Author: Skookum

Skookum’s Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Club is growing fast

The front page of your bulk-buying club

Well, we’ve made it through one test order in February, and another larger order in March, so it looks as though the Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Club is really a going concern. We invite all members of Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative to explore the bulk-buying website, where you can:

  • visit our current product selection;
  • link to our FAQ page;
  • read about one of our local producers; and
  • learn how to become a local producer, yourself.

Consider joining The Abundant Pantry, where shopping is easy thanks to our online shopping cart system, and there is no pressure to order, because we have no minimum.

Here is some of the progress we’re making behind the scenes:

  • We now have a working Advisory Team meeting monthly to support our Coordinator Wendy Pelton and our web programmer Barry Bookout. Thank you to Skookum members Dan Glover, Pete Tebbutt, and Laura Wallace for stepping forward to take on this extremely important work!
  • Wendy has been conducting a survey of member satisfaction and the Advisory Team is using this feedback to improve the website and the ordering and pickup system.
  • The splits page got quite a workout on the March order. Members are already getting better at working together to split sacks and cases, so that everyone benefits from low prices while still able to buy smaller quantities — a perfect example of cooperation in action!
  • The Advisory Team is hard at work developing policies and procedures to allow us to offer local farm produce and other products from the Upper Sunshine Coast. We’re really excited by the possibilities, so stay tuned for more news.
  • We’re thinking ahead to providing refrigerated and frozen products.

If you’re keen to participate in Powell River’s fastest-growing bulk-buying club — one that benefits your cooperative, your community, and our fabulous Coordinator Wendy Pelton — then find out how to join here. Our next order deadline will be Sunday May 13 at 11:00 PM, and the pickup day will be the following Thursday, May 17 from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM.

Just one of the benefits of membership in Powell River’s one and only non-profit cooperative!

If you have any questions, you may direct them to Wendy at bulkbuying@skookumfood.ca or call (604) 485-6664 after 11:00 AM.

Announcing the Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Project

Wendy is waiting for you to pick up your bulk food...

Exciting news! After many months of planning and hard work, Skookum’s Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Project is ready for prime time! The coordinator Wendy Pelton and her husband Barry Bookout have created a fantastic website for Skookum members to place their bimonthly orders for bulk food and all members of Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative are invited to sign up and check it out.

Here’s how it works:

  • In the odd months (January, March, May, July, September, & November), Skookum members who have signed up with The Abundant Pantry will be invited to shop for bulk goods, using the new website;
  • Members can work together to split bags or cases, using the splits page;
  • The deadline for each order will be the second Sunday of the month;
  • Once we have closed the website and received the orders for that month, we pass our collective order to Melissa Call at Sunshine Organics/Ecossentials, who acts as our local distributor;
  • Ferries permitting, our order will come in on the following Wednesday and be ready for members on the Thursday of that week to come up to Melissa’s warehouse in Wildwood and get their food.

We currently have access to the catalogue from Horizon Distributors and plans are afoot to get other distributors’ catalogues into our online ordering system. Stay tuned.

The project's mascot, Skooky, created by Giovanni Spezzacatena

Beyond that, one of the most exciting aspects of this online ordering site is that we can list local producers and their products there for our members to buy in bulk quantities. Currently, our only local distributor is Skookum member Mischa Brooks-Thoma, the Powell River Natural Soap Lady, but Wendy is hard at work finding more local food other products for us. If you have suggestions, contact her. (Local producers whom we buy from do not need to be members.)

We’re also thinking ahead to frozen refrigerated products, but we plan to run a few simple orders before we start complicating things.

In February, we ran a small test run, and everything (well, almost!) went off without a hitch. And so we are now ready to try a larger order with more members involved. The order deadline this time around will be 11:00 PM on Sunday March 11, and the pickup day will be Thursday March 15.

You can check out the current catalogue here. (Please note that the full catalogue might take some time to load if you’re on a slow internet connection.) Information about joining The Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Club and getting your own secure online login information is here.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email Wendy or phone her at (604) 485-6664.

On behalf of all our members who will benefit from having a simple accessible online bulk ordering system, the Skookum board would like to acknowledge the contributions of the ‘guinea pigs’ of the pilot order, as well as Melissa Leigh, who has helped with invaluable advice on bookkeeping procedures financial sanity; Mischa Brooks-Thoma, for being the first local producer providing so much useful feedback; and above all, Wendy and Barry, who have given us so many hours of hard work trying to get the website all the procedures in order. Thank you, all!

Last Call for Cooperative Seed Order


This is the last call for joining in our Skookum Bulk Seed Project for 2012. More information can be found in a post I put out on January 15th.

