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Membership Questions
General Questions About The Food Club
Ordering Questions
The best way to join the club is to attend a new member meeting. Currently, these meetings are scheduled through our meetup website (link). Please consult our handbook for specific details about membership.
Our dues cover our costs. Because we are still working to establish relationships with many of our suppliers, and because local farmers often have a cash flow issue, we pay them upfront for all the food and then collect the payment from you. The dues allow us to pay the farmers before we collect your check at pickup.
No. The point of the club is to create a relationship between farmers and buyers, so producers can make a decent living, raise superlative products in a sustainable manner, and so buyers can know that their food is as good for their families as it is for the environment.
The membership dues are partially refundable if you volunteer. If you donate 12 hours of volunteer work during a 6-month period, you get 80% of your dues back. There are several volunteering opportunities available, from doing pick-up runs to helping during distribution, so you'll most likely be able to find something to fit your schedule.
We are a very diverse group. We are locavores, omnivores, vegetarians, gluten-free folk, raw foods practitioners, etc. Our common interest is to keep our food purchases local and knowable.
Please consult our handbook for a detailed description of how the club works. We are a 100% volunteer effort. No member of the club has received payment for any of the very considerable services our members have provided.
We do have some organic products, but organic food is not our only focus. We aim to put more local foods on more local plates because we want to reduce the number of miles our food travels to reach our homes. Ultimately, we hope to have organic, transitional, and conventional products of every basic category (eggs/dairy, produce, meats, etc.). You are welcome to browse our producers to see whether our current offerings suit your needs.
Some of our producers provide wholesale pricing to club members on their products but have requested that we not publicize these prices. Therefore, only dues-paying members with an account on our site will be able to see pricing information. Please keep in mind that unlike some traditional buying clubs, cost savings is not our primary mission.
The best way to find out about our producers’ practices is to ask them your questions. Our producers provide some basic information on our website, and contact information is provided for all.
Yes. The club was founded as a first step toward forming a co-op. We have a steering committee who are in the very beginning stages of planning this next step.
Our goal is to support local producers. If we continue as a club, given our current time, cold storage, and volunteer constraints, we will have to limit membership. We want to give one-stop access to local foods to as many central Bucks households as we can because we believe that more local buying supports more local farmers, which is good for our environment and our economy.
Unfortunately, there are some very real limits to the kinds of products we can find within a short drive of our homes. We therefore provide organic and natural dry goods through Neshaminy Valley Natural Foods as a convenience for our members.
Currently there is no one-stop year-round source for all varieties of local foods. Many of us are currently CSA members and intend to remain so. Some of us are buying locally on a regular basis for the first time because of the convenience the club offers. In general, our members continue to frequent, promote, and otherwise support other businesses who share our mission.
It is.
We have found it necessary from the beginning to try to control our growth. Our volunteers have logged hundreds of hours getting the club up and running, working out problems, and establishing ourselves with our producers. If we grow too big too fast, we will have to cap membership, and we really don’t want to have to do that.
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Doylestown Food Club
For information on scheduled pickups, meetings and
other events, please visit our Meetup.com group.
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