Fresh Picks offers year-round home delivery in the Chicago area of local and organic produce, meat, dairy, eggs, baked goods and more! We are partnering with sustainable farmers in the region to grow the supply of local food in a way that protects our health and the environment.

With our current global system, food is grown, processed and transported thousands of miles around the world to feed the earth’s population. Most farms are connected to global corporations that arrange for all aspects of gathering, processing, distributing, marketing and selling crops. For small regional farms that grow, or want to move more into growing, a diverse set of consumer-ready products (vegetables, fruits, meats, eggs), the picture is quite different. The networks for marketing and distribution of local consumer-ready crops have been replaced by global systems that do not serve regional needs well, if at all.

On the marketing and city distribution end, Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks has been able to successfully implement increased local food deliveries over the past three and a half years (over 29,000 deliveries in 2009) throughout the Chicago area. This has enabled local farmers working with Fresh Picks to expand production, employment and income.  For the 2010 Season, Fresh Picks is working with farmers to alleviate the additional bottlenecks of post-harvest handling, packing and transporting farm products so the many benefits of local food, principally to public health, the environment, and rural economies, can be increased and more broadly enjoyed. 

At Fresh Picks, our efficient routing and delivery practices minimize the number of miles we travel and take other cars off the road, estimated at 200 saved trips per day. these practices include only delivering to each eighborhood one day each week to reduce the back and forth miles traveled by our vans as well as using routing software to find the most efficient routes each day. The bins we deliver in not only keep our food fresh, but are reusable with a very long working life.

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