As some of you may have heard, Nice Cream has suddenly encountered some trouble with the Illinois Department of Public Health. The State is requiring Nice Cream to get a “dairy license,” which Kris Swanberg (Nice Cream owner) and her colleagues had never heard of and had not been informed about by the City while setting up their businesses. Nice Cream is in the process of raising money to challenge this regulation, which seems to be intended for large-scale production.

Follow the links below to learn more about this issue and how you can help. The last link will take you to a fundraiser for Nice Cream being held at Revolution Brewing on August 28th. You can also show your support by donating to Nice Cream’s Kickstarter page (linked below) and by continuing to purchase Nice Cream ice cream from farmers’ markets and here at Open Produce.

Chicago Tribune article: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-08-05/news/chi-local-ice-cream-makers-could-be-shut-down-by-state-20110805_1_kris-swanberg-nice-cream-strawberry-syrup

Talking Points from The Feast: http://www.thefeast.com/chicago/Six-Clarifications-about-the-Ice-Cream-and-Dairy-License-Debacle-127446403.html

Nice Cream’s Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/832317133/nice-cream-chicago

Fundraiser Information & Tickets: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2027922571

Hello everyone,

As you may have noticed, we changed our hours in April so we are now open until 2am every day of the week. We were already open until midnight, so I think this moves us up the ranks of ‘latest place to buy fresh produce in Hyde Park’ from 1st place to…1st place.

But, a question we get all of the time from regulars is “is it worth it to be open that late?” Of course, before we tried it we had only an educated guess. But now we have some data we can look at to evaluate whether we should keep these new hours, or whether this has been a disaster and we should scale back. The answer to that, and more, if you click this link:

Read the rest of this entry »

EDIT 5/30: Thanks everyone, we’re done hiring for now. Check back in September, when we may be hiring again.

Read the rest of this entry »

We got the news a few weeks ago that our distributor was going to stop carrying Traderspoint Creamery milk and yogurt, and we’ve decided to stop carrying it ourselves instead of switching to another distributor. This wasn’t a simple decision to make - and since the “Open” in our name means being open with our customers and connecting you to your food, here’s a little insight into that decision.

We got Traderspoint milk and yogurt, and briefly carried some of their fromage blanc and cottage cheese, through a distributor called Natural Direct, based in Oswego, IL. We order through about a dozen distributors, all of which have some sort of speciality. Natural Direct focuses on small, family-owned, local producers, usually of certified organic but always of responsibly-made products. You may recognize Local Folks Foods, Upton’s seitan, and Black Earths meat products on our shelves; all of these come to us through Natural Direct.

Distributors are essential for small producers to get their product into the market. Natural Direct picks up products from independent farms or kitchens, then markets them to other retail locations in the region. Without Natural Direct, Kilgus milk would never leave Fairbury, IL, where the Kilgus’ farm is, and Otter Creek cheddar cheese would age for years in the cheese cellars of Black Earth, WI.

Many of these producers are small enough, often just a family or a partnership of a handful of friends, that they distribute exclusively through one distributor. A business like Traderspoint Creamery, however, markets and distributes nationwide through many different distributors. We can say from experience here at Open Produce that it is much simpler and time-efficient to use less distributors. For us, however, this would sacrifice our essential diversity of products. There is no way one distributor could bring us Marukome Ryotei miso soup from Japan, fresh corn tortillas from El Milagro in Pilsen, as well as Local Folks Food salsa from Sheridan, Indiana.

Perhaps for simplicity’s sake, Traderspoint recently left Natural Direct to distribute through a Chicago-based large regional distributor called Goodness Greenness. (They also distribute through UNFI, an even larger distributor that places customers in price tiers and means us buying from them is much too expensive.) Founded in 1991 as a family-run supplier of organic produce, Goodness Greenness distributes from Iowa to Pennsylvania, and since they have long supplied Whole Foods, you could say they’re largely responsible for the success of the organic food movement.

