Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

As a former CSA operator in New Mexico for several years we established a very good relationship with the local people. And I made a lot of money.  Ecuador is a whole lot different. There is a lot of cheap local produce available and not much demand for high quality organic food. In my opinion you will probably not be successful in a venture such as this because most people here would rather buy the cheapest food they can because they do not know the difference between cheaply raised food and properly cultivated organic food. Although it could be contaminated with pesticides and assorted fungicides, herbicides and inorganic fertilizer, they tend to spend as little as possible to survive  Good luck with your endeavor. I am still growing things here the way we did in NM. We managed to bring some seeds with us the last few times we went there to visit and it is impossible to grow them here without having a green house or some type of shelter. Customs do not give you a hard time so long as you have them in airtight containers and not a whole lot of a certain type of seed. Also many of the people who want clean food will not pay the extra price. A local restaurant owner says it is not worth the extra expense to have organic leaf lettuce because the customers complain that it has bugs. It takes too long to wash it, I guess. So she buys those huge heads of lettuce at the mercado that has no flavor and keeps for days without refrigeration.. Sanitation is not really high on her list although she claims she is a healthy food restaurant. Another conundrum here in Wonderful Ecuador. Not trying to sound negative, just stating the facts.

Thank you for the feedback doncarlos. My expectation, is that the base clientele would be expats that appreciated both better produce and the convenience of selecting their produce online and having it magically show up in a box every week. However, to make it in Ecuador a CSA would need more than just gringo clientele. It is likely a fool's errand. Maybe when I have money to lose I'll experiment with it.

Another thing to consider is the fact that we had a group of people that we knew who they were because we had them fill out a brief paper with their personal info. If I was working, and my wife was out working on the farm, they could come to our house and pick up what they wanted and pay on the honor system.  We had a two car garage that we turned into a small store with refrigerators and air conditioning. When they needed something they could enter and get what they needed such as watermelons, cantaloupes, sweet corn, black eye peas, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, ornamental corn and squash, chili, lettuce, cabbage and other cole crops herbs and other assorted veggies when they were ripe. All they had to do was take what they wanted because everything was labeled with a date of picking and the price. They would leave money in a coffee can. Sometimes there might be over a hundred dollars in the can at the end of the day.  I don't believe that would work so well here in Ecuador.I have yet to meet any one here that I could trust any farther than I could throw my bull by the tail. Just my opinion.

DonCarlos wrote:

Another thing to consider is the fact that we had a group of people that we knew who they were because we had them fill out a brief paper with their personal info. If I was working, and my wife was out working on the farm, they could come to our house and pick up what they wanted and pay on the honor system.  We had a two car garage that we turned into a small store with refrigerators and air conditioning. When they needed something they could enter and get what they needed such as watermelons, cantaloupes, sweet corn, black eye peas, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, ornamental corn and squash, chili, lettuce, cabbage and other cole crops herbs and other assorted veggies when they were ripe. All they had to do was take what they wanted because everything was labeled with a date of picking and the price. They would leave money in a coffee can. Sometimes there might be over a hundred dollars in the can at the end of the day.  I don't believe that would work so well here in Ecuador.I have yet to meet any one here that I could trust any farther than I could throw my bull by the tail. Just my opinion.

It kinda sounds like you don't like Ecuadorians. It's a pretty negative vibe you're putting out. I have had both good and bad experiences when it comes to trust in Ecuador... just like anywhere.

DonCarlos wrote:

Ecuador is a whole lot different.....people here would rather buy the cheapest food they can because they do not know the difference between cheaply raised food and properly cultivated organic food. .... Not trying to sound negative, just stating the facts.

Maybe it's because so many of them are dirt poor and has nothing to do with knowing the difference between organic and "cheaply raised food". I couldn't afford organic food till my teenaged son moved out his own. Can't imagine what the cost would be if I was feeding a large family. However inorganic at least it's fresh with lots of seafood in the diet

Organic food has it's merits. I have the luxury of going to the health food store as often as I want. Can't stock up at all because the date it was picked or packed is not always marked. They donate to all of the soup kitchens and shelters

There are large organic sections in all of the supermarkets most of the packed food have dates. If I felt like driving out to the farms I could get fresh picked stuff . Locally raised and butchered meat also available at the farms but still way out my price range. If I had a big freezer I could by parts of a cow or 10 pounds of chicken at a time

DonCarlos wrote:

And I made a lot of money.

