Farm Glance: La Mauve Cooperative

Ok, so this Farm Glance doesn’t feature a farm.  But La Mauve Cooperative is worth posting about because of its success marketing the products of small farms in the area surrounding St.-Vallier, just northeast of Quebec City.  This post will be mainly text-based, but before I get to that I want to share a cool technique the cooperative uses when loading up veggie boxes for its box program:

La Mauve has taken the brackets of old tables, along with the legs that screw into them, and mounted them on the wall along the bench on which they load the boxes for their box program. This way cloth or plastic bags can be conveniently held open while loading veggies.

La Mauve is a cooperative that operates both the storefront that you see pictured above and a 250 and growing Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) box program.  Many farms operate their own box program, which often limits the diversity of products in the box.  La Mauve Cooperative’s box program assembles the products of over 2o farms, each of which is a member of the cooperative.  Each year, the cooperative’s members and administrators get together to forecast the amount of product they will need based on the coming year’s subscriptions.  The group then uses a spreadsheet program to determine what percentage of demand each farm will supply.

Subscribers to the box program have to pay about 15% more than the average box offered by individual farms, but benefit from the ability to choose from different categories of boxes that offer a wide variety of food products including veggies, fruit, meat, dairy, juices, and preserved goods.

To pay for the administrative costs of the cooperative, La Mauve has struck a balance between a mark-up on the prices charged by its member-farms, and taking a small percentage of each member farm’s box program revenues.  It seems to be working; the box program continues to grow in size, and there are more farms interested in supplying the program than can be accommodated.

Meanwhile, the La Mauve retail store is also flourishing.  In addition to selling local farm products, the store stocks its shelves with a wide variety organic and natural foods.  It also operates a deli and preserving operation in a well-equipped kitchen in back.  All employees of the store are members of the cooperative.  Like the box program, the store turns a profit, which it reinvests in the business.

Thanks to La Mauve coordinator Marie Lacasse for hosting us for the day.  We wished there had been more weeding to do to repay the time she put into touring us around, not to mention the wonderful lunch La Mauve’s cooks prepared for us.