They are much bigger than Natural Direct, which allows for a greater inventory but also comes with sacrifice. We have a personal relationship with Sid, our representative from Natural Direct, that we do not want to give up. As another small, independent business, we recognize the importance of building relationships with customers, because they become valuable to the success of the business. But they’re also friends. We can call Sid with questions about products at any time, and he’ll gladly swing by the store and drop off samples of new delicious products he thinks we should carry. As a small store, we are often unable to sell entire cases of pricier items, and Sid recognizes this and will split cases for us. If we aren’t able to sell a new kind of cheese before it expires, he’ll readily replace it with another in the hopes that it will catch on next time. Personal relationships between businesses, distributors, and producers mean everyone gets what they want and need to succeed, and happily. Goodness Greenness is too big to provide this personal attention.

You come to Open Produce for a more personal shopping experience, and that comes from more personal relationships with the products we carry. We have worked hard to make the right decisions and bring good food to the store, and we’re excited about the new products we’ll be getting from Sid, as well as our other distributors. Let us know what you think!

Although plenty of people walk into Open Produce and assume we’re an organic co-op or a health food store, we’re not - but we would certainly like to carry more local, organic produce, for a start. Higher prices, variable appearance, and inconsistent supply are hurdles for sales, and difficulties with sourcing the produce mean we just haven’t been able to capitalize on the many available resources.

Here to help is a new collaboration with Edible Alchemy, a local food co-op that organizes a local, all sustainably-(or organically)-grown produce share and fruit share every other week. Open Produce is now a drop-off site for these CSA-like share deliveries. We’re excited to develop relationships with many of Edible Alchemy’s producers and hopefully be able to get more produce from the farmers that they work with.

Stay tuned for further developments! For more information about Edible Alchemy, and to buy in, check out their website at ediblealchemyexchange.weebly.com.

Thanks for helping us start breaking out of the industrial food system, Dietrich!

I just spent a month riding my bike from Chicago to Ohio, visiting farms along the way and teaching people how to make yogurt as the Yogurt Pedaler. Much of the project was inspired by working at Open Produce and learning about where all of this popular “local” food comes from. There are so many labels on the food we’re supposed to eat these days, and the first two farms I visited - Kilgus Farmstead in Fairbury, IL, and Traderspoint Creamery in Zionsville, IN - were great examples of the different ways responsible, local food is made. And, we’ve carried milk and yogurt from both dairies here at Open Produce. Here’s a bit of one post I wrote just over halfway through the trip:

The project is about getting people excited about making things and about visiting the farms, but it’s also about getting to know the farmers and the animals and the products that are produced. I’ve tasted Kilgus ice cream, and I’ve tasted Traderspoint ice cream, and they are two completely different products from two completely different farms.

I’m sure I’ll visit even more diverse farms – but even visiting these two has made me ask lots of questions about the missions of these “sustainable” dairies, whether third generation and newly grass-fed like Kilgus, or new organic farms with missions that far surpass producing dairy products, like Traderspoint.

Kilgus is a third generation farm, but only recently did they refocus their market to the grass-fed, bottled-on-site niche. They’ve always been a responsible dairy, but this change in marketing has meant their survival, now that restaurants and speciality shops in Chicago are drawn to their product for its unique appeal.

Traderspoint, on the other hand, was founded in 2003 by a couple whose background and startup capital are found far from dairy farming. Their operation is beautiful, their herd of Brown Swiss is attractive and healthy, and their farm is bustling with activity from visitors to the farm, customers at the shop, and diners at their restaurant. Their marketing is so successful, spreading demand for “Fresh. Simple. Organic.” dairy nationwide, that they’ve had to bring in milk from other organic, grass-fed dairies to produce enough product to sell. They’ve done wonders for the organic movement, which I support and am frustrated by in equal measure.

The inescapable fact of the comparison I have just described is that the economic position of Traderspoint’s owners (they inherited the land, he is a plastic surgeon) allows more publicity and a greater reach of the message and products from grass-fed, sustainable, healthy food. But what are the real advantages of marketing over a family farm like Kilgus, with deep roots in the community, and with wisdom and a connection to the land and a way of life that is truly entrenched in the region’s economies and social networks? Would Kilgus be aided by investment in marketing to the higher-profile niche to which Traderspoint’s customers largely belong? Or by going organic? Or would they lose a valuable local connection, one that they have relied on and which has supported the dairy for decades.

