The Omnivore’s Solution

Standing behind the cash register, Aleisha Gibbons offers a hearty greeting to the customer who has jst walked into the bright, cheery Berkshire Organics store in Dalton, Massachusetts. As the woman deposits an empty green bin near the front door, Gibbons lifts a small walkie-talkie to her lips and buzzes into it: “Basket for Barbara Healey.”

A moment later, as Healey scans the nearby shelves lined with organic foods and environmentally friendly supplies, a young woman emerges from the back room with a large bin. It’s identical to the one Healey brought in, but is filled with sweet potatoes, apples, carrots, kale, oranges, and a host of other ripe, colorful fruits and vegetables. Healey is one of about seventy Berkshire Organics customers who make weekly visits to pick up their produce—and enjoy a ten percent discount—rather than scheduling delivery to their homes, as the majority of customers elect to do. “I like to check out [the store] and see what’s new,” Healey explains.

Outside, a heavy winter rain is pelting the shop’s front window and the parking lot is covered with thick gray slush. “Stay warm!” Gibbons says with a smile, as Healey turns to leave.

Thirty-one-year-old Gibbons telegraphs a confident capability, and her warm, straightforward demeanor invites almost immediate trust. Her relaxed appearance—she’s wearing a dark, wool-lined vest over a long-sleeved T-shirt and black corduroys, and her straight, shiny brown hair cascades over her shoulders—belies the seriousness and professionalism with which she approaches her business. Berkshire Organics has been remarkably successful; since Gibbons founded the company two years ago, its customer base, operating facilities, and range of services have expanded substantially.

The store in Dalton has become an important part of the operation, but Berkshire Organics is essentially a farmers’ market on wheels, delivering local and organic produce to at least four hundred homes and businesses in the region. At its heart is an environmentally driven goal: to provide an efficient bridge between farmers and customers, thereby reducing the distance—and pollutant fallout—of moving produce from field to table. Its motto: “Live green. Eat fresh.”

“At first I thought this would only be attractive to second-home owners,” Gibbons admits. “But that hasn’t been the case at all; eighty percent of our customers [stay with us] year round.”

Miriam Kimball, a longtime resident of Richmond, Massachusetts, is one such customer. Since last summer, Kimball has received a “Bachelorette Basket” at her doorstep every Friday. Last week the container was filled with a mid-winter bounty of butternut squash, russet potatoes, Empire apples, carrots, gold beets, navel oranges, grape tomatoes, scallions, and lettuce. As always, a recipe-laden newsletter was tucked into the bin. Kimball, who no longer drives, welcomes the regular delivery of fresh produce. “It simplifies my shopping all around,” she says, noting that from the very beginning she has been “impressed and surprised by the variety and freshness of everything.”

Despite sixty-plus-hour work weeks, Gibbons herself seems fresh and vibrant, brimming with enthusiasm for the burgeoning enterprise she now co-owns with her husband, Brian, also a Berkshire native.

Gibbons, however, tried on a few hats before discovering she was an ambitious businesswoman with an ecological mission. After college, she enrolled in law school but dropped out after two semesters. Then she taught high school history for a couple of years at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. When she moved back to the Berkshires to marry Brian, she searched in vain for a teaching position. “I was beginning to get very frustrated,” she recalls. Eventually she found a job as an executive assistant to John Miller, the founder and owner of @utoRevenue, a marketing company based in Lee, Massachusetts. “He said, ‘I will teach you everything you need to know about starting your own business,’” Gibbons says. “Looking back, that really prepared me.”

After she left @utoRevenue in the fall of 2007, Gibbons heard about an outfit on the West Coast that specialized in home delivery of local produce. “I couldn’t get that idea out of my head,” she says. She then discovered that a similar operation had existed in Boston since 2001. “That really gave me confidence that this could work.”

That winter Gibbons taught herself how to create a website and developed a list of farms and other contacts to launch Berkshire Organics. Her father, a retired English teacher, created a logo: a handmade sketch of a massive tomato behind a mountain, encircled by the words “Berkshire Organics Delivery.” Gibbons designed a tri-fold brochure and posted flyers at coffee shops and fitness centers. “I didn’t have any start-up money at all,” she says matter-of-factly.

Gibbons also faced some hefty market challenges. “Gas was over four dollars a gallon,” she says. “A lot of people thought I was crazy.”

For her first delivery on May 30, 2008, she packed thirty-five baskets by herself in the middle of her living room, then loaded them into her car and set off on a carefully planned route from Sheffield to North Adams. By July, her customer base had grown to seventy-five. She hired a high-school student to help for the rest of the summer. “He had a Prius, which was excellent,” she says. By the end of the summer, she had one hundred customers.

Last August, Brian Gibbons, a horticulturist with twent years of experience, closed his landscaping firm to become co-owner of Berkshire Organics. It turned out he had an impressive knowledge of produce as well as plants. “He won a national award in college for being able to decipher different fruits and vegetables,” Aleisha Gibbons says proudly. Brian’s twin brother, Brendan, has also since joined the company.

Spring being just around the corner, Gibbons is focused on working with local farmers to coordinate crops and improve distribution systems. She’s also developing a new commerce-based website, managing five employees (a number that multiplies in the summer), handling orders and customer service, and, together with Brian, directing day-to-day operations, headquartered since June 2009 at the two-thousand-square-foot retail space. The Berkshire Organics store boasts an impressive array of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as frozen grass-fed meat, local eggs, tofu, olive oil, soups, grains, beverages, canned goods, and organic and earth-friendly toiletries. On Fridays, the store sells fresh seafood from the Other Brother Darryl’s, a company based in Otis, Massachusetts. 

