December 2024

NEW Member-Owners Wholesale Buying Club Website

 
Our Co-op started nearly 20 years ago as a Buyer's Club.  We got together in our kitchen weekly with various community members and placed bulk special orders using Pneumatic Diner's *UNFI wholesale account (UNFI is the largest organic distributor in the nation).  It was a wild ride, and in our first year, we saved $814. That small amount of money set the stage for what would someday become the Great Basin Community Food Cooperative (GBCFC).  
After we moved into our first brick-and-mortar in the back of Sound and Fury Records off Wells Avenue, we continued to offer special order benefits to our members. The process for placing and taking in special orders was and has continued to be messy and inefficient (for all 19.5 years that the co-op has been open). 🤪
During the pandemic, one of our beloved friends and fellow co-op operators, Learner Limbach of Orcas Island Food Co-op, created a massive Shopify Plus website that offered the entire UNFI Wholesale catalog on one easy-to-shop website called Provisions; this changed the entire game! For the first time, co-op member-owners nationwide could log into a website and view nearly 25,000 wholesale items not carried by their local food co-op.
Member-owner buying clubs are the bedrock of Food Co-ops in America, the foundation we all started upon.  We couldn't be more excited to finally launch our new super sleek and easy-to-use website that allows our member-owners to buy in bulk - by the case and save money. 🤑 This is also a great place to find all your beloved organic and non-GMO goods we don't have room to carry in-store.
If you are a current member-owner at GBCFC, you will receive a separate email later today with your new login for the GBCFC Provisions Wholesale Ordering Website. 
Please note that you must be a current member-owner to order from our new Owner's Buying Club Provisions website. If your membership has expired, or you aren't a member-owner, you can reactivate or sign up in-store or by calling the store. One of our helpful store managers can sign you up over the phone. For just $20 a year, you can co-own your local grocery store and contribute to local food resiliency and cleaner Northern Nevada watersheds!

Provisions Co-op Wholesale Reno Website

🎄🎄Fun Christmas Goodies! 🎄🎄

We've got lots of cute Christmas ornaments and stocking stuffers for your favorite food-loving family members and friends ❤️

Holley Family Farms in Dayton, NV is producing the most ethical, nutritious and delicious pork that you can find in Northern Nevada
🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖

We've been working with this family-owned and operated farm since our early days, and each year, they blow us away with the incredible quality of their products.  As someone who didn't like pork and swore it off years before starting the co-op due to animal abuse issues inside of CAFOs (aka factory farms), it was a hard sell to get me to eat this brilliant and sentient animal. 
All of that changed when I first visited Holley Family Farm in Dayton, NV. Their pigs are happy and healthy, with plenty of space in big open pens.  The pigs regularly eat fresh veggies from the garden, "spent" grain from a local brewery, and non-GMO supplemental feed. The Holleys have been committed to excellent animal husbandry practices since day one.  They are some of the kindest and gentlest humans I've ever met, and this is evident in all of their livestock programs.  Over the past 15 years, we've bought beef, lamb, pork, eggs, and lots of organic produce from the Holleys.
Holley Family Farm was the first ranch in Northern Nevada to certify their alfalfa as organic. The Holleys are pioneers, to say the very least, and possibly the heart and soul of the kind of good food that most folks at the co-op want to consume. Images below courtesy of Holley Family Farm.
NOTE: I stand corrected from an earlier article and social media post that I did about Snowball Ranch. Also, a fantastic family-owned cattle operation in Eureka, NV. They went through the entire process to certify their alfalfa organic, but the Holleys did this first about a decade ago.

Pigs are both omnivores and monogastric.  Monogastric animals, like pigs, have similar fatty acids to ruminants, but the fatty acids in their muscles reflect their diet. Pigs fed solely corn and soy-based fats (common in CAFOs, as seen in the image below) have high levels of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs), like linoleic acid, which can be inflammatory.  They also store all of their toxins in their fat, which means that when humans eat low-quality pork, they consume everything toxic that these pigs have ingested in their lifetime.

This next part is going to blow your mind, but in some of the worst hog operations in the United States, some pigs are fed actual garbage - moldy bags of bread are ground up (plastic and all... yes, unfortunately, it is legal in the United States) and turned into dry feed for pigs.  . The facility manufactures pig feed and is run by Smithfield Foods, a Chinese-owned entity that's the largest pork producer in the United States.  Oh yeah, did I mention that one in every four pigs in the US is brought to you by the Chinese Government? Take a deep dive into that one on the internet. 😬
This Christmas, if you plan on eating ham or pork, then try buying it from Holley Family Farm. It's more expensive than commodity market industrial pork but you're going to pay that difference one way or another - either with your health and/or your tax dollars. Most pork in America is subsidized via the Farm Bill, the second highest federal funding after the Military Industrial Complex.  Whether you like centralized industrial food operations or not, we are all paying for them out of our paychecks.
We've got most of the Holley's pork cuts available at the co-op, with more bacon, pork belly, and hams arriving next Monday.  We've also got their chorizo sausages, Italian sausages, Bratwurst, and Country Ground signature sausage (also used in all of our sausage offerings in the Foodshed Cafe).
🎄🐷 The Christmas hams are almost sold out, but we should have about ten left. If you'd like to reserve one, simply reply to this E-Letter, and we'll set one aside for you. Hams are available on a first-come, first-served basis.  Look for the Holley Family Farm labels shown below in our frozen meat department. 🎄🐷

