Focus on Coop Suppliers:
Angello's Distributing

by Suzanne Fisher

A Vital Link

As you may be aware, Honest Weight fills its shelves and coolers with goods from a variety of growers and distributors. Angello’s Distributing is a name you might not recognize because they are smaller in size than some of our distributors, and only supply food to a region limited to the area between New York City and the Capital District, including the Hudson Valley region.

Angello’s Distributing, privately owned and operated by its founder Joe Angello, started with the intention of helping local farmers find markets for their produce. While not all the food is locally grown, Angello’s does help give us access to local produce and baked goods that are grown or made close to home. Angello’s warehouse is located in Clermont. Two trucks leased from local, family-owned Leroy Holding Company now pick up and deliver produce, meats, dairy, grocery items and baked goods daily.

The farmers, bakers and producers are located throughout western Massachusetts, Vermont, the Berkshires, the Catskills and the Hudson Valley. Every year Joe is adding new growers, and he says that with a reliable market, farmers are growing more.

Some of the brands Angello’s supplies are the Hawthorne Valley line of baked goods, yogurt, cheese and lacto-fermented vegetables; Berkshire Mountain Bakery cookies and pizzas; Cookie Baker Flax Snacks cookies, and the Rapunzel and Med-Org lines of grocery items. He delivers Hardwick beef, which is raised by a group of private growers using a 100% pasture-based diet. In the near future he will have both pork and lamb available from Stone and Thistle Farm, for whom he currently delivers organic goat milk. He will soon carry their organic yogurt as well, which is processed in Norwich at the Evans Farmhouse Creamery plant, a small, family-owned enterprise that has been featured in the Coop Scoop. He also delivers Evans Farmhouse Creamery yogurt, milk and cream, and the Sunrise Family Farms milk.

Joe Angelo sells a wide array of vegetable and fruits from many different farmers, and speaks of how he loads into his trucks lovely, seasonal fresh vegetables that have just been picked that day — and they appear on the shelves and plates of restaurants the very next day. Through him, many of his customers have come to know the particular specialties of specific farms, and will make requests for those items.

Joe agrees that mass-produced “affordable” goods are more expensive than the price tag in the grocery store, when one considers the government subsidies to large farmers and corporations supplied by tax payers, pollution from shipping foodstuffs long distances, and the social and economic costs of keeping America awash in fossil fuel to move that food around. He also has some interesting insights into the food industry that go beyond the usual issues of responsible stewardship of our energy resources, clean air and fair trade. Relying on large distributors is not as secure as we think it is. If United Natural Foods, for example, were to stop delivery to co-ops, most of them would be bankrupt in a matter of weeks.

When asked about other trends in the food industry, Joe cites the fact that in most other nations people spend a much greater percentage of their income on food. In Rome, Italy, 80% of the food served by the public school system is organically grown. The idea that food is supposed to be a cheap commodity, which should originate from wherever it costs the least, is an American phenomenon. He concedes that, in some areas, Americans have begun to look for real quality in their diets. But, as the co-opting of the now-legal term “organic” demonstrates with all its controversies, we are accepting the mass-produced version of what that means.

Joe is disappointed with the organic dairy industry, which he says has diluted the standards and sells mostly ultra-pasteurized milk that lasts for months on the shelves without refrigeration — because it is so sterile and devoid of the enzymes and vitamins found naturally in raw milk. He fears that if the high price of organic milk, which is due to its relatively low supply, falls quickly when the industry responds to the increased demand, the small farmers will be the ones to suffer the most financially — and lose their farms. These are the very farmers we need to encourage and support. What better way than to buy their milk and other dairy products?

Another worry for Joe is that the e-coli episode with spinach in California will have repercussions for future government regulations. That is, he believes that government regulation of salad greens could happen, which would make life very difficult if not impossible for the small farmer attempting to make a living growing this particular item to sell locally.

The future of food in our country depends mostly on the consumers themselves. Joe argues that we must educate ourselves about where our food comes from, what is done to it and how it gets to us. He would like to see the members of Honest Weight ask even more questions about what we buy, and to support our local economies and ecologies by choosing local organic food over imported foods from around the globe. He commends our managers for their focus on local opportunities and urges us to be even more aggressive in our efforts.

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