Discovery Organics is one of NOWBC’s early partners, they are a small local independent wholesaler.  Discovery offers our on-line market a way of including many locally produced foods such as Nature’s Path cereals and Anita’s Organic Grains as well as expands our reach to a wider array of organic local farms for produce items when we are unable to source them directly, thereby ensuring customers a good selection of local organics every week.  While we work to support BC farms, we are pleased to also support this small BC company which holds many goals in parallel with our co-op.  At Discovery Organics they are very good at doing due diligence (including face to face farm visits) to ensure that the companies they buy from are sustainable and fair companies so we feel confident buying further afield goods from them when we have to also.  Below is an excerpt from Discovery’s own web site we would like to share:

“From our farming roots, we began in 1999 with a mission to bring more of the hundreds of Certified Organic fruit and vegetable, berry, nut and mushroom farms in B.C. into the commercial marketplace than the very few whose products were found on store shelves in Western Canada 10 years ago. We have done this, step by step, with over 90 B.C. farms over the past decade. Farming is much more than chucking seeds into the ground, managing the crop and hoping someone buys it. We help farmers develop cooperative shipping docks, uniform packaging, proper seed selection, crop contracts and marketing plans. We have visited dozens of farms in B.C., working with growers to see them move to larger and more financially sustainable operations.

We are a small company, tiny, actually, in comparison to some of the giant distributors across North America, but we take what we do very seriously. We have a mission to feed people, to make sure that the small farmers we work with (and most of the farmers we work with are small) stay in business, by increasing local production of in-season and storage crops, working with growers along the Pacific Coast of the U.S. who provide for us when our local growers have been driven off the fields for the winter by frost and snow, and contracting crops with growers in other countries who have the right growing conditions to produce year-round, but lack resources and relationships to be financially viable.

So these are the families who grow your food – people we love, respect and admire, and who rely on us to bring their crops to market. These people are dedicated to organics, to the planet, to their communities and their families.”

Follow this link to see profiles of farms Discovery works with: http://www.discoveryorganics.ca/farms.html