Sprouting new take on CSAs

Barcelona Restaurant and Wine Bar is connecting its customers with the local farmers it uses to get its own food supply.

Using the website Farmigo.com, the culinary director for Barcelona, Adam Halberg, has assembled a lineup of farms and food suppliers that customers can order from online to cook locally grown and made meals at home. After ordering, the food will be boxed and brought to Barcelona’s Fairfield location for pickup.

“We’re already interacting with a number of these farms,” Halberg said. “And we know our customers are, more and more, wanting to buy local and buy fresh. It makes sense to bring those two together.”

So far the website offers salad greens from Cote’s Naturals L.L.C., in Bristol, cook-to-eat veggies and eggs from Sport Hill Farm in Easton, bread from Wave Hill Breads in Norwalk and organic maple syrup from Woodhull, N.Y.

Fairfield’s new “food community” is one of more than 3,000 hosted on Farmigo’s website. The idea for the site came out of the growing popularity of Community Supported Agriculture, more commonly known as CSAs, where consumers buy a share of a farm and receive weekly baskets of produce throughout the harvest season.

Typically, a CSA is with only one farm. Shareholders have to drive out to the farm for pickup and the produce they receive is a mixed bag. Consumers don’t choose what foods they get. Through Farmigo, consumers have more control over what they buy and through “group buying,” similar to sites like Groupon, costs can remain low without buying a share in the farm.

In more active and established communities on the site, consumers can buy vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, dairy, bakery products, wine from local vineyards and prepared food from local chefs.

“We need a better food system,” Farmigo says on its web site. The average carrot travels 1,800 miles before it ends up in a meal and only nine cents of each dollar actually spent on produce goes to a farmer.

“It’s important to buy good food, as in food that tastes good,” Halberg said. “That may be organic or not and it may be local or not.”

But when it comes to buying local, Halberg said the most valuable aspect is the relationship and knowing who grew your food. At Barcelona, if chefs notice their tomatoes are getting watery, they’re able to tell their suppliers directly. Then the farmer might alter the variety of tomatoes or care given, providing a certain amount of attention to detail that’s hard to find anywhere else.

Barcelona opened in 1995 and has six locations in Connecticut, including four in Fairfield County. Fairfield is the first place Barcelona has volunteered to be a pickup location for Farmigo, mostly because its own community garden at their restaurant in Fairfield serves as a good backdrop.

Currently Barcelona is looking to include more farms and suppliers on its Farmigo site. They’ve been a pickup spot for about a month and roughly a dozen people have been actively engaging. If the idea takes off, they’d like to become a pickup site at more of their locations.

“There is no kickback. We’re not personally taking a cut in the sales,” Halberg said. “Really what we’re doing is building connections with the people we already have relationships with.”