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Local Produce for your Community
About The Common Market
The Common Market is a nonprofit regional food distributor on a mission to connect urban communities with local food from sustainable family farms. We do this by:
- selling fresh, healthy food to community institutions,
- creating a supply chain for farmers and ranchers who are at the forefront of creating an equitable and resilient food system,
- and providing avenues for values-aligned wholesale food procurement, guiding our partners to see the full value of the food and its impact on the health of their people, community and environment.
We strive to improve food security, farm viability, and community and ecological health across the country.
The Common Market currently has hubs in four regions: the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Texas, and Great Lakes. Each location operates independently, managing its own infrastructure and local staff. “The Commons,” our centralized location, provides support across the organization. We are actively expanding to other U.S. regions to build a nation of vibrant regional food systems!
Our Impact
Since 2008, The Common Market has been building relationships, strengthening regional food systems, and connecting urban and rural communities. Last year, our impact included:
5,017,185
healthy meal equivalents distributed
$13 million
invested in local economies through food purchases
283,072
Farm-Fresh Boxes distributed
4 regions
Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Texas... and soon Great Lakes!
118
family farms supported
How We Work
The Common Market model supports robust regional food systems. We collaborate with both farmers and customers from procurement through delivery. Alongside our partners, we increase access to healthy food, improve health in vulnerable communities, support family farms, and expand ecological agriculture.
Supply Chain Capacity Building
Resilient supply chains are our first priority. We provide farmers with technical assistance, support to scale up, fair pricing and more. Our staff and partners follow industry standards for food safety and handling. We create infrastructure for efficient aggregation and distribution.
Wholesale Distribution
We aggregate local products from multiple sources then deliver them to local anchor institutions serving communities in need. We collaborate with national food service companies and independent institutions to create avenues for easy wholesale distribution of sustainable, local food.
Stakeholder Collaboration
Beyond procurement support for individual institutions, we collaborate with organizations and government agencies to improve community healthy, local sourcing, and equitable regional economies. Our work with these partners and alongside our funders has positioned us as leaders in developing values-based institutional procurement practices and policy.
Deliveries to Vulnerable Communities
Our partnerships with anchor institutions allow us to provide healthy food in areas where access can be limited. We prioritize wholesale and Farm Fresh Box Program distribution to communities most at risk of diet-related and chronic disease as a way to increase positive health outcomes.
Our History
As a young married couple, Haile Johnston and Tatiana Garcia-Granados moved to Philadelphia’s historic Strawberry Mansion neighborhood in 2003. At the time Haile and Tatiana settled in, families of means had moved out. While the culture remained, the lives of everyday people were impacted by blight, vacancy and poverty.
Working as part of a neighborhood community development organization, they engaged young people in projects to beautify the neighborhood’s vacant lots – cleaning up, planting flowers and growing vegetables.
A field trip with their team led to an a-ha moment that changed their futures.
“By chance we stumbled upon a big agricultural auction about an hour away in a rural area,” Tatiana remembers. “And while we were there, we realized it’s not just communities like ours that are disconnected from healthy food. There are all these small family farmers who don’t have access to markets – they’re at the mercy of this auction system.”
Recognizing the disconnect between these two communities was the starting point for The Common Market – bringing local produce from small farms to communities like theirs.
In 2008, they formally started their nonprofit, a food distributor that would transcend the word vendor, working to support and develop sustainable family farms while providing food access to vulnerable communities through the institutions that served them.
-story excerpt by Kari Carlson for W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 2020 report
