Just over a year ago, on a brisk late September day in Spokane, Washington, two medium-sized cargo trucks backed up to the open garage door of a small warehouse in an alley behind a carpet store and a used-car dealer. Inside the warehouse, a forklift beeped incessantly as its operator stacked pallets of cardboard boxes full of meat, cheese and produce onto the trucks’ lowered loading gates.
A farmer drove up in a faded red minivan. He unloaded bags and boxes of crisp red, orange and yellow bell peppers and tomatoes as big as softballs, the last in a procession of morning deliveries from farmers to the warehouse of the Local Inland Northwest Cooperative, or LINC Foods. The co-op is a marketplace, an online and physical hub where restaurants, schools, grocery stores, hospitals and individual shoppers can order produce and other food from small farmers in the region instead of relying on huge wholesalers.
Beth Robinette, one of LINC’s co-founders, checked to make sure orders were complete. Then the trucks pulled out of the alley. One headed south toward the college towns of Moscow, Idaho, and Pullman, Washington. The other went east, to restaurants and health food stores in Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls, Idaho, before returning to Spokane to zigzag between businesses and schools.