As I ate lunch before leaving Traderspoint on Friday, I overheard Fritz Coons, one of the owners, say to a potential product supplier that their desire was to “express the brand through glass.” This gets at the essential difference I’ve been expressing here – through words and pictures – and I’ve become comfortable with the two dairies in their own ways and niches. I am attracted to Kilgus’ community connection at such a heartwarming level, and I truly believe it’s important to furthering American culture’s agricultural foundations. But I’m also convinced that what Traderspoint is doing to advance the “Organic” movement in this country, while I’m incredibly frustrated by its class limitations, is important to creating healthier and more balanced food systems. There is no perfect dairy, and I hope I continue to discover diverse models in the coming weeks, but these two welcoming places have provided me with plenty of calcium-rich food for thought.

Hi OP fans! Annie here, Open Produce manager and yogurt-maker on the side. I’ve been hard at work on a project called the Yogurt Pedaler that is launching this weekend, at the 61st Street Farmers Market.

The project has been in the works for over a year, and was inspired in part by the connections to food production and distribution and the community that I’ve come to know since working at Open Produce. As the Yogurt Pedaler, I’m biking from my home in Hyde Park, Chicago, to Ohio, making yogurt from milk from local dairy farms and teaching people along the way how to make their own. It’s about encouraging people to take an active role in making their own food and knowing their local community, and about inspiring street life and a more active lifestyle.

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, but ready or not, I’ll be inaugurating the Yogurt Pedaler at the 61st Street Farmers Market tomorrow, Saturday, August 14, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The market is fantastic - it’s on the street by Experimental Station, at E 61st and S Dorchester, and it’s well worth a visit at any time. But it’s especially worth a visit tomorrow, when I’ll be out there teaching yogurt-making, so if you find yourself on the South Side, stop by and say hi! I’m hitting the road on Sunday, so this is your last chance to see the Yogurt Pedaler in action in Chicago until September…at which point I may be so tired of yogurt that I’ll refuse to make it ever again.

While I’m gone, keep up with my adventures on my website at yogurtpedaler.com, where you can already find all of my worrisome yogurt-making experiments in excruciating detail.

I’ve been looking over our financial data from 2009, and I thought I’d share some findings.

In particular, I’ve been looking at some metrics for how efficiently we turn money into inventory and back into money. If you look at the amount of money we made (our SALES) and divide by the amount of money we spent on inventory and related expenses (COGS, or Cost Of Goods Sold), you get our SALES/COGS ratio, which was 1.21 for 2009. This is also called a “markup” of 21%. That means for every $1.00 we spent on inventory, we sold that inventory for $1.21.

To look at it a different way, for every $1.00 we earn in sales, we get keep $0.17, which is known as a 17% “margin”. Markup and margin are related, but different, and it’s easy to get them confused. For item we sell for $1.00, for instance, a markup of 100% means we paid $0.50 for it. A 100% margin on the same item would mean that we got it for free. Confused yet? Great. I’ll stick with markup, or SALES/COGS, for the rest of this post.

As I said, for 2009 our SALES/COGS was 1.21. Our target has been 1.5, so this is a little lower than we were aiming for. However, it fluctuated month to month — in July, for instance, it was 0.98, meaning we actually spent more on inventory than we sold. This is because we grew our inventory selection massively over the summer, and we didn’t see the jump in sales until later in the autumn, when our SALES/COGS went up to 1.35.

Our monthly expenses — everything that is not an inventory expense — hover around $10,000. This includes payroll, rent, utilities, insurance, repairs, and taxes. To break even, we need to cover this — and hopefully make some extra to cover slow months like December, finance growth, and pay back our loans.

At a SALES/COGS ratio of 1.21, we need to sell about $58,000 per month, or $1,960 per day, to break even. This is much higher than we are doing right now — for instance, in May 2010 we averaged just over $1,500 per day, and June has been lower. If SALES/COGS was 1.3 instead of 1.21, we would only have to average $1,444 per day, and we would be officially in the black.

We’re not sure what our SALES/COGS is for 2010 yet. We are still crunching the numbers on the first 6 months. But it looks like it’s going to be higher than 1.21 — maybe 1.3 or 1.35. Here is a chart showing how much we would have to sell every day for each value of SALES/COGS.

As you can see, if our sales numbers stay flat over the summer then we need to be in the 1.3 range to break even, and 1.4 would mean we’re solidly in the black.

