Outpost Natural Foods Boosts Community, Local Businesses and Vendors

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It’s been one heck of a year for the 50th anniversary of Outpost Natural Foods Coop. What started with big plans to celebrate, turned into … well, you know what happened. That hasn’t stopped them from continuing to serve the community they love and the suppliers and farmers that help make them who they’ve been for the last half-century.

“It’s kind of par for the course for what we do here at Outpost; we support the local farmer and local vendor,” says Margaret Mittelstadt, Director of Community Relations for Outpost. “During difficult times, those kinds of relationships really strengthen and show what it means to support each other.”

Outpost cares about those relationships and they take responsibility for keeping them going. In an article from April, General Manager Pam Mehnert says: “Our mission to create healthy, diverse, and sustainable communities is stronger than the competitive forces around us.” That mission proved to be true during this time of struggle for some of their local partners. “I think what is amplified during times like this is that we continue with that and we look to see if there are challenges that we can meet,” says Mittelstadt.

Whether it’s finding a local company to source bathroom tissue when most other stores were running short, like they did from Rebel Green, or making sure their customers have access to their favorite local coffee after cafes were shut down, Outpost strives to meet the changing needs of customers.

Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co.

“There’s no script, there’s no manual for when something like this happens,” says Steven Kessler, Wholesale Manager for Anodyne Coffee Roasting Company. “Orders from Outpost just exploded. They were doing their best to accommodate everybody’s needs like ordering ground coffee, for their customers that don’t have a grinder at home.”

Kessler talks about how Outpost didn’t just buy a ton of bags of coffee and stick them in a warehouse somewhere, they bought weekly to keep their customers in fresh coffee. Consistency is key for Anodyne in dealing with the pandemic. With the help from Outpost Natural Foods, they were able to focus on doing what they do best: roasting great coffee. “We were absolutely touched and blown away,” says Kessler of Outpost picking up more of their product to distribute. “When coffee’s your world, the best way to say thank you is with a free cup, and that’s what we opted to do.”

Anodyne roasted a special batch specifically for every single employee of Outpost, Essential Worker Blend, in return for their help. These bags of coffee didn’t just go to managements at Outpost either. Every single one of Outpost’s 360 employees got a bag to take home. “At the end of it, if we can embrace our humanity a bit more and just be nicer, that goes not only from person to person, but business to business,” says Kessler. “I mean, we’re all in this together and the only way we get through is together.”

“That was really humbling to me, and I know it was for a lot of others here,” says Mittelstadt. “We’ve been working overtime since the onset of the pandemic, trying to adjust business operations in a matter of days and weeks, and it’s been really stressful.”

Help for Mushroom Mike

Mushroom Mike sells predominantly to restaurants and at farmers markets and on Friday, March 13, everything stopped. “I’ll never forget the date in my life,” says Mike Jozwik, Owner of Mushroom Mike. “We were on pace to have just another unbelievable year. We were building momentum to hopefully break ground this fall on our new facility.” Basically overnight, they lost about 90% of their revenue.

Those plans for the fall expansion have been pushed back to spring 2021, but Mushroom Mike is going to survive. Outpost picked up some of the slack from Mushroom’s lost business and agreed to sell a variety of the company’s products in their stores.

“The produce managers at Outpost will call or email and ask questions about the mushrooms to be as knowledgeable as possible to be able to guide customers,” says Jozwik. “I think that’s unique and very ‘Outpost’ and I think that’s one of the reasons our relationship has been succeeding.”

Kellner Back Acre Garden

Another Wisconsin business that saw significant drop-off in distribution because of coronavirus is Kellner Back Acre Garden in Denmark, Wis. Outpost usually carried regular chicken products and duck eggs from the farm, but when restaurants were forced to close during the start of the shutdown, most of Keller’s business fell off completely. “Over half of our egg business was shut down,” says Nancy Kellner, second-generation operator of Kellner Back Acre Garden. “March was OK, since there were a lot of people stocking up for home, but then they start piling up and we started taking them to the food pantry.”

It costs money to keep feeding the 2,000 chickens from the farm and they don’t stop laying eggs, and that’s when Outpost stepped in and bought about 900 dozen in one week. Kellner and her farm usually sell chicken eggs to restaurants around Wisconsin and even down into Chicago. Right about the time that Outpost said they’d purchase chicken eggs, Hunger Task Force also said they would purchase eggs from me,” says Kellner. Outpost was fine with that and just wanted to help Kellner out while they needed it temporarily.

The Kellner farm started out 40 years ago as just a hobby-farm and has now worked itself into a certified organic poultry farm with no plans of going away. The current Kellners have their son working at the farm and plan to pass it all down to him someday, and the fourth generation after that.

Healthy Eats

The name Kathy Papineau came up a few times during the reporting for this story and she could possibly be the hero we need right now. Papineau started MKE Kitchen (and catering company MKE Localicious), which every Tuesday prepares farm-to-table meals for the homeless from their location in Riverwest. She also helps coordinate donated meals for Healthy Eats for Hospital Heroes, where she came across the Kellner Back Acre Garden and she shared what she saw with Mittelstadt at Outpost.

“All in all, in three weeks, including Outpost, we unloaded 1,300-dozen eggs,” says Papineau, who had to also find help moving the eggs from a trucking company with commercial refrigeration access. “You can’t just treat these like they’re velvet Elvises and throw them in the back of a truck!”

A thank you can only go so far. Outpost helps when they see local, like-minded businesses who need it. That help isn’t limited to the food industry; it extends into local newspapers. Outpost deserves more than just a thank you, they deserve your business. You’ll thank them for it.

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To read more articles by Tyler Nelson, click here.