I Heart Seeds

IMPORTANT: FEB. 14 at noon is the cut-off for Skookum’s Seed order for 2012!

  • Please note that we have 29 types of seeds available at 25% discount if we manage to get 10 packets of any particular variety. These are seeds you will likely NOT find at Seedy Saturday (except from seed vendors at full price).
  • We need to cooperatively order at least 10 packets of any single kind of seed to proceed with the ordering of that seed variety. If we have fewer than 10 orders of any variety, we will not get the 25% discount from our local supplier (Eternalseed.ca),and we will not order that variety.
  • I know that many of you have already made plans to buy seeds using your usual method, but it would help a lot if you considered buying even a few seed varieties through this service Skookum is offering, as an order of fewer than 10 packets will not go through, thus affecting others’ orders.
  • See which seeds have been ordered by clicking here. If you can possibly contribute to this project by topping up the seed varieties that are close to 10 packets right now (maybe an investment of $3-$5), this would be helpful (plus you do get the seeds after all, at a 25% discount over retail)
  • Want to order some seeds? Look at the varieties and descriptions on offer here.  Email Giovanni(at)rabideye(dot)com with the variety name and number of packets you want, and I will get back to you.

Skookum’s Celebratory Social

A look at the Skookum Social (Jan 31, 2012)

The members of Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative gathered at Trinity Hall in Powell River on January 31 2012 to celebrate our first public gathering for 2012, the United Nations International Year of the Cooperative. The salad/dessert pot-luck event attracted over 30 of our 101 members. The meal was centred around Jacqueline Huddleston’s delicious risotto and quiche dishes, and graciously emceed by member Alison Taplay. A special gift basket was awarded in absentia to Nansi McKay and Nancy Tyler (members #100 and 101), and presentations by Wendy Pelton, coordinator of The Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Project and by directors David Parkinson and Giovanni Spezzacatena provided lots of news about what’s going on with our cooperative.

Here is some of what we talked about:

    • Alison talked about 2012 Year of the Cooperative, and set up an informal agenda for the evening, ending with a call for ideas on new projects and for helping hands to organize and implement existing ones;
    • Wendy Pelton gave us a major update on The Abundant Pantry Bulk-Buying Club, which is about to be launched;
    • Giovanni Spezzacatena talked briefly about the Bulk Seed Project (deadline Feb 14, 2012), and on Skookum Members’ Survey Results;
    • The Skookum Community Bookshelf was introduced: this is a Skookum Cooperative initiative by Director Sharon Deane and Melissa Leigh where members may donate books that they feel would be appropriate to cooperative member use to this project housed in Kingfisher Used Books. A dedicated bookshelf will be set up letting only Skookum members borrow these materials. Contact Sharon at the store for more information;
    • David Parkinson reported on the Skookum Gleaners project. The upshot is that key Skookum members have devoted a lot of time and effort to this community project, to little benefit to the cooperative, while other projects more in tune with our purposes have suffered. The board of Skookum has voted to let this project go, but encourage members to reach out to us if they want to pursue this project outside of the cooperative;
    • David also briefly introduced the concept of a Community Orchard that may prove to be the evolution of Gleaners. Please reach him if you have an interest in this up-coming project.

A couple of items that got a little lost in the fray, but we’ll pick up on these in future posts and gatherings:

    •  Skookum co-presents the feature documentary film How to Make a Farm) at Powell River Film Festival;
    • Skookum’s board wants to set up a Project Selection and Development Team to help in selecting viable projects from member proposals, and guide the process;
    • We want to set up a crack team that will be focused on Fundraising Events, to help fund Skookum projects, and to engage members; contact Giovanni if you are interested.

Skookum co-presents the film “To Make A Farm”

Skookum Food Provisioners’ Cooperative is happy to co-sponsor (with Transition Town Powell River) the feature documentary, To Make a Farm (Canada, 2011) On Saturday February 18, 2012 at the Powell River Film Festival. See below for details, and a clip from the film.

Sat. Feb 18 at 12:30PM, PR Recreation Complex. Click to see large version

Synopsis: Starting a farm from scratch takes more than just imagination, but it’s a good place to start. Often considered a way of life from the past, today there is a movement of young people without farming backgrounds taking up this challenging profession. To Make A Farm follows the lives of five such young people through their first seasons on the land, as the joys and disappointments of bringing life from the earth become a quiet manifesto for social change. Documentary filmmaker Steve Suderman searches his own family history in farming to wonder if the mistakes of the past can be avoided this time through.

To Make A Farm – preview 1 from Steve Suderman on Vimeo.