There are lots of ways for us to try to nudge our SALES/COGS up. The most obvious way is to raise prices, but we’d like to avoid doing that as much as possible (and our customers would like us to avoid that, too)! Other methods include finding better sources for our products, seeking out special promotional deals with manufacturers, and reducing “shrinkage” due to spoilage. Especially with produce and fresh bread, there is a very fine line between buying to little and running out, and buying too much and facing spoilage. Tweaking our ordering could help raise our markup to a healthier level without raising prices.

We here at Open Produce are slowly getting back in the saddle when it comes to being transparent, which all too often gets put on the back burner when more pressing concerns arise. Maybe we should have named our store “Warm Produce” instead of “Open Produce”. If you happened to stop by the store early last week, for example, you will have noticed that it was about 90 degrees in the shop. Not good for our customers, our produce, or our poor clerks! The culprit was an air conditioner that failed twice in two weeks (first with a bad compressor, then again because it had sucked up an entire tree’s worth of cottonwood).

The heat was also bad for our equipment — high temperatures and bad luck meant we had a freezer technician out three separate times over the last month. One time, we acted quickly enough that our frozen inventory was fine. Once, we frantically packed our frozen goods into crates and drove them over to Hyde Park Produce, where they friendly folks there lent us some freezer space for a few days while we waited for a compressor part. And a third time, a failure at 11pm on a Friday night, everything thawed and became unsellable. A huge cost for the store, sure, but it means I’ve been enjoying organic pork sausages every night for two weeks. Unfortunately the lost inventory rang in at a little bit under our $1000 deductible for our inventory-lost-due-to-equipment-failure insurance.

But our freezer and air conditioner woes are under control for now (a cool 68 in the shop tonight), and I’ve been playing around with some data with the help of a University of Chicago student who is our data analysis intern.

Head on over to our new data page for a look at how our sales have been doing, from opening day up to the present (the graph updates every night with the latest data). Notice the perilous Decembers, the small dips for U of C spring breaks (look at 3/17 - 3/27 of this year, for example), and how our battered hopes in March ‘09 fell away with the May ‘09 warm weather.

We’ll be adding things to that page as we prepare them, including more detailed sales data, inventory insights, and financial statements. Explanatory blog posts will keep you in the loop.

Today, we have a guest post by Erica Dreisbach, who visited our store last May from Social Venture Network in California.

Here it is:

Walking into Open Produce is like giving yourself a present. From the great
lighting, to the friendly staff, to the shelves stacked high with ethnic and
organic stock, the experience is pure pleasure. You can find all sorts of
amazing treasures here for your home-cooked Mexican feast, fresh salad, or
sugary study break.

But Open Produce is also about giving the community and the Earth a
present. And the present is delicious.

I came to this Hyde Park gem the week after organizing and attending Social
Venture Network’s Annual Member Gathering (http://www.svn.org/),
where we convened more than 200 socially- and environmentally-minded business
leaders. These innovators value both profit and mission, ensuring that
they’ll be in business for a long time to do work for the public benefit. It
also means that most profiteers think they’re crazy (for aligning business
decisions with the common good), and most do-gooders think they’re crazy
(for trying to make money).

“You two would have fit right in at the conference I was just at!” I told
Steven.

I was delighted to spot a number of brands on the shelf whose leaders I’ve
met through work, like Annie’s Mac & Cheese, Stonyfield Farm, and Seventh
Generation. But not only does Open Produce stock nationally-known organic
and sustainable brands led by cool people, they also support small local
companies that sell ethnic food not available anywhere else in the area,
including products from all over the world. They invest in the local
community, whether it’s when Steven and Andrew are chatting with the truck
drivers, or on the phone with Nancy from Nancy’s Organic Yogurt, or
gossiping with their regulars or the guys at the dollar store one door down.
And their low prices mean they can bring affordable, whole, fresh food to
their neighbors.

“This is it, this is the real deal,” I thought. This is about a commitment
to building local, sustainable communities. This is about people and
companies working together to build a new kind of capitalism, one that puts
energy back into the planet, and brings whole and delicious things to our
lives and our dinner plates.

So give yourself a present, Hyde Park, and stop by Open Produce today!

Erica Dreisbach was, at the time of her visit, an art and techmancer for Social Venture Network, a national network of nearly 500 socially responsible business leaders who are working for a just and sustainable economy. Read more at www.socialventurenetwork.wordpress.com.