Your Veggie Mobile questions answered
posted June 4,
2009
By
Jessica Pasko
A few
weeks ago, AOA told you that the Veggie Mobile was a finalist in an
international competition. And based on the comment thread that
ensued, it seemed like a lot of you were pretty curious about the
whole thing.
So I
caught up with Veggie Mobile Coordinator EJ Krans to get the whole
scoop...
(And by
the way, when he's not selling veggies, you can catch EJ playing
around town with Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned and We are Jeneric.)
What's a typical day on the veggie mobile like?
The short
answer is: dizzying. We start by pulling out the produce we already
have in stock. There are usually two or three full-time staff
helping to get the truck loaded and out on the road. We bring stored
produce onto the truck and organize it into our display shelves
while one of our team makes a list, orders produce and drives our
Community Gardens van down to the Menands market to pick up new
stock. We then determine the price per pound of the produce we just
bought and update the price boards on the truck. Load up takes about
two hours total. Then we're on the road.
We have
three or four stops a day, Tuesday through Saturday, and they're all
over the Capital Region so we spend a lot of time in the cab of the
truck. That's where the Veggie Mobile team holds its meetings and
where we listen to plenty of music too. At each stop the two Veggie
Mobile staffers on duty will maneuver our 175 pound ramp into place,
set up our cash register and scale, pull out our wooden step, our
shopping baskets and our open sign
Also the
set up and take down can be particularly fun when we have eager
customers waiting for us to open up and we're often still serving a
customer when we really ought to be on the road driving to our next
stop.
Who buys from you?
Our
customers run the spectrum. We have children like Kyle from Griswold
Heights, who has been coming to the Veggie Mobile with his mother
for two years now, or Tatianna from Martin Luther King Apartments,
who just recently became a regular visitor and always asks us first
thing if we remember her name. We also serve a lot of senior centers
where most of our customers are regular weekly friends. So we serve
all ages, races and creeds, we have young families, seniors, black,
white, Latino, and Asian. Most of our customers are low income but
we don't discriminate. We just make it more likely that our
customers will be low-income or fixed income seniors by putting our
market stops in those communities.
Which are the most popular stops? Where do you tend to see the most
visitors to the veggie mobile? Do you seem to have a lot of
regulars?
Our most
popular stops are South Mall Towers in downtown Albany on South
Pearl on Friday mornings from 11-12:30, and Kennedy Towers in Troy
on Thursdays from 2-3:00ish. Those are consistently very busy, the
truck is regularly crowded and our stock is usually decimated after
those particular stops but they are not always the busiest, some
weeks our Yates Village or Ten Eyck Apartments stops in Schenectady
are incredibly busy, and Ida Yarbrough Apartments on North Pearl in
Albany, a new stop since April 2009, is becoming busier and busier
each week.
One thing many people were concerned about is whether or not the
Veggie Mobile is open to everyone. I think there's some worry that
if people who aren't as low-income are utilizing the Veggie Mobile,
it will take away from those who really need it. Has this ever been
a problem?
As I said
before, we don't discriminate. Most of our customers are low-income
simply because we target those communities but we have never turned
anyone away. Having said that, however, if you can afford to buy
produce at the grocery store, have a car, and some discretionary
income, then you're not our target population. We target low income
people who live far from grocery stores, who don't have easy
transport to grocery stores, or who might not be able to afford
eating healthy. Or to put it another way: we target people whose
access to healthy eating is blocked by price or mobility obstacles.
It is for these people that we designed a market that moves so it
can come into their neighborhood and sell them high-quality low-cost
produce.
We can
sell our produce at a lower price than supermarkets because we don't
need to make a profit on the produce we sell. Capital District
Community Gardens is a not-for-profit organization and has secured
private and government grants in order to run the Veggie Mobile
project, to pay salaries and cover costs.
The
benefits of pricing the produce this way are more than we originally
anticipated. Not only do people buy more produce when it is cheaper
they are also open to trying things they may never have had the
opportunity to try before, or to try things they didn't really like
the first time. Most importantly they are excited to eat those
fruits and vegetables they didn't see as absolutely necessary before
when their money was stretched thin by the high prices of staples.
By
comparing prices to local grocery stores we found that selling at
wholesale price saves our customers approximately 45% on their
produce bill. We then encourage our customers to spend as much
as they would have before; we nudge them to buy more healthy foods
than they could have or would have before. And we are finding that
our customers are in fact buying more and they are telling us that
they are happier for it. And healthier too.
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