We are having a great month around here so far. Here is a quick brain dump for mid-July. Our Organic Juice Bar is back in full-tilt this week. The demand for our fresh juices has been so intense, that we broke our cold-pressed juicer. We are back squeezing right now though.

Few notes that are worth mentioning with our Juice program. We only (ever) use Organic products to juice. When you juice fruits and veggies, all of the nutrients and vitamins are concentrated into the juice. Which is obviously a great thing. But if you drink juice from non-Organic produce, you also concentrate all of the herbicides and pesticides that were used in the farming practices. So do yourself a huge favor and only drink Organic juices. Your body will thank you.

Secondly, our Juices are not pasteurized. This keeps all of the fresh vitamins and minerals intact. And maybe even more importantly, the flavor is garden fresh. Pasteurization alters the flavor, there is no denying that.

New Faces in our Juice Bar. Cocktail Mixers! For those of you keeping score at home, you know that the state of New Mexico passed a huge bill this year that allows home delivery of alcohol and food. I could not be happier about this.

Personally, I enjoy alcohol. But I absolutely hate Drinking and Driving. My brother, Jason, and I almost left this rock when we were involved in a car accident where the driver had been drinking. So it is near and dear to my heart to keep drunk drivers off the road. I feel like home delivery will help in this effort.

Additionally, there are some incredible flavors of beverages that pair so well with food. So we are launching 4 great new mixers this week. Crafted in our juice bar, that pair well with the alcohol of your choice…Or add them to soda water to make a fun Mocktail that is alcohol-free for kids or adults. Feel free to sip on these with your Pinkies out. You’ll still feel all classy eh.

To complete the overall vision, someday in the near future, you will be able to add Organically crafted Mixed Cocktails to your SKRS order. But for now, we will have fun working on the mixers and you can add whatever you feel like to them at your casa. Your feedback would be appreciated as we fine-tune the offerings.

Tangerines are back from our buddies in San Diego, Stehly Farms. The variety is called Golden Nugget and they are super yummy. Keep an eye out for those.

Losing the COVID-19. I am sure that I am not the only one who has put on a few lbs over the lockdown. Some comfort eating probably kept my sanity over the last 15 months. But I also noticed that our website was looking a little chubby too. So we are putting our website on a diet in hopes that it will be easier for you to use.

Quick math is that the top 50% of our products account for 89% of our sales. Therefore, we will be phasing out a lot of low demand items in exchange for weekly specials. I want to see items in high demand, or get the heck out of our store. Too many items make packing harder for our crew and the website less friendly for you.

The final vision for this is to have Kitchen Staples, more Weekly Specials, and then the Necessities like dish soap. If we can curate this properly (which we will) then you should feel showered with all you need to have a fantastic food journey, and more efficient for us.

Happy grazing, Farmer Monte

Meal Kit Highlight from Chef Jules: Smoked Pork Belly Tacos with Housemade Pineapple Salsa

Local Pork Belly from Robert Kyzer. Smoked for 8 hours with Applewood chips from Excelsior Orchards. Housemade Pineapple Salsa. SKRS Pickled Peppers and Onions. Cotija and Cilantro. Insane folks. Don’t miss this one.

Few Housekeeping Notes:
Our website just went through a little refresher. Nothing major, but the Harvest Boxes were affected. With this update, we will not be able to put as many items in the Harvest Boxes as we were before. We had to put them on a diet.

What you will see now is about 100 seasonal offerings all on 1 page. Still a very easy way to scroll through and add items to your order from several categories. We will, as we have for 2 decades, offer the weekly produce picks of the week. And these Harvest Boxes will be a fantastic way to stroll through our Produce aisles as well as see what our Kitchen Crew is highlighting.

One other functionality that I want to point out is our system’s ability to place Recurring Orders. If your family goes through a gallon of milk a week, just set it and forget it. Place any number of staple items on recurring order so you do not accidentally miss your cut-off time.

OK, enough housekeeping….So June is one of my favorite months of the year. Even though my back hair keeps me rather warm throughout the year, my body operates better in the heat. When the temps start to hit 90, then I am happy bear.

June is also Pride month. And I have to tell you that the word Pride has been spinning in my mind a lot recently.

As the grip of COVID continues to ease up, I feel very Proud of our crew. Since the world shut down on 3/11/20, our communities asked for our food more than ever. Demand shot up 500% and our crew had to be here to help feed New Mexicans. There was no option for Zoom in our world. We had to come into work.

And over the last 15 months, we have had No cases of COVID in our crew. Truly amazing. We masked up and came together as a team to accomplish so much. An incredible victory for the power of a team.

