Farm to Restaurant delivers again! The New Mexico USDA Rural Development office awards a $24,100 federal grant to the Santa Fe Alliance to support the expansion of the Farm to Restaurant Delivers project. A very special awards ceremony will take place Thursday, July 28th at 5:00 pm at the Santa Fe Farmers Market in recognition [...]

Much has been made of the farm-to-table restaurant movement. But what happens to all the food that ends up uneaten at the table? In what you might call a burgeoning table-to-farm movement, a small but growing number of companies are being launched around the country to answer that question, to help restaurants deal with the [...]

The National Restaurant Association’s “What’s Hot” survey of more than 1,500 professional chefs – members of theAmerican Culinary Federation (ACF) – reveals that local and hyper-local sourcing, healthy children’s meals, sustainable seafood, and gluten-free cuisine will be among the hottest trends on restaurant menus in 2011. For the full story, read on.

Farm to Restaurant: Serving Up Local, Organic, Sustainable Dining In our current global food system, where food is mass-produced, sprayed with chemicals and transported hundreds of miles to get to your plate, I am proud to be involved in a project that counteracts this unhealthy system and takes us back to a more community-based way of [...]

We are working on getting together as many Santa Fe restaurant owners, chefs and managers as possible for a one-day open house to inform these folks about the Farm to Restaurant project, both the marketing campaign and the delivery system. Specifically, we are looking for some projections on local food buying needs from the restaurants [...]

In August, a Federal court ruled that USDA’s approval of genetically engineered (GE), “Roundup Ready” sugar beets was unlawful, concluding that USDA had failed to conduct an adequate analysis of the impacts of this crop on farmers and the environment, such as the biological contamination of non-GE crops with GE pollen.  The Court made the [...]

“While I strongly believe in and support our local farmer markets and know that they are an essential piece in the food system, there is a greater need in the region than farmers markets can provide.  Our work is not about getting value-added products for sale at the farmers markets. It’s about getting them into [...]

August was a solid month in the Santa Fe Farm to Restaurant distribution system. From our end the system seems to be working more and more smoothly as folks fall into the rhythm of the new program. We want to congratulate and thank the restaurants for getting on board so quickly with box recycling. It [...]

Dear Farm to Restaurant Distribution Participants: On behalf of the Santa Fe Alliance Farm to Restaurant Team, I want to congratulate you all on a fantastic first month of the Distribution Pilot Project. Restaurants have purchased $6,895 worth of fresh, local food and farmers have received $5,871 in additional sales. We know that there have been [...]

When it launched five years ago, the Santa Fe Alliance’s Farm to Restaurant Project was a humble marketing program aimed at informing customers about which restaurants were buying locally. This year, with help from a grant from the Department of Agriculture, Farm to Restaurant has begun a new distribution project to facilitate restaurants acquiring food [...]