Growing and giving back
Farm Table Produce expands to ‘pay-what-you-can’ service
VERNFIELD >> Local families or individuals who are dealing with food insecurity will have a way to cut their grocery bills under a pay-whatyou-can plan being started by a produce delivery service.
Ryan Welby has served with the Peace Corps in Togo, in Haiti with the nongovernmental organization Meds and Foods for Kids, and with the United Nations World Food Programme in Rwanda.
“My interests generally are in food security, food justice, trying to make sure that people have access to good nutritious foods,” he said.
Last year, he started Farm Table Produce at the 30-acre Morwood Road farm that has been in his family for a century and at which the Freed’s Produce farmstand
is located.
Farm Table Produce is an online e-commerce store making produce deliveries to customers within a five mile radius of the farm, including Lansdale, Harleysville and Souderton, Welby said.
From July to November, most of the produce comes from the farm or other local sources, he said.
Over the winter, the produce is purchased from wholesalers in Philadelphia, he said.
Customer options include a one-time purchase or monthly or weekly subscriptions.
“Subscriptions run from $25 to $50 and generally speaking, it’s between 12 and 30 pounds of fresh produce per subscription delivery,” Welby said.
Some of the money received from the sales is donated to an international school feeding program, he said.
“We are also going to introduce a pay-what-you-can option,” he said.
Based on a model from a restaurant, the pay-whatyou-can option would allow local families or individuals who are dealing with food insecurity to pay what they can, instead of a set price, he said.
In the restaurant’s case, most people pay the suggested rate on the menu, with some people paying more and some less, he said. In order for the service to be financially sustainable, some customers must choose to pay more to cover the costs of those who pay less.
Welby said he plans to be talking to some local service organizations in July about food insecurity issues and the pay-what-youcan proposal.
A survey of current customers showed that most said they were saving money by using Farm Table Produce, he said, but also showed that most of the customers were making more than $100,000 per year, and therefore already had access to and could afford the quality produce being provided, he said.
That, however, didn’t meet his goal of assisting lower income families and individuals, he said.
He said he will be talking to social workers about the pay-what-you-can plan and taking it to a low income community.
He’ll also be doing a survey to evaluate the impact for the lower income families taking part.
“I want to make sure that it’s actually having the impact that I want it to have, where it’s having the best possible impact that it could have,” he said, “and you don’t know that until you measure it.”
Welby, a 2009 Souderton Area High School and 2013 Ursinus College graduate who in 2018 returned to graduate school at Tufts University, will be going this fall to the University of Oxford.
When he makes the move to the United Kingdom for that, he will most likely outsource the work being done by Farm Table Produce to another local business, he said.
He said he’s hoping to do the surveys on the impact of the pay-what-you-can plan before leaving for school, then analyze the answers while he’s at school.
“If the results of the trial are good and the program is financially sustainable then I am going to attempt to rapidly scale this model either by growing Farm Tables operations or by getting my larger competitors to offer this model as well!” Welby wrote in information for this article.