Getting to know our produce distributor

A few weeks ago, we announced the opening of our Weekly Produce Program (if you haven’t heard about it, you can read up here). Thank you SO much to everyone who has signed up so far!

Can you believe that it’s just days away from April and only 2 weeks away from the start of our Early Season phase of the Produce Program?!

The Weekly Produce Program offers fresh produce from our farm as well as from our produce distributor, Mento Produce. Mento is a family-owned company based in Syracuse, NY which distributes fresh, high quality produce from G.A.P. certified farms (abiding by high standards of safety and quality–but not Organic).

Since this is our first year with Mento Produce, we decided to do a “practice run” before the program started.  Last week, we asked 10 of our close family and friends to join us to place a minimum order, and we ordered a variety of fruits and vegetables including sweet corn, romaine, spinach, oranges, grapefruit, cucumbers, tomatoes and red peppers. All of this produce came from the Southern states but was guaranteed to be much fresher than the grocery store.

And… it was! The lettuce and spinach haven’t even started to wilt (a week later). Everything tasted great with the possible exception that the tomatoes and cucumbers were not quite as flavorful as they might be from our garden. Everyone who participated agreed that even the non-local Sweet Corn was surprisingly good. It was a new experience to eat fresh corn-on-the-cob in March…

The other encouraging part was the price. We were very happy with the amount of produce we received for the price we paid (and we expect the Regular Season prices to be even better because the produce will all be sourced locally!)

In short, we are thrilled with how our first order with Mento went and we are already dreaming about the fresh produce we will get to eat and share next time…