrant. We assure you that we continue to bring our best judgments and selves to the Farmers To You community, even and especially, in this unprecedented time.
Please don’t hesitate to be in touch with questions, thoughts or words of encouragement. Our connections with you keep us all going and remind us why we built Farmers To You in the first place (10 years ago this April!)
Sending you good wishes and health from Vermont.
With humility and gratitude,
Greg Georgaklis
Farmers To You Founder
Photo by Kristine Cinate on Unsplash
