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Harvie Farms Pittsburgh Seeking Part-time Operations Assistant

Harvie Farms Pittsburgh Seeking Part-time Operations Assistant

Harvie Farms Pittsburgh is a local foods home delivery service based in Lawrenceville. Founded in 2020 with a mission to make it as simple as possible for families to have access to local foods, Harvie Farms is a farm share model that emphasizes customization and convenience.

We are looking for smart and motivated individuals that want to work in a start-up food hub environment as an Operations Assistant. Each week the Harvie Farms crew will work together to aggregate products from our farm and producer partners and then create customized farm shares for customers in our Pittsburgh warehouse space. Products will include produce, eggs, milk, cheese, bread, meat, flowers, and other locally made products.

Most work hours will be daytime Tuesdays through Thursdays starting immediately. Room for advancement and additional hours available for the right candidate. The best applicants will be:

  • Quick workers with an extremely high attention to detail.
  • Motivated to communicate and work well with a team.
  • Reliable, prompt, and flexible.
  • Familiar with the various types of produce and farm products offered in a diverse farm share.
  • Interested in supporting local farms and providing high levels of customer service.
  • Able to do repetitive tasks that involve lifting and hauling on a warehouse floor.

Compensation begins at $15/hour. To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to neil@harvie.farm. Positions will fill quickly—we recommend applying soon.

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Culture bearers in New Orleans Eat Farm Fresh with Feed the Second Line and Harvie

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 1/25/2021

Simon Huntley
Founder/CEO, Harvie
http://harvie.farm/neworleans
simon@harvie.farm

Devin Dewulf
Founder, Feed the Second Line
https://www.feedthesecondline.org/
redbeansfounder@gmail.com 

Culture bearers in New Orleans Eat Farm Fresh with Feed the Second Line and Harvie
Feed the Second Line is partnering with Harvie Farms New Orleans to get farm-fresh local food directly to the door steps of culture bearers

New Orleans, LA. — This week, Feed the Second Line adds five culture-bearers to the Harvie Farms New Orleans home delivery service. These culture-bearers will receive a customized box of local food from farms and suppliers in Louisiana and Mississippi. 

The estimated cost is $2,500 for a year’s worth of Harvie deliveries for one culture-bearer – the goal is to add them all 120 culture bearers in 2021 (which means a goal of $312,500).

“This is really important because our elders need access to healthy food and we need to also support small, local farms in our purchasing power” says Devin Dewulf, founder of Feed the Second Line.

As the general public signs up for the Harvie Farms New Orleans service, they will have the option of donating $10, $25, or $50 per delivery to Feed the Second Line that will be used to purchase Harvie deliveries for culture bearers.

“We are excited to support the culture of New Orleans through Feed the Second Line while also supporting the agri-culture of the region by bringing local farms and suppliers to the front door of Harvie Farms New Orleans members. It’s good for our culture, our farmers, and, most importantly, the food is delicious and farm fresh,” says Simon Huntley, CEO of Harvie.

About Harvie Farms New Orleans

Harvie Farms New Orleans works with more than 30 local farms and suppliers to bring a localized, farm-fresh grocery box to the front door of members. The delivery area includes metropolitan New Orleans, Kenner, Slidell, and Covington. Harvie’s goal is to help small, local farms beat the big buys by creating a direct link between farmers and consumers in the New Orleans region. Information on becoming a member can be found at http://harvie.farm/neworleans

About Feed the Second Line

Launched by the Krewe of Red Beans in 2020, Feed the Second Line seeks to create a strong safety net for New Orleans culture. Purchasing groceries for our culture-bearers and creating jobs. In 2020, Feed the Second Line purchased over $130,000 worth of groceries and created $300,000 worth of jobs for New Orleans culture-bearers. Feed the Second Line is an effort to support the folks who create New Orleans culture and make our city special. Spy Boys, Baby Dolls, Musicians, Second Lines – all of these are created by people. During these tough times of COVID, we invite you to join us – in supporting the culture bearers.

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Where to shop for local food in New Orleans

We are coordinating “buy local” efforts at the Geaux Local Community group on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/401785854225137/

Here are some options to shop local food in New Orleans. Please submit any other options to neworleans@harvie.farm and we’ll post them here.

For all of your grocery needs (produce, meat, cheese, seafood and more):

Harvie Farms New Orleans 

Each week Harvie Farms New Orleans brings a home delivered, customized box from local farms and vendors to bring you everything from produce to cheese, meat, seafood, and more:
https://www.harvie.farm/farm/harvie-farms-new-orleans/signup

Use coupon code SHOPLOCAL to get 25% off your first delivery.

Other great options for local produce:

Sheaux Fresh Sustainable Foods (Black-Owned Business)

Thaddeaus Prosper has served thousands of people including two Presidents of the United States. He is now applying those experiences to Sheaux Fresh Sustainable Foods, striving to provide the same level of quality in their products and services by pulling from aspects of multiple disciplines and experiences. Everything that they can provide locally they will in the season in which it is available locally. They understand that there are some things that are desired even when out of season. They will bring those things in and provide you the knowledge if it’s origins. You will find Produce, eggs, honey, seedlings, and garden help and much more!