At the height of the Berkshire growing season—June to November—about 80 percent of Berkshire Organics produce is procured from farms in Berkshire and Columbia counties and the Pioneer Valley. (The Locavore Basket offered in the summer contains only food grown within a fifty-mile radius of Dalton.) During the fall, winter, and spring, “local” is more liberally defined; produce is gathered primarily from a network of about thirty-seven family-owned organic farms spanning the East Coast, from Homestead, Florida, to Prince Edward Island, Canada. That’s why oranges and grapefruit often appear in baskets and on the Berkshire Organics store shelves. Other organic tropical fruit pops up on occasion: Gibbons sources fair-trade bananas from Ecuador, fair-trade mangoes from Peru, and papaya from Hawaii. Some of the winter produce—lettuce, arugula, salad greens, and baby spinach, for example—is actually grown at regional farms with year-round operations, like Equinox Farm in Sheffield, Massachusetts.

This careful selection of produce, in cooperation with local farms, achieves a few important objectives. First, because the distribution system is direct, there’s a lower environmental impact; transportation of these goods usually requires less fuel and less packaging than does delivery to large grocery chains. Second, because of abbreviated distribution times, produce sold by Berkshire

Organics is often fresher than that of its supermarket counterparts—and, because it’s organic or partially organic, it’s also healthier. Third, by supporting Berkshire Organics, customers are sustaining the local economy as well as small, family-owned farms on the East Coast that face an increasingly tough fight against deep-pocketed agri-giants.

Gibbons points out another environmental advantage of the Berkshire Organics service: strategically mapped weekly home deliveries reduce the need for individuals to drive their own cars for shopping.

“My husband does ten to twelve deliveries an hour in Lenox [Massachusetts],” she says. “That’s ten to twelve families who are not driving back and forth to the grocery store.”

Berkshire Organics is also committed to eliminating as much plastic as possible. Produce is delivered in sturdy bins and totes made from recycled materials. “We’ve saved thousands of plastic bags,” Gibbons asserts. In fact, Berkshire Organics was the first business in the Berkshires to organize a bag share program, modeled after a successful setup in the Pioneer Valley. Last year, Gibbons organized a bag-making event in collaboration with St. Stephen’s Church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, asking customers to bring fabric and sewing machines. About twenty people showed up. “We made two hundred and fifty reusable bags in three hours,” Gibbons says proudly. And the program is still going strong.

Berkshire Organics strives to keep its produce prices affordable. “We’ve done price comparisons and figured it’s less expensive to get our basket and have it delivered to your door than to go to the store,” Gibbons says. Michelle Raymer, a customer who lives in Becket, Massachusetts, with her husband and toddler son, agrees wholeheartedly. Raymer used to buy all of her produce from a nearby market that specializes in organic and other high-quality foods. “[Berkshire Organics] is definitely less expensive,” Raymer says. “And they deliver on top of it.”

The smallest baskets—the Bachelor and Bachelorette—are about $35. The most expensive option among eight or nine is the Bountiful Basket, at about $55. But price is the only aspect that’s fixed.

Customers are not obligated to receive a basket every week, and substitutions may be requested. (A list of weekly offerings is e-mailed in advance of each delivery, and side items include eggs, milk, cheese, meat, soup, and granola.)

Gibbons understands that this flexibility is key. “There’s no commitment,” she says. “You can get it weekly, or you can get it once a month.” A number of people subscribe during the fall, winter, and spring, but turn to their own gardens during the summer.

The farmers directly involved—about twenty of them, primarily in the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley—are impressed by the system. By building its own customer base, Berkshire Organics has been able to boost demand of produce from these sources.

Berkshire Organics now accounts for ten percent of winter commerce at Enterprise Farm in Whately, one of the longest-running certified-organic farms in Massachusetts. Over the past twenty-five years, owner Dave Jackson has expanded the farm from one-and-a-half acres to eighty five. Gibbons, he says, has been an inspiring partner in her shared commitment to sustain the family-owned organic farms that are part of what he calls the East Coast Foodshed. Berkshire Organics strengthens the buying power of Enterprise, which relies heavily on this network of farms during the off-season for its own wholesale and retail customers in the region. “Aleisha inspired me to change the farm operations,” Jackson says. “When we order from farms down south, we call her first to find out what she’s looking for.”

Together Gibbons and Jackson assess supply and demand, but they play distinctive and complementary roles in the local economy. “I am the farm, and she is the home delivery service,” Jackson says. “Rather than fighting the system, we are the system, and we’re all working together.”

Ted Dobson, who has worked with Berkshire Organics for two of the twenty-seven years he has owned Equinox Farm, says that the Gibbonses are “tapping into the best of what farmers in the region have to offer year round.”

“They’ve made my winter very worthwhile,” he says. “[Aleisha] has done a remarkable job. Here’s a young lady that within two years has just shot out of a cannon. Her idea has translated beautifully.”

It’s translated beautifully, it seems, to everyone involved: customers, farmers, and employees. Even the Dalton food pantry and other nonprofit organizations have benefitted. Last year, Berkshire Organics donated more than $13,000 worth of produce to help feed hungry families.

“We’re local people and we wanted to make a go of something in the Berkshires,” Gibbons says. When people ask where her farm is—and they often do—she explains that she works with farms but doesn’t run one. “My husband would love to have one,” she admits. “Maybe someday that would be an opportunity for us, but we’re happy where we are now.” [MAY 2010]

Christine Hensel Triantos is a freelance writer who lives in Richmond, Mass. She is an ardent fan of fruits and vegetables—and of the people dedicated to growing them.

THE GOODS

Berkshire Organics
813 Dalton Division Rd.
Dalton, Mass.
413.442.0888