Pivot or Perish
"In a long but short three months, we’ve seen many local businesses getting extremely creative in providing food to their communities and actively expanding and shaping our local food systems. With a shared ethos of getting as much food as possible to their neighbors safely, local growers and food distributors have risen to the challenges of shifting national supply chains, markets, consumer buying habits, and health safety protocols within the failure and fracturing of a fragile food system... For Nina Yozell-Epstein, owner and operator of Squash Blossom Local Food, the backbone of her business prior to the pandemic had been wholesale to restaurants in Santa Fe. As a supplement to these sales, she offered Blossom Bags, a service for individuals to get weekly bags of seasonal produce from a variety of farmers from northern New Mexico. She averaged twenty-five bags a week in the winter and around fifty per week in the summer. When restaurants were required to close, the majority of her business disappeared overnight. Within the same week, orders for her Blossom Bags went from twenty-five to more than two-hundred fifty."