Furthermore, every single one of our crew members could have thrown in the towel and made more money living on inflated unemployment checks. Know this about our team…No one stayed here because of the money; they could have done better financially watching reruns of The Golden Girls. But everyone knew how important our work is and showed up and kicked butt. This makes me a very proud papa.

I am also a firm believer in the Inclusive nature of Pride month. It might be why I love food so much. Food brings people together. I would be willing to bet that food was involved in the best memories of your life. Food is an incredible uniter. We experience other cultures and people through food. The unity that food brings helps breakdown walls and barriers that we can arbitrarily put in place. Connect through food.

And lastly I will say that from the very first day we broke ground (3/3/2003), our mission has been about offering everyone a seat at our table. Our crew members are every color of the rainbow. Our customers are every color of the rainbow. And I love it.

After a year of COVID and a bumpy election year, I think everyone should take a pause and be Prideful of where we are as a group. Celebrate our similarities. Celebrate (and learn) from our differences. And all take a deep breath and smile knowing that we have green pastures ahead of us and have overcome so much.

Pride On, Farmer Monte

For those food nerds out there (like me), you probably have seen one or a dozen articles concerning the rising cost of food that began in March and is not slowing down. And if you have not seen these articles yet, you will. Gas and food prices will be serious water-cooler chatter coming into the summer. I would like to give you some food for thought.

Our country’s love of cheap food rides on the back of cheap gas. When fuel is inexpensive, the world is your oyster. Find cheap labor, set up shop, and just ship to market. Nothing really fancy about it. But what hap-pens as fuel prices go up? Well, all of the gains that you earned by finding cheap labor get gobbled up in fuel costs and you are back to where you began.

Therefore, when you see rising fuel costs, you know that rising food costs are on the heels. This is where we are at right now amigos. Is this avoidable? Absolutely.

To get off this manic roller coaster, we must expand our scope for long-term solutions to our food system. We need to look beyond short-term gains and build a consistent sustainable food model.

We all remember this from a year ago when the cheap food industry failed us as shelves were empty and over-crowded processing warehouses became the breeding grounds for Covid outbreaks.

At that time, our local and regional food network of many small producers coming together to sell as One, kept food on our tables as we did not have to go to the store. Our strength came from our diversity. We did not put all of our eggs in one basket and because of that we flourished in a very challenging time.

But that was then. Where are we now? Well we are obviously in a different situation than we were a year ago, but our local/regional model is still bringing us stability. We are not held hostage by the price of fuel. By cutting down food miles and cutting out the middle men (and women), we can maintain serious value in our offerings. And so yes, the local food model wins again.

We have built a little safe harbor in the storm of uncertainty. But also know that this is not by accident. The security that our food model maintains comes from decades of relationship building and from you sup-porting our vendors through the good and the bad times.

Our partners know that you have supported their efforts when easier or cheaper options were available; now they support you by not raising prices. A true Win-Win situation for producers and consumers. And I have to tell you that I celebrate these Wins in a marketplace that seemingly acts like if you have a Winner you have to have a Loser. You do not. And we are showing that.

So I invite (ok Encourage) you to browse the website. Our offering of fresh healthy foods has never been more diverse and value-packed than it is right now. Our partner producers are scaling up with more demand and that is decreasing the cost to support lo-cal/regional. And this will only continue to grow as we continue to support one another. It is really exciting to see.

I also encourage you to try all of the prepared foods our kitchen team is putting together. These are quick, convenient, and healthy options for you and your familia to enjoy. Chef Jules is showing us that we do not need to sacrifice quality just because we are looking for quick options to get food on the table.

Enjoy! Farmer Monte

First to bat this week is a big welcome to Silver Leaf Farms to the party. I have known Aaron and Elan for many years and am/have been really impressed with how they have scaled their Corrales farm in a very thoughtful and professional way.

They have pretty much perfected growing butter lettuce and I am happy to have them on board and sup-porting their continued growth. We will see other offerings coming up later this season, but to kick things off, look for their butter lettuce in all Harvest Boxes this week.

Continuation from our last newsletter. As I mentioned, we bought the old Zacatecas restaurant in Nob Hill. And after receiving several emails telling me that I have fallen off the turnip truck, I want to flesh this vision out a bit.

As we have been building out our fresh market concept, The Stand, a crazy thing happened; the space became too small for what we were envisioning. Chef Jules and his team have really shown the demand for high quality, local, convenient, and healthy “fast-food.”

Our lives are very busy, hectic, and at times a bit chaotic. And what we have seen is that healthy food choices are usually sacrificed in the face of convenience. Furthermore, there are Zero fast-food options that support local producers. None.

Our goal/mission is to change this unnecessary paradigm. There is no reason why fast-food cannot be Healthy, Tasty, and Local. But as you can imagine, changing how people eat is not an easy task. But as my Viking dad always says, “If the challenge is easy, the Swedes would have already figured it out.” So let me share with you this 2.0 version of this goal.