House Made Items from our Co-op Kitchen 🤠

Take and Bake co-op cookies are available in our frozen department! Sure, our cookies are great since they're both delicious and made with the best ingredients: organic flour, butter, sugar, chocolate chips, and eggs... but what's even better is having them warm with a cold glass of milk. You can now grab a container of our ready-to-bake signature treats - Salted Chocolate Chip, Paleo Chocolate Chip, and a Gluten-Free Version of our Salted Chocolate Chip Cookie.  


We've been scouring the market this year trying to find delicious frozen grab-and-go meals that don't have seed oils.  It's been a feat, to say the least.  We finally settled on the fact that the only way to get the ingredients that we want to consume, is to make it ourselves!  Shout out to Chef Savannah Streeter for whipping up these incredibly delicious Shepherd's Pies.  She made a vegan version using the Mountain Mushroom (Bordertown, NV) blue oyster mushrooms and an OMNI (omnivore... aka MEAT) version using local grass-fed & finished beef from Avanzino Farms (Reno, NV) and Snowball Ranch (Eureka, NV). You can find these delicious ready to heat meals in our kitchen's grab n go case and our frozen section.  Baking instructions on the lid.


Local Non-GMO Pork Lard (Holley Family Farms - Dayton, NV) & Local Grass-Fed & Finished Cooking Tallow (Avanzino Farms - Reno, NV and Snowball Ranch - Eureka, NV)!  Cook with healthier fats and increase the flavor in your dishes 


The Heart Beet has landed on the juice shelves this week, a delightfully sweet,  warming, and nourishing juice that currently has local ginger from Holley Family Farms (Dayton, NV) - *Apple, *Carrot, * Beet, *Orange, *Ginger - *Organic Ingredient.

Grocery Gets a Facelift!

  Come in and check out the grocery floor changes!  You know that awkward part of the co-op in the back by the dairy and drink fridges where you can barely get a cart through... let alone open the door to grab your creamer of choice?!  We opened up all of that space so that now two carts can pass by with ease 🥳
We've also analyzed all of our data and are in the process of discontinuing the items that aren't very popular and replacing them with items we think our members and shoppers will love ❤️. Look for great deals on blowout clearance items around the store. Clearance prices are 25-50% off our regular retail prices until stock is gone. 🥳
The most significant change we're making is to our bulk department.  Ever since the pandemic, we've seen some bulk sales declining.  We did some digging and found out that this is actually happening at a national level and is primarily tied to consumer fears about germs, cross-contamination, etc.  We also suspect that it's related to how busy everyone is since we started to pre-pack some of our most popular bulk items into glass mason jars (with a refundable bottle deposit), and they started to fly off the shelves! 
While the bulk department can help reduce packaging, it has a minor environmental impact if it contributes to food waste. To help prevent contamination, spoilage, and messes, we're now pre-packing our bulk spices and herbs into compostable, resealable baggies. You can find these hanging on our new aisle #3 end cap for easy shopping, image below
If you walk the aisles of the co-op, you will see brand-new sections for jams, nut butters (by the tree), cleaning supplies, pet foods (soon to be expanded), beer & wine, organic cheeses, supplements, and frozen goods. We have a bulk water dispenser coming early in 2025 that will have reverse osmosis, de-ionized, and high PH alkaline water. 💦 
Our last big push (for a while since we need to sleep) will be adding 20% more space to our LOCAL & ORGANIC MEAT department.  This will take place early on Saturday morning.  Because demand for LOCAL meat is on the rise, and we're pretty much the only retail spot in Reno where you can get local beef, lamb, pork, and bison + increasing demand for organic poultry products, we are expanding and better organizing our frozen meat department to make it easier for our customers to find the meats they want.  
♥️💙💜 2025 is going to be a big year for education and sneak peeks into the lives of the incredible ranchers that we work with. Check out the Holley Family Farm feature story above - if you eat pork, you will want to read this one. 🐖 









West Coast citrus season has begun! Flash Sale on 2lb Bagged Organic Mandarins! Regular price is $6.99 but on sale for $4.99 each while supplies last. 🏃‍♂️ 🍊


Anyone can shop, everyone can join!
Grocery Store Open everyday from 7:30am – 9pm
Foodshed Cafe (upstairs) Open everyday from 7:30am – 3pm
Great Basin Community Food Co-op
240 Court St Reno, NV 89501
775.324.6133
info@greatbasinfood.coop
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