Less than 100 years ago, the Lewiston Orchards were a thriving fruit growing district. Apple and cherry trees neatly lined the valley and nearby farms helped feed their community. Now we’re making every effort to bring some of that system back. Through a new direct-purchasing program, we’re aiming to connect local producers with local buyers to create a more robust and resilient farming network in our region.
Helping lead the effort is CJ Kalysten, our Sourcing Coordinator. Her position, a first for Happy Day, focuses entirely on building strong relationships with our local farmers and producers. This essentially means that rather than relying solely on traditional food suppliers, such as US Foods or Charlie’s Produce, the company is now working directly with growers in our area to create consistent purchasing opportunities for local food.
Kalysten’s ambitious work quickly turned into action during our Grower’s Summit that was held around Mid-March of this year. The summit aimed to give anyone interested in growing and selling commercial wholesale products the opportunity to learn about Happy Day’s purchasing program and walk away with actionable resources. The response exceeded expectations, with roughly 10 to 14 producers signing on following the event. While there was plenty of excitement surrounding the opportunity, Kalysten said there was also some understandable hesitancy from growers entering a new kind of partnership.
Many concerns stemmed from consistency. For many small to medium sized farms, wholesale purchasing can feel unpredictable, especially without the promise of steady weekly sales. A lot of produce sales are done under the Just-In-Time model, meaning the producers list what they have available and then restaurants can order what they need on a week-to-week basis, but this can leave space for significant uncertainty. Our model aims to provide more stability in sales by working with producers through a harvest planning process. Growers can submit crop plans ahead of the season, allowing us to compare projected harvests against restaurant demand and make more dependable purchasing commitments in advance. The goal is to provide farmers with a clearer understanding of what products will be purchased, at an unchanging base price, throughout the growing season. The program has also invested in reusable travel totes to reduce packaging waste and simplify transportation logistics for producers, helping growers avoid scrambling for boxes or disposable packaging during deliveries.
For many growers, this sense of reliability makes all the difference. Finding dependable buyers can sometimes be the hardest part of farming. Local farmers’ markets and farm stands are a crucial and beneficial asset of our community’s culture, but there could be additional systems in place to provide practical food shopping alongside the markets. This could provide the security needed for small and medium farms to sustainably grow their operations. Outside of direct-to-consumer sales, many growers are left navigating unpredictable wholesale opportunities with little long-term stability. By offering dependable purchasing commitments, Happy Day hopes to bridge that gap. Consistent weekly sales allow growers to better plan crops, manage labor, and invest in future seasons with greater confidence. Kalysten said that kind of reliability can be especially valuable for newer farmers trying to establish themselves without the uncertainty that often comes with direct-market sales alone.
Kalysten explained how supporting medium sized farms is especially important in regions like ours. Many of these farms have been passed down generationally, yet they continue to face challenges like rising production costs and falling commodity pricing. While large scale industrial farms are made to supply national distributors, smaller regional farms tend to fall in the middle; large enough to grow meaningful quantities of food, but not large enough to compete with traditional distribution systems. Across the country, tens of thousands of farms closed last year alone. That kind of purchasing gives growers a more dependable sales pipeline. It allows them to focus less on marketing and uncertainty, and more on growing quality food for the community. By decentralizing the food system and applying more diversity, newer farms are now starting to show up and are able to thrive with a consistent sale process.
For Kalysten, the work is also deeply personal. Raised on rural land and surrounded by agriculture from an early age, she said the importance of local food systems was instilled in her at a young age. She and her husband now operate a small garden farm of their own, and she recalled the excitement of looking out across their land and imagining all that it could produce. That excitement was quickly followed by a difficult realization: where would all that food go? Like many small growers, Kalysten found herself facing the challenge of finding dependable ways to sell locally grown products. “If nobody else is doing it,” she said, “I better go do something about it.”
Beyond supporting individual farms, the effort is also about building long-term resiliency within the local food system. By building these stronger connections between regional producers and local buyers, we’re aiming to keep more food and more money circulating within our own community. Kalysten explained that much of the food system operates quietly behind the scenes, leaving many people disconnected from where their food actually comes from. But recent supply chain disruptions have highlighted how vulnerable centralized food systems can be. By supporting a wider network of local producers, she said communities become better equipped to withstand shortages and disruptions while keeping resources circulating locally instead of leaving the region.
The program is also designed to reconnect people with the food they eat. We want consumers to recognize the difference between locally produced food and products shipped across the country. “We want you to be able to see the speckled brown eggs when you buy them instead of the bleached white eggs at the store,” she said. On average, our food travels 15,000 miles before it reaches our plate. Insane, right? If we build stronger supply chains, we can reduce that distance and simultaneously create fresher products and stronger community connections.
While the program is still in its early stages, the vision continues to grow. Happy Day hopes to expand the network over time, bringing in more producers from across the region and creating additional educational opportunities for growers interested in commercial wholesale production. The goal is not to replace traditional food distributors, but to supplement seasonal abundance whenever possible while strengthening the local food economy alongside existing systems. For Kalysten, the project represents something much larger than restaurant purchasing. It’s about rebuilding a culture of local food that once defined the LC Valley. “The future is abundant,” Tobe Finch said. “And it’s going to be delicious.”
With summer just around the corner, we’re excited to share more as local producers begin bringing in fresh produce. In the months ahead, we’ll introduce more of the farms behind the harvest and continue highlighting the people helping strengthen our local food community!
Leave a Reply