Covey Rise Farm

Fresh locally grown vine ripened vegetables from Covey Rise Farms in Husser, LA. Expect a selection of seasonally grown produce.

River Queen Greens

The River Queen Greens Farm Share contains a variety of Certified Naturally Grown produce from our New Orleans farm along with some produce from additional local farms. Boxes include a robust selection of greens – salad, cooking, and microgreens – root crops, fresh herbs, and other seasonal favorites. Eggs, mushrooms, and other local products are typically available as add-ons.

For other specialty items:

Buttery Spell  (Black-Owned Business)

Buttery Spell works with local family-owned farms and food co-ops to bring quality products directly to you, guaranteeing the freshest tastes of home! All our nut butters are made with local products. You will find delicious flavored butters, nut butters, charcuterie boards and more!

Viola’s Heritage Breads (Black-Owned Business)

The great, entrepreneurial, and intentional Dream with Viola’s Heritage Sandwich Breads is to create a perpetual international business, rooted in honoring the contributions of unacknowledged people of color in food, that provides a high-quality, culinary-crafted and -flavored everyday quality sandwich bread option. Best enjoyed toasted and as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

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Announcing Harvie Farms New Orleans

We are happy to announce Harvie Farms New Orleans, a new service that brings together the best local farms in the New Orleans area, allows you to customize your farm box before each delivery and then brings the harvest right to your doorstep!

Image
Madeline and Timothy, farmers at Compostella Farm in Picayune, MS who are suppliers for Harvie Farms New Orleans.

In the local farm community here in New Orleans and across the country, we recognize that food buying habits are changing.

We are a group of experienced local farmers, distributors, and farm technology folks who want to make it easy for you to get access to the most quality local food for your home kitchen. Think of Harvie Farms New Orleans as the ease of online shopping, Amazon, and home delivery meets the unique tastes and freshness of CSAs and farmers markets.

We are a national company with local roots in the New Orleans region: our distribution partner is JV Foods who has deep connections to the local food community in New Orleans.

Why Harvie Farms New Orleans?

  • We work with multiple farms across the New Orleans region so your farm box can include vegetables, fruit, cheese, eggs, bread, meat, seafood, milk, and more!
  • Home delivery to the New Orleans region.
  • Customize your box each week so you get exactly what you want and nothing you don’t.
  • Get your farm box on your schedule! When you are out of town, just pause your box or reschedule it for another week.
  • Built in cooking and recipe tips plus connect with farm share members all over the world (literally!)

So how does it work?

  1. Start at the sign up page:
    https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-farms-new-orleans
  2. Pick a farm box, small ($49), medium ($79), or large ($109) — plus a $6 home delivery fee — which will include a fully customizable product selection each week.
  3. Choose a frequency of delivery: weekly, every-other-week, and every-four-weeks and remember you can schedule around your needs.
  4. If you want pork, poultry, seafood, sausage and more, choose a meat and seafood box for delivery once per month.
  5. Complete contact info and payment info.
  6. (Optional) Set product preferences so Harvie knows what you like and what you don’t like and we’ll pre-customize based on your product preferences.
  7. First deliveries start on December 1st
  8. Each week, customize your box if you like and we’ll deliver it to your door on Tuesday afternoons.

We are looking for 400 families to join us for this first season to make Harvie Farms New Orleans fly!

To encourage you to join us, use the coupon code FIRST400 to get 25% off your first box. Sign up here:
https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-farms-new-orleans

This coupon code will be valid until 11/25. We expect to sell out quickly, so we welcome your sign up as soon as possible!

-Simon Huntley
CEO, Harvie
harvie.farm/neworleans

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Harvie is hiring Member Support Specialists (remote)

Member Support Specialist

About Us

Harvie (http://harvie.farm) connects local consumers with local farmers who deliver shares of farm fresh products customized to their personal preferences.

Our company was started in 2006 to meet the technology and marketing needs of local farmers across the US, Canada, and internationally and has served 1000’s of farms in the last 13 years. We have since evolved into the Harvie platform, which was introduced in late 2016 to address the changing landscape of food buying and to help farmers grow sales and profit by making local food more accessible through a customer friendly CSA / farm share model. The concept has grown rapidly. In 2020, Harvie has helped 200 farmers serve approximately 100,000 end consumers.

At Harvie, we believe all employees benefit from starting their Harvie career journey in our Member Support department. This department is the stepping stone where everyone will learn the software from the ground up and get a feel for our company “voice” as we build relationships with our farmers and members. We are a young and growing company and encourage professional development every step of the way. We’ll work with every team member to identify their strengths and set a career path that best fits their unique assets and the needs of our company.

