By Lisa Bean, Board President
Left to right: Lisa Bean, Board President; Gary Huber, General Manager; Kelly Bassett, Distribution Coordinator.
Our new home base on Franklin is working out very nicely. It is great to have a stable spot. Our food co-op has grown 40% this fiscal year! Each distribution, somewhere around 2,000 items arrive at our Franklin location; items are then sorted and organized based on their final location. Growth in sales and product inventory means we face greater challenges at distribution and to meet those challenges we have hired two people to assist us.
Kelly Bassett, new Distribution Coordinator
Introducing Kelly Bassett, our new distribution coordinator. Kelly has been a volunteer at Franklin and at our Ankeny drop-off site. She holds a Bachelors of Science in microbiology from the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Masters in Food Science from Kansas State University. She has over eight years of experience in several different aspects of food chain including agriculture (eggs), processing (meat), and third party laboratory testing (all foods).
She has great organization skills and a passion for good quality foods. Her twin boys Isaiah and Jeremiah have been helping us out too and some of their art work is displayed on our refrigerators. Gary and I look forward to working with Kelly and our volunteers to perfect our delivery of products to each of our consumers at 6 locations – last year we experienced 40% growth which is absolutely great, but it comes with a few challenges that Kelly will help us meet. Welcome Kelly!
John Whitson’s ‘Flower Burrito
Hi All!
Many of you know me as the producer member ‘Sunrise’.
I’ve been with the IFC since its inception.
After years of farmers markets and wholesale to stores,the IFC concept offered unique opportunities for connecting producers with customers.
The growth of the IFC over the last 5 years has been exciting!
Producer members have grown with customer members to the point where the variety and quantity of products every cycle is astounding.
This is only possible due to the growth of the customer members.
I’ve been fortunate to have time to participate as a distribution volunteer and witness the growth.
Also,resulting from this growth, QUALITY Assurance is now receiving a boost.
My new role is to zero in and focus on quality issues in order to identify and resolve quickly problems with products received by customer members.
We’ve relied on customer members contacting producer members about sub-par products and that is still encouraged.
Now we’ve redoubled efforts to identify problems as they arrive at Franklin Ave.
as well as working with producer members to pre -empt issues.
Perfect Shopping Cycles are our no.1 goal.
Customer members and Producer members,we’re all in this together for our common good.
Please feel free to contact me with ideas on how to improve as well as quality issues.
Many thanks!
John Whitson