Express delivery service from the farm to your door

Passion for what she does wakes up Deb Marsden at some ungodly hour at dawn and gets her to work by 5 a.m. on Fridays.

Her two-year-old business, CT Farm Fresh Express, has since moved to a quainter location - a barn - but on this April morning, Marsden and co-worker Amy Pear are still packing locally grown and produced foods in an inconspicuous warehouse in an industrial park in East Haddam.

CT Farm Fresh Express is a grocery delivery service, à la Peapod, with a locavore twist: all the products Farm Fresh delivers has been grown or processed by farmers and artisans in Connecticut. Customers place their orders online by noon on Tuesdays, based on what farmers have said they have available that week, and receive the goods that Friday.

The goods and produce are picked up from local farmers on Thursdays and are brought back to the warehouse to be sorted, packaged and labeled.

For seven or eight hours on that Friday in April, Marsden and Pear work steadily to fill the roughly 100 orders that Farm Fresh will deliver to Connecticut residents that day.

Marsden, with the no-nonsense air about her, and Pear, with the retired Middletown cop's ability to focus on the task at hand, make a formidable team. They cheerfully but hurriedly greet employees coming in for their shift. They take no bathroom breaks. They eat no snacks.

Marsden calls out order items one by one for Pear to grab. There are roses, meats, cheese, bread, milk, vegetables, fruit, herbs, giant scallions. There is no room for error; the goods must be packed in coolers and sent out as soon as possible to avoid spoilage. And they must be placed just so to maximize use of each cooler.

"It's a big Tetris game for me," Pear says.

Farm Fresh has grown rapidly in an astonishingly short period of time, with its appealing combination of quality products, convenience and a growing desire to know exactly where one's food comes from.

Since Marsden started the business in February 2008, she has hired two full-time employees and 11 part-timers. They pick up food from about 40 to 60 farms each week, year-round, on six to eight pick-up routes throughout the state.

The company also delivers food to restaurants, but home deliveries alone require about seven or eight delivery routes, Marsden, 57, says.

"It's been amazing," says the former graphic designer. "I didn't expect it. I just thought it was a good idea, and I was just going to go for it and see what happened."

'What could be better?'

Marsden's business plan works because it overcomes hurdles that those who strive to eat locally face. For one, it eliminates the need to drive to individual farms all over the state to get fresh products.

For another, customers can only order exactly what they need, avoiding the potential waste that comes with subscribing to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), where members receive a box of abundant farm-fresh goods that they may not like or need in the quantities they're offered.

"What could be better?" says Niantic resident Margarita Emerson, who moved to Connecticut two years ago from New York City. "I can order it online so I can think about what I need. And I can get it delivered."

Pear was sold on the Farm Fresh concept as soon as she signed on as a customer a year ago. She began working for Marsden soon after.

"I was sold on the food," Pear says. "I buy something at the store, not knowing how long it's been traveling. … Two days later, my lettuces were mush.

"Now, I buy local lettuces, they get picked a day before they get delivered to my house … They can sit in my refrigerator for a week or longer until I get to them, and they haven't turned to mush because they were picked the day before, by the farmer."

Commitment-phobes will enjoy Marsden's no-membership fee service, though there is a refundable $20 cooler fee to ensure fresh delivery. Depending on where customers live, deliveries run between $8 and $15 in New London County.

Farm Fresh benefits farmers and customers alike, giving small-time farmers another outlet to sell their goods and getting farmers' products in the hands of those who can't always get to farmers markets and wouldn't otherwise make the drive to the farms themselves.

Julie DelPrado, a mother of three young boys, says it was the convenience of Farm Fresh's "one-stop shopping" for healthy foods that appealed to her.

"My husband and I have been looking for local sources for food for a while now," DelPrado says at her Gales Ferry home on a Friday afternoon as she waits for her first Farm Fresh delivery. "It's hard, just schedule-wise, with the boys' schedules and with work schedules to actually make a commitment to go into a farmers market, 'cause it's usually very specific hours. So it makes it easier when we can log on to the computer in the evening, after the kids go to bed, and make a decision about what it is that we want to order."

For operations such as Cato Corner Farm's in Colchester, Farm Fresh helps to generate additional revenue, however small. Co-owner Mark Gillman says recent Farm Fresh orders have generated between $200 and $500 in weekly sales for the cheese producers.

The delivery service was Cato Corner's fifth largest wholesale consumer in 2009 and is currently its second, Gillman says.

"It's sort of overdue, actually," Gillman says of the Farm Fresh concept. "People respond well to Peapod (the Stop & Shop grocery delivery service), but this is real food."

Perfecting the system

Employees at Farm Fresh are a remarkably cheery bunch for people who regularly get up at the crack of dawn and drive upwards of 100 miles for home deliveries in their personal vehicles.

Pear's face lights up at the mention of fresh, locally grown asparagus that hit the online order form at the end of April, and another employee, Cindi Perugini, gets giddy talking about the goats she gets to play with every week at Beltane Farm in Lebanon during her farm runs.

Beltane is known for its fresh chèvre, or goat's milk cheese, but it also serves as a hub for other farmers to drop off their Farm Fresh orders for the week. Cheesemaker Kim Abell, who works with Beltane Farm owner Paul Trubey, also sells her own line of cow's milk cheese and yogurt under the name Ladies of Levita Road.

Marsden is always perfecting the order and delivery system. She is expecting a matching grant from the state Department of Agriculture to purchase a walk-in cooler, which would eliminate the need for at least some of the seven refrigerators she currently uses.

Marsden is also updating the Farm Fresh website and hopes to eventually add a distribution center in either Litchfield or Fairfield county.

It's a lot of work, but Marsden says it's worth it.

"Why do I do it?" she says. "I do it so that other people can share in the bounties of the state."