People’s Food Co-op is happy to announce that we are now selling products from Elgin, Minnesota’s Hidden Stream Farm.

In a competitive marketplace that has increasingly demanded that farmers get big or get out, a group of small Amish family farms in Eastern Iowa came together to pool their resources to find a way to continue their traditional way of life.

“If you want good craft beers, you have to go to the brew pub that’s making the stuff.”

La Riojana winery is a producers’ co-op from Argentina. They’ve supplied PFC with great wines since 2016.

Hidden Springs Creamery has a new owner and new cheeses for People’s Food Co-op.

A visit with Hare and Tortoise Farm, produce supplier for PFC—Rochester.

We recently visited with Tom Weighner, one of the partners of PFC’s local dairy supplier, WW Homestead in Waukon, Iowa.

Sambusas are a deep-fried pastry with savory filling—similar to Cornish pasties, Italian calzones, or Argentine empanadas. Every community that has immigrated to this country has brought their traditional foods and added those flavors to the American menu.

People’s Food Co-op has a friend in Minneapolis. The Co-op Partners Warehouse, or CPW, has worked with PFC for many years to bring fresh produce and other products to our shoppers in La Crosse and Rochester.

People’s Food Co-op made a recent visit to Viroqua’s fermented food producer Fizzeology. Fizzeology has been a steady supplier to People’s Food Co-op for many years. Faith Anacker brought her Sauerkraut, Kimchi, and other flavors into the La Crosse store in 2012. Faith sold the company to Rob Andolsek about two years ago. PFC met with Rob and his production crew on a chilly fall morning. During the length of our interview, the crew cut, trimmed, shredded, and set up for fermentation several hundred pounds of cabbage for a batch of German Sauerkraut.

Quebracho has been supplying Argentine-style empanadas to both PFC stores since 2021. Quebracho’s owner and chef Belén Rodríguez moved to Minneapolis in 2012 from her native Argentina. She initially worked at a hospital in the Twin Cities as a translator. To relieve her homesickness, she started cooking the foods that she used to make with her grandmother back home.

The O’Neill Farm in southeastern Minnesota supplies lamb and beef to Rochester shoppers. They are a grass farm; they grow no crops. The farm is covered in tall grass, green and lush after the recent rains.

Deutsch Family Farm outside of Osseo, Wisconsin has been in business since the mid-2000s. Alison and her husband, Jim, were city people who had wanted to farm for years.

Pearson Organics was founded in 2017 by Kristin Pearson, who is originally from Rochester, MN. Starting from rented land near Oronoco, Pearson Organics moved to its permanent home in the bluffs of Lake City in March of 2020. They proudly supply PFC with beautiful organic seedlings each spring.

Lyfe Gardens is a small hydroponic farm in Bangor, Wisconsin. Steve and Michelle Glandt have been supplying red, green, and romaine lettuces to People’s Food Co-op of La Crosse since 2016. Their ambitions are truly local. They harvest about 200 heads of lettuce a week. Besides the co-op, they also supply fresh lettuce to two local school districts.

Toppling Goliath of Decorah, Iowa, started in 2009 when Barb Lewey bought her husband, Clark, a five-gallon beer brewing kit and he discovered he was an avid brewer

Sno Pac “Organic before organic was cool.”

“We’re harvesting organic product from our greenhouses daily, and we do that year-round”