Local Food CS: Farm to Phone to Table
Southern Colorado app and food movement aims to break down barriers for the local food market.
Would you know where to get in season fresh horseradish? Or find the restaurant that sources out local foods? How about goat cheese, Colorado honey, duck eggs or in-season roasted peppers?
For foodies, finding organic and locally grown and raised vegetables, fruits, meats, spices, grains all other foods is a hectic jumble of Yelp reviews, blogs and Google searches. But one group aims to change that and and form a community of local food supporters in the process.
That’s the goal of Manitou resident Elise Rothman of Local Motive and her mobile app, LocalFood CS.
For Rothman, this is more than a resource in your pocket. With Local Motive, a public benefit corporation, she wants to amplify the local food industry.
Part of obtaining this goal involves its categorization as a public benefit corporation, a new breed of business classification that allows an organization to make a profit, but also functions as a public service.
“That means we can make a profit but our reason for being is to serve the public so in order to keep that status in Colorado you have to submit a report to the Secretary of State at the end of each year showing how your project has served the community,” Rothman explained. “It’s a perfect hybrid between a for-profit and a nonprofit.”
Rothman said 98 percent of Colorado’s current food comes from outside of the state borders and if the food trucks were to stop delivering for just three days, the state would be almost entirely out of food.
The app, developed through partnership between LocalMotive, Vrello app builders, and a University of Colorado-Colorado Springs Bachelor of Innovation team, was launched in February 2015. Since then it has been used around 43,000 times and downloaded by almost 4,000 users, Rothman said.
“That was really the main idea, to make the local food system visible and thereby making it accessible,” she said.
With the app, users are able to find locally produced, in-season vegetables and fruits, as well as grocery stores, restaurants, distilleries, breweries, farmers, ranchers and even neighbors that sell or produce some type of local food product anywhere within 67 miles of Colorado Springs.
The more economically sound restaurants and companies are asked to donate to help sustain the app and according to Rothman around 98 percent that are asked to donate based on their revenue.
Currently, the app has fourteen Pueblo businesses listed, including Solar Roast Coffee, Milberger Farms, Shamrock Brewing Company, Broadway Cup ’n’ Cork and more. Rothman said that the list of Pueblo local food supporters and businesses is still growing.
“I didn’t even know Solar Roast was Pueblo coffee until I came down there and met with Broadway Cup and Coffee. I was so excited,” she said.
Mike Hartkop, president of Solar Roast Coffee, is making his own strides to help further the effort of promoting the local food system.
“I do believe that it is important to purchase locally and regionally whenever we can. It does increase money in our communities which is better for all of us. We are currently working with our PCC to create more farm to table items as our local farms come online in spring,” he said.
Jessica Blunn, a LocalMotive employee, was born and raised in Pueblo and in addition to working on app features, Rothman explained that her roots and knowledge of Pueblo have been one of the company’s major pushes for expanding into the town more.
“I came into Pueblo last week and it seems a little depressed,” Rothman said, “and I thought to myself ‘this is one of the vegetable baskets of the country, but the town is depressed. Why is the town depressed?’”
“It dawned on me that when the economy is bad, people still need to buy food, but Pueblo is not selling their food to the town. The food in the town comes from outside of town that why even in a prolific growing environment the town can still be totally depressed you know in a low economy, but if we just start buying our local food then even when the economy goes bad people still will buy food,” she said.
Since the app’s launch, Rothman has successfully linked up several food producers to businesses in order to amplify the local food industry and keep money locally circulating through the region.
“There was a deli, Olde World Bagels, that started buying pastrami from Sangre’s Best and so we put them together and when I ran into Sangre’s Best he told me that Olde World Bagels was buying between approximately $1,000 and $1,500 worth of pastrami a week. And that was one product, one rancher, one restaurant,” Rothman said.
A new feature currently being developed in the app is the ‘Fair Food’ button that will allow users to find the closest place to use food stamps, where they can get double the food for their money with the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to assist those involved in the program in purchasing healthier foods.
The new app feature will also help find affordable cafés where you can pay it forward or eat and drink for almost nothing-like Seeds Community Café in downtown Colorado Springs. This feature has not officially launched yet.
“We’re trying to level the playing field for our local foods,” Rothman said.
Later this year, Rothman expects the app to be developed for multiple cities in Colorado and other parts of the U.S., including Boulder, and even possibly Miami. Additionally, LocalMotive has been contacted regarding development of the app on an international level, the south of France to be exact.
“We just don’t know if we can run it in another language without a significant amount of investment, but yeah we definitely have our eye on scaling those across Colorado the U.S. and abroad,” she said.
Information on the the LocalFood app and LocalMotive can be found at localmotiveco.com. Download the App (iOS | Android)
