Building the business of Chow Locally has been an exciting adventure for our team.  We’ve worked hard to create something that not only made sense as a business, but truly served the health and nutrition needs of you and your community.   And, we hoped our business would point us in the direction of changing the world by improving the food system.

We’re excited now to introduce an offering we think takes us and you one step closer to that goal.  The Chow Share is a subscription program that allows you to get a weekly box filled with the best local foods seasonally available, chef-prepared recipes, nutrition information, and of course our guarantee that all foods were produced in ethical and sustainable ways.  We’ve tried to take everything people truly care about when it comes to food and put it in one box. 

With the Chow Share, you don’t have to worry about whether the food was produced in the right way or not.  We make sure for you.  You don’t have to worry about figuring out what local vegetables are available and how to prepare them.  We give you that information.  And, you don’t have to worry about how to fit these foods into a healthy diet.  We give you that information as well.

So, if you’ve been looking for a way to make health and sustainable living more convenient through food, the Chow Share is for you.  Check out our site to learn more.

We want to thank everyone who supported Chow Locally the past few weeks in the National Bank of Arizona’s Next Great Business contest!  Because of you, we won the competition!!!!

We plan to use the award ($10,000) to help launch our newest endeavor: a city-wide CSA box program.  If you aren’t familiar with CSAs, they are programs in which customers can sign up for multiple weeks of produce boxes.  Usually, these boxes come from single farms and they are a great way to add healthy foods to your diet while supporting local farmers.  Our program will take advantage of the great relationships we have with multiple local farms and ranches, and we’ll build boxes that include the best of what the valley, not just one farmer, has to offer!  And, we’ll make sure boxes are designed to support meal creation and healthy eating.

To that end, we’ve partnered with dietitians and other experts to help us design the perfect CSA box.  We’ll include recipes, nutrition breakdowns, and cooking videos to help you make the most of what you get.  And no worries…you’ll be able to customize your box by including add-ons with all the great products we’ll continue to carry in our online store!!

When the new year rolls around, look for this great product on our site.  In the meantime, if you want to help coordinate a box drop-off for your workplace, let us know!!  We can set up delivery right to your business’s door, at the end of the workday to make it convenient and save you a grocery shopping trip!  And, if you help us coordinate a multi-customer drop-off at your business, we’ll offer you a free CSA box!!  Email us for more details.

Once again, thanks to all of you who see such value in supporting local farmers, eating healthy local foods, and imbuing your food with ethics!  And thanks to the National Bank of Arizona for supporting Arizona local businesses!

Your Chow Locally Team.

We were excited to find out that we are the first official food hub in Arizona…so much so that Chris Wharton, one of Chow Locally’s founders, couldn’t stop talking about it in a recent interview for the Atlantic Online!  Check out this link to read more.

As we’ve been building the business of Chow Locally, we’ve wondered a bit about how to characterize what we do.  We often tell people that we are an online farmers’ market because we offer lots of local foods for purchase through our website.  Of course, we hope to be much more than that because what we really care about is supporting local farmers, supporting local food systems, and helping everyone eat in a healthier way.  So, we constantly explore new angles on how we can make all of that happen, including offering a new city-wide CSA (community supported agriculture) program through corporate partnerships (more on that in the very near future), helping farmers deliver their goods to restaurants, and continuing to do what we do best: letting people buy exactly what they want from as many local farmers and ranchers as possible through our Chow Locally website.

Turns out there’s a name for what we are: Food Hub.  Chow Locally is in fact a food hub, a business that aggregates and distributes locally and regionally grown foods.  It’s a new business model for local foods, and one that holds a lot of promise.  You can learn more about food hubs here. 

USDA is paying attention to the growth of businesses like us, and in fact you can track down the presentation to the right by googling ‘USDA Food Hub’ to see what they’ve been up to.  Jim Barham at USDA is leading the way on this effort, and with this national recognition, it’ll be exciting to see where the food hub movement (and we) might go!