By adding a large commercial kitchen, we will not need The Stand to have a huge kitchen footprint. That market will be able to focus on being a true farm stand. It will have Daily Pickups of SKRS orders. It will have a fresh bakery. Healthy deli offerings from soups, salads, sandwiches, and of course our state breakfast, The Burrito. Organic fresh juice bar. Tons of produce. A Meat case to highlight all our awesome Local ranchers. And eventually a wine bar as we take advantage of the new liquor laws that just passed the state.

All in all, it will be a market that gives our community a place to meet, eat, and connect with our local food system. We should have this open in the next month.

That leaves us with an amazing restaurant and kitchen space. So I would like to introduce you to our newest concept, Carbón by Skarsgard Farms. Carbón in Spanish simply means Charcoal. And as I flip through my memories, the favorite flavors throughout my life have been cooked on coals. No fancy ovens, just heat paired with smoke. So Carbón is a space that will pay homage to foods cooked on coals. This will be an in-credible experience for omnivores and vegetarians alike.

Have a tasty weekend, Farmer Monte

Some of my taste buds favorite memories are harvesting strawberries, warmed by the sun, in our U-Pick patch in Santa Cruz. More berries then I could ever eat. It was the first time in my life that I could eat fresh berries until I was stuffed. I fell in love with the U-Pick.

And I have been thinking about that quite a bit recently. U-Pick signifies freshness, abundance, and maybe most importantly, Choice. I got to choose what and how much I wanted to eat of various items. Great experience.

As I have been chewing on (pun intended) our Meal Kit program, I have to tell you that I came to a point that hit me like a bat over the head; why do we have curry (for example) Meal Kits, but I can’t buy just curry sauce? This has become a torn in my bear paw. It doesn’t make sense. We have the ability to and must allow for customizations in our model. You deserve it.

Therefore, I want to introduce you to our newest iteration of New Mexico’s most amazing Meal Kit service.

1-Click Ordering. When you go to the 1-Click Meal Kit page, you will see several meal kits to choose from. Say you add a NM Pork Taco Kit. That whole recipe will default into your order. But here is the interesting part, you can customize it. Say you don’t like Cilantro, just remove it from you order and the price of the Kit will adjust. Say you want more tortillas with your Kit; add some and the price will adjust. Beautifully simple.

Basically, we are building these Kits to be more like how our Harvest Boxes act…We set the default that you will receive if you do not customize. Or open up the meal kit and customize all you like. Get what you like. I am not here to force you to eat cilantro.

Welcome U-Pick Meal Kits! The new addition to our family of Meal Kit inspiration. These kits you will design yourself. Example, click on our Build Your Own Pizza tab. Inside you will see various dough and toppings to choose from. If you want a Gluten Free pizza crust with Hatch green chile and Goat cheese, we have it! Design what you like, and we will bring it to you.

So what you can expect to see in the U-Pick Kits are items like Taco Tuesday, Burger Time, Pasta Night, Pizza Party, Links/Sausages, and Choose Your Own Pizza Adventure. We will be adding more categories to these meal kits as we move along, but this is our “Seed.”

With the addition of Customizations comes one change; we will No longer be packing kits into the cute brown paper bags. I like the bags, but the labor that we put into packing those individual kits is very expensive. So we pass those costs along to you. Unfortunately.

With this new system, all of the items for your meals will be in your order, but you will have to separate the items at your casa. This will help us to a) allow you to customize and b) $ave you Money! I think that you will be very impressed with the savings you will see with this new meal kit structure.

Last bit of fantastic news that I have been waiting to share with you…drum-roll please…we are the proud new parents of the old Zacatecas restaurant in Nob Hill. As we were building out The Stand’s kitchen, we realized that we were too limited on our scope. Our prepared food program is an absolute rocket ship. So we now have a large kitchen space that will expand offering through the home delivery platform, and yes, we will be opening a killer taco restaurant. More to come.

Hugs, Farmer Monte

Cardboard. We have received more than a plethora of emails about reusing the cardboard. Folks, I know that we have the sexiest cardboard boxes that you have ever seen. Unfortunately, we cannot reuse them. It is just not sanitary to build a fort for your cats with them and then turn around and put Local bagels back into them.

The good news is that cardboard is in high demand and recycling it happens very quickly. Most of the re-cycled cardboard is back on the streets within 45 days. Or a month and a half in dog years. So please reuse our boxes if you can. But if you cannot, place those babies in your curbside recycling bins (guilt-free) and know that they will be back on your doorstep shortly. Reincarnation is real. Believe.

