It’s no secret that the Creston Valley offers an abundance of fresh food, from vegetables to fruit to meat. But there’s nothing quite like seeing a lot of it in one place — and you can at Fooby’s Local Food Store, where most of the produce sold is grown within five kilometers.
“It’s cool to see how much is grown in the Creston Valley,” said Kaitlin Viers, who owns the store at 3851 Highway 3 in Erickson. “When I started, people said, ‘You’re gonna have to go outside for a lot.’ ”
But with over 90 small farms (under an acre) consigning their goods and with 50 producers from whom she buys outright, the 26-year-old has proven the skeptics wrong.
She’d been thinking about opening a local food store for several years, but really became inspired last year when she helped a woman create a map to source her Thanksgiving dinner — even cranberries — in the Kootenays. But the woman ended up driving over 300 kilometres to do so — Fooby’s solves that problem by bringing everything together in one place.
Viers’ guidelines specify the product must be fresh, and locally grown, produced or made by a local person. That’s led to Fooby’s offering spices from three producers, berries, quince, tomatillos, beef, skillet-roasted coffee, pork, rabbit, flour, tea, honey and cheese — with that many producers, the list is obviously extensive.
By expanding local to include the Kootenay, Boundary and Columbia regions, Viers has been able to bring in items not available from Creston producers, such as Jerseyland Organics cheese from Grand Forks and, soon, kombucha from Nelson. And more could be on its way.
“As soon as you go over the mountain to Salmo, there are 15 small family businesses that make food products,” Viers said.
About 35 per cent, though, is produced on-site. Viers leases about 16 acres (10.5 of those orchard and the rest garden) at the former Sun-Kee Farms, which she and her father, Kevin, grow fruit and vegetables.
“Dad specializes in heirloom varieties of tomatoes,” Viers said.
Some of the property’s apple trees are over 70 years old, and they include rare varieties such as Tydeman’s Red (“They used to be really popular in the ’60s”) and Tiger (“It’s a variety that came in the ’30s to Canada”).
The greengage plums are a bit of a surprise for customers, as well.
“I’ve had people come in and says, ‘Those are not ripe yet’, but they’re just green,” said Viers. “A lot of Albertan tourists are astonished at the stuff we have here. I had a lady who was over the moon because of the plums — we have Italian, greengage, red, yellow, Bradshaw, pollinator and Mirabelle.”
Coming soon to Fooby’s is Roasted Oat artisan granola, and bulk grains and sugar from sugar beets are possibilities, as well.
“I am also trying to convince a couple of farmers to grow me an acre of kidney beans,” she said.
Viers opened Fooby’s on June 1, and plans to keep going through the winter, with a few crops that should keep growing as the weather gets chilly.
“We have two greenhouses, so we have peppers and tomatoes, and I planted Swiss chard and spinach,” she said.
To keep the store going year-round, Viers will start adding Christmas crafts and candy as the major growing season winds down, and in the winter and spring, she’ll offer Apocalyptic Life Skills classes, covering canning to root cellar creation to gardening through the year. She hopes to add a commercial kitchen to make it possible for more producers to, well, produce.
For now, though, Viers is happy to have met her main goals of helping farmers to sell and making it easier for consumer to buy.
“It’s important for me to have a store that sells food so farmers can concentrate on being farmers, and so customers don’t have to go so far. I wanted to show people, too, that it’s affordable to eat local.”