Ecuador is a whole lot different. There is a lot of cheap local produce available and not much demand for high quality organic food.. Another conundrum here in Wonderful Ecuador. Not trying to sound negative, just stating the facts.

Yeah organic food is pretty much yuppie food here although lots of people have vegetable gardens of their own

Glad you made a lot of money,,,so does Trader Joe's who makes a buck on a half gallon of milk  without putting the name of the dairy on it. Either the yuppies are too stupid to go across the street and buy it at the super market or they believe the hype and slick marketing written on the container.

We have a huge warehouse with a packing and freezing operation...refrigerated trucks... a distribution system ...a dietician. All donations from local farms and out of the pockets of those here who are more fortunate to feed those who are not. And this is just for the two local counties.

Just my IMHO Jess, but it has been my experience that business which are built to serve expat needs are destined to fail, usually sooner than later.

Not that expats don't have extra money to spend, but they are not a dependable clientele and they move around a lot. Most expats who have the resources to live in foreign country A, are also able to  move to to foreign country B if it suits them, or go back home where they came from. Expats are wholly unreliable as a source of income and a client base.

I have seen few expat-focused business survive which do not also meet the needs of the local populace. You've got to have to locals to survive.

If you think that Ecuadorans would would also be a willing market for your business idea, it might float. But depending on the expat market it is unlikely to succeed.

There was Organic Mom wanting to go to Vilacamba because of the organic produce market there. There are supposedly a lot of US hippie New Age types in VilaC.

I wonder how much of the appeal would be from the convenience rather than the organic hippie new age angle. Some people may enjoy shopping in Ecuador, but I suspect a lot of folks, including locals, kind of hate it when your choices are visiting 5 different little stores to get good prices and produce, or one big supermaxi where you over pay and have to wait in a crazily long line. I'm sure it varies from town to town, but in Quito it kinda sucked.

Maybe the locals in Quito have become more Americanized and like the supermercado. Shopping malls are already there. What's next one stop shopping a la Fred Meyer's? Convenience is a great angle if, like Gardener suggested you could get business from the locals as well. Read wealthy ...organic is chic


Myself, I rather enjoyed picking out my own fruit and veggies and haggling in NY Chinatown and Brighton Beach (big Russian community near Coney Island.....was sort of gross in that it was under an el. Both open air

I preferred using a CSA in Seattle, because the quality and prices were better than super yuppie farmer's markets and Whole Paycheck... er I mean Foods. I also preferred the farmer, rather than the store, making the real profit. In Korea, I loved shopping in the open air market. Everything I needed was there, the quality and prices were awesome, and it was fun. In Ecuador the in store shopping experience is difficult enough that I suspect there is a lot of opportunity for CSAs. That said, if I do get into this business, it will be as an investor/middleman. I'm not a farmer. I'm a dreamer and an organizer. The idea would be to organize a group for farmers and connect them to a group of customers using the internet, a delivery truck, and a processing location where customer orders are sorted, boxed, and labeled.

Just so you know, suefrankdahl, I'm not a new age hippie, just a person who knows that pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and all the other chemicals in food today are not good for you.  And, I have a son who has allergic reactions to many of these chemicals.  Here in the US, I know quite a few people who get truly organic food from local farms, not because they're trying to make some kind of statement, but because they care about their health.  It's always fascinating to me how it's become so acceptable to eat the chemical-laden crap that passes for food today, that when someone actually cares enough about their health, and the health of their kids, to try to get food in its natural state, they're called yuppies, hippies, or some other similar name.

Jesse, I'd be very interested in something like this.  Though, I'd rather pay a little less and pick the food up than have it delivered to my house.  I buy from about 4 different farms here in the US, and have made some friends and we take turns picking up the food.  I'd love to have some contacts there before I move there.  I saw a post on one of the Expat.coms a while ago (might have been this one) by an expat who said he had an organic farm and was selling some stuff.  I haven't been able to find that post since then.  I've been talking to someone in Canada who's planning on moving there in about a year too, and he and his family might also be interested.