I just confirmed something very cool. Something that I had suspected, but needed data to confirm. One of the big things for us at Medomak is the food. The reality is that nobody wants to eat bad food on their vacation and camps in general have a reputation for bad food. So we put money and effort into making sure the food is of a quality we are proud of.
So for the past couple of years, we have had a dairy cow…which means fresh milk, fresh cream, fresh butter, fresh cheese, fresh ice cream, etc… And this year we decided that we were going to try and grow as much of our vegetables as possible. Primarily we needed lettuce and other greens, but tomatoes, broccoli, garlic, peas, edamame, cucumbers, squash also were in the plan. Growing on a small level wasn’t hard, but we needed to grow large numbers of veggies, in succession, so that each week would have adequate amounts for our campers. So figure that on a given week, we needed enough lettuce and other veggies for anywhere from 50-120 people. And the scary part was that since we had to plant in April, we weren’t even 100% sure of our final number of campers.
Anyhow, onto the cool part…the cost. I had assumed that the labor and materials (seeds, fertilizer, etc…) would be so expensive as to make it prohibitive (we convinced ourselves to go ahead and try anyway because we figured the programming aspect would justify some of the expense). What we found out was even with all the costs of the cow and the production garden added in (labor and materials), our food costs stayed about even in comparison to our previous years! I was amazed. We all know just by comparing the cost of a head of lettuce at the local grocery store vs. the cost of an organic head of lettuce at the health food store, that it is cheaper to get the non-organic (did I mention our gardens are organic?). But hey, on our scale, it was cost neutral to grow our own veggies and get our own milk rather than get it from one of the big food distributors most camps and restaurants use.
If anyone is interested in talking with me about the details of how we were able to offer organic vegetables and milk for the same cost as non-organic, food service-distributed veggies and milk, give me a shout. I’m happy to go into the costs we incurred and we can compare our experiences. Anyway, it was a good season with FRESH, TASTY food that WE grew ourselves. And it didn’t cost us anything additional. WIN-WIN!
So far there's (just?) 0 comments on this post - join in and add one »