Small business and non-profit join forces to curb hunger in mountain towns

If you’ve come to believe that necessity is the mother of invention, you might want to meet Emma Kottenstette.

She and her husband Matthew founded Farm Runners in 2015. The business provides food distribution services connecting local farmers and their products to businesses who need them in the North Fork Valley and surrounding areas. They also have their own grocery store in Hotchkiss.

At the start of the pandemic shutdowns, Emma and her leadership team were worrying over how to replace the lost revenue from the ski area shutdowns, which represented a huge chunk of their business. In turn, they were also worrying over what to do with the relatively large amount of produce they had in cold storage.

“We had a moment of panic. I honestly don’t know how the exact idea came up. We just put together our produce and delivery system with our community need. People had started asking where they could put their money to do some good locally for the community. We decided to give them that place,” Kottenstette said.

Alongside the community supported agriculture boxes they were packing to keep the business afloat, Kottenstette’s staff also started packing additional boxes for distribution to families at local schools. Money started to flow in to help with the effort from local organizations like the Rotary. Farm Runners donated the produce they had at cost and paid their employees to pack, pick up and distribute food. They used additional donations to buy more produce.

That’s when they realized that schools would be closing soon and with them the free lunches for families. Kottenstette reached out to Meghan Williams, a Programs Representative for Food Bank of the Rockies. Williams was able to contribute shelf stable packaged meals through the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP). The combination of the produce and the meals distributed in elementary school parking lots in Delta, Hotchkiss, Paonia and Cedaredge were just what many families needed. At their high point, the effort was providing 60 families with food. That’s a large number when you consider few of the towns they were serving have populations that climb much over 1,000.

“It ended up being kind of like a CFAP box and kind of like a backpack program and kind of like meals on wheels,” Williams said. “But what it did was bring together food resources in a new way that really worked. And Farm Runners honestly did this totally of their own volition.”

By employing their existing storage facilities and delivery trucks and delivery routes, Farm Runners was able to stand up a nearly immediate delivery system that operated through the summer harvest until students returned to schools. Kottenstette and her team are in the early stages of exploring founding a new non-profit that would continue the work they started.

Kottenstette’s advice for starting an effort like this? Listen to yourself, not the naysayers.

“If you have an idea, follow it through. It was a little discouraging to hear that it wouldn’t work from people when we started exploring how we might make the logistics happen. If you have an idea, try it. And try it for several weeks before you give up. Listen to what your community needs and don’t get stuck in the way things have always been done,” she said. “You’ll be surprised what will work in this environment, if you just keep on going.