Speaking of reincarnation and building good Karma. We have come to a beautiful solution with our cooler pile that we have lingering from our pre-Covid business model. We want to donate coolers to any family or team who is in need of coolers. I grew up on the fields and courts of youth sports. I think I still have bits of orange pulp stuck in my teeth from half-time.

So if you need or know anyone who could use coolers for their youth sports teams, we want to donate these coolers to help out. So many groups have been hit hard by Covid, but youth sports has been awful. Let’s help these kiddos get back on the pitch.

Eliminating the waste stream. My brother, Jason, has an infamous (more than famous) saying that “None of this animal goes to waste.” He usual says that as he is filling up my wine glass. But the root of his point is obviously that we cannot waste resources. And finding a use for all resources is one of the hardest things for sustainable businesses to tackle. 2021 will be our biggest push ever to get our mission/business to Zero Waste. Here are a few things that we are working on….

Bakery Treats. As you have been stuffing your pie hole with all of the wonderful baked goods that our bakers have been pulling from the oven, you probably never knew that the fruit fillings were made from blemished fruits from Excelsior Orchards. Fruit that was not perfect to look at, but still insanely delicious.

Our Housemade Bacon is raised in the South Valley, but then smoked with apple wood trimmings from Excelsior Orchards. My wife, Adrie, and I stood in the orchard with Paul last summer and we saw huge piles of trimmings. “What do you do with those piles?” We burn them. “Shoot, let’s try smoking some meats with them.” OK. Next thing you know, our house bacon is probably one of our most incredible products we make.

Dog Treats (on the website now). After we juice veggies for our Juice Bar, we are left with a gorgeous (but unusable) pulp of Organic goodness. So our juice guru, Sarah, decided to mix that pulp with some flax and tahini and baked some pretty amazing dog treats. Check them out if you have some pups around the casa.

Lastly, 18 Cheers for 18 years! The first week of March marks our birthday. I know a lot of folks do not like birthdays, but I love them. To last 365 days on this rock is no easy feat whether you are a person or business. I am so grateful, proud, and Lucky to have been able to chase my dream for all these years. Thank you for the continued support. And I am thankful for all of our crew members who work as hard as I do to build a better food system for New Mexico. Adelante!

Farmer Monte

What a crazy week last week was for deliveries. Sure, we did not get it as badly as other folks around the country, but that really challenged our delivery limits. Good thing our drivers carry snowshoes. Really proud of all our chariot drivers who got all of the deliveries out and brought themselves (and our rigs) back in one piece. Nice to have professionals on your team!

Couple of quick housekeeping pointers as I do a brain-dump here. Prices. If we need to adjust prices up or down, we do that on Friday mornings. Our offerings change weekly, and with that, we need the flexibility to change prices accordingly once a week.

So if you are ordering broccoli today for delivery 3 weeks from now (that our system allows you to do), I cannot promise it will be at the same price. Produce is a volatile market and we do our best to bring you all of the value that we can.

Also along the lines of pricing…I know two things to be true at this point; 1. Families are struggling financially to make ends meet, and 2. New Mexico has supported our business throughout the pandemic in ways that I never imagined possible. I am grateful for that. So as you might have noticed, we are passing huge savings to all of our customers in this challenging time.

There is no magic in business. The more customers that we feed, the more efficiently our business runs. With that, we can offer better pricing to you. And I am 100% committed to making our food as price competitive as we can. I know that fresh healthy foods can get kicked out of the shopping cart when we have to tighten our belts. I don’t want that to happen to our customers.

As one of the new things that you will see on the site is our Farmers’ Abundance Box. What I have done was repurpose the Scratch n Dent Box. Our incredible kitchen crew is finding homes for all of our Scratched produce. So instead, we have created a Harvest Box filled with the best value produce of the week in one box. This week for example is 10 items for only $20! That is a ridiculous value to still be eating healthy, regionally, and Organically.

Spring Cleaning. This week we are going to begin a process to redesign the way we pack your orders. Here are some of the highlights we are aiming to accomplish.

Seafood. We have a new connection who works at the Boston Fish Market. They take fish directly from the boats, cut that seafood into 1 lb packages, and then freeze them. We will then fly that seafood into the ABQ Sunport and have it ready for your orders. But to make this happen, we need to pack frozen items into your orders literally as the drivers are heading out. This will ensure you get access to the best seafood in the state.

More items on the website. With seafood, more prepared food options, more meal kits, and expanding items overall, our Pack Line just needs more space. So we will be extending this line to serpentine throughout the warehouse and give us the needed space to bring you more. It will be bringing together Refrigerated items, Dry good items, and Frozen items in a way that we have never done before. But it needs to happen.

Patience. Change is difficult. There maybe some minor bumps in this transition. I ask for patience and also remind you that if something is ever Not Right in your order, just let us know and we’ll make it right.

Green pastures to come amigos, Farmer Monte