Here at the Seattle Metro Chamber, we have to 2,500 companies across the region and 13 different business sectors, from your favorite neighborhood restaurant to brands known around the world. We have started our new member feature program based on referrals. Please help us welcome Garden of Eden Urban Farming as our next member feature and tell us who we should feature next!
Garden of Eden Urban Farming‘s mission is to provide the highest quality organic, nutritional, and flavorful herbs, greens, tomatoes, and strawberries, at the best price for consumers. Providing lower transportation time and costs, less spoilage, and meeting market demand efficiently all year round, Garden of Eden supplies locally grown garden produce to both large-scale and small-scale retailers and wholesalers.
In addition, we will provide full-time, state-of-the-art urban farming job training, offering a transformative skills development model for underperforming young adults, veterans, and the unemployed. We will take unskilled young adults and low-skilled workers and give them high-tech, 100% green agriculture skills training required for 21st-century food production. This creates local jobs for local residents.
What’s something you wish you had known before you started or grew your business, or before you chose your current career path?
Don’t make assumptions about the acceptance of new products and services in local markets. Get adequate training and secure financing before launching a business. We’ve had to build awareness of the dietary efficacy of our products in the grocery marketplace while creating the capacity to serve growing demand.
How is your business active in your community?
We partner with entrepreneurs looking to sell to the general market and with nonprofits seeking to make better nutrition available to their communities of interest, e.g., ethnic groups, or other affinity organizations. Past associations have been principally with BIPOC entities.
We subscribe to and support business groups like Tabor 100 and interact frequently with nonprofit community groups. This exposes our organization to a variety of perspectives on the need for our products and services.
We also conduct training programs for prospective urban indoor gardeners.
What does an equitable and inclusive regional economy look like to you?
We produce food. We believe that a large number of independent producers making independent decisions and growing a large variety of crops with varied nutritive importance (e.g., trace elements, minerals, vitamins) is superior to the industrial model of a small number of producers producing a narrow range of crops that have an equivalent low range of nutritional benefit, though they may produce higher short-term profit.
We are intent on helping to tackle the urban food desert that is all too common in impacted, low-income areas of our cities.
Our dispersed, collaborative growing and distribution model is also better for community economies, as it keeps income circulating locally. Our model includes incentives to pay fairly, disperse ownership,p and enable low cost of entry.
Thank you to Garden of Eden Urban Farming for being part of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce network.
If you would like to learn more about how to be featured in our member features series, please contact Cori Lumens.