About the Position

The Harvie Member Support Specialists work as the front line of customer support for assisting our partner farms’ members navigate their subscriptions through the Harvie platform. Support requests come in primarily through emails in a ticketing system but also by phone. Supporting our farmers’ members often involves tasks such as helping them get signed up, scheduling vacations, making cancellations, processing refunds, billing questions, technical difficulties, and other account management issues.

As with any small company, this position will be multidisciplinary and will occasionally include work involving other aspects of the company including marketing, product development and testing. This is an exciting opportunity for independent, self-starting individuals who are ready to grow with Harvie.

We are an all remote team so collaboration, communication and the ability to document and manage tasks are key!

Responsibilities:

  • Independently manage a high volume of member support requests coming from both farmers and members
  • Quickly learn the ins and outs of our Harvie platform to best advise members and farmers
  • Respond to tickets within our designated time limits based on priority
  • Answer tickets with our company “voice” and Style Guide in mind
  • Seek out help from the appropriate avenues when needed to provide the best possible answers
  • Work in collaboration with a team of member support specialists, farm account managers, and software developers to diagnose issues and address potential bugs
  • Stay up-to-date on documentation and new software developments to ensure you’re advising farms and members appropriately

Important details:

  • Full-time position
  • Competitive starting salary range from $45 – $55k
  • Health benefits inc. vision and dental, retirement plan, and paid vacation
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company!
  • Remote work office stipend if working remotely
  • Office on North Shore of Pittsburgh, 10 minute walk from downtown, free parking
  • Full-time work is 40 hours a week including some regular weekend coverage required
  • Equal Opportunity Employer

About You:

  • Passionate for Harvie and our mission to help small farms beat the big guys
  • Natural problem-solver with the ability to deductively get to root causes of problems
  • Able to manage and reach multiple goals simultaneously
  • Highly organized and attentive to detail
  • A thoughtful communicator with the ability to handle a high volume of communications from various channels while being mindful of tone and empathy
  • Able to write friendly, grammatically correct, and clear support emails
  • Able to explain technical concepts in a non-technical manner
  • Advanced computational skills
  • Comfort with friendly phone support — support is unscripted and requests are often unique
  • Able to work independently yet collaboratively
  • Able to learn or have experience with web-based utilities such as Google Suite (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets), Zendesk, Atlassian Suite, Guru, Slack, and Zoom

Apply

Follow this link to fill out our Harvie Applicant Form: https://airtable.com/shriZlBNv99ZoQ7g2
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Making connections between farmers and consumers in the midst of a pandemic

(For those that want to get right to the point…. we are taking sign-ups for home delivery in Pittsburgh via Harvie Farms Pittsburgh and also we are shipping meat to a 5 state radius of western Pennsylvania now via our Stockman Share if you are not in the Pittsburgh metro area. For a longer story, see below!)

Jubilee Hilltop Ranch, one of the farms that supplies meat for Harvie Farms Pittsburgh boxes, lost 97% of their revenue when COVID-19 related shut downs closed restaurants across Allegheny County. With Harvie and the support of our members across the region, we were able to fill many of those orders for Neal and his family at Jubilee Hilltop Ranch. Neal talked about this experience recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Biiu9JmAZY

When we launched Harvie Farms Pittsburgh in January, we had no idea what was coming in March, but our work felt more important than ever this year. In the middle of a pandemic, it felt good to be of use: supporting farms and distributing food directly to the door.

My vision with Harvie since we launched four years ago has been to make buying from local farms as easy as buying from Amazon. The benefits of local agriculture are many: fresh and delicious food, less transportation in distribution, growing the local economy, building community, and supporting farms that are taking care of their land in a responsible manner.

However, we recognize that the experience of buying from local farmers must be more convenient. There has been a missing piece between the farmer and the consumer. Part of it is technology that can serve as that bridge (and that is what we worked on for the first few years of Harvie’s life) but there is also distribution. As a local food system, we have not figured out how to make that direct connection in a way that works for farmers, distributors, retailers, and consumers at large scale. I believe Harvie and especially the model we are piloting at Harvie Farms Pittsburgh is part of that answer.

In essence, we help small farms beat the big guys.

Although our overall food supply was never really in doubt this Spring, the sight of empty grocery store shelves got us thinking as a society about where our food comes from. This resulted in a huge sales increase for the local food economy. Our network of farms across the United States and Canada saw a 500% increase in year-over-year sales.

Fast forward to August and we are delivering over 500 boxes per week to our Pittsburgh community and we are working on our logistics so we can serve more people. We are opening a third delivery day to keep up with demand, so as of today we are open for sign ups again!

To sign up for Harvie Farms Pittsburgh visit:
https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-farms-pittsburgh

We have been sold out most of the year and we expect these new slots to sell out quickly!

If you are outside of Allegheny county and the delivery area for Harvie Farms Pittsburgh, or know someone who is, I encourage you to check out our new option that we call the Stockman Share. It is a meat box delivered straight from Jubilee Hilltop Ranch. For delivery, we are using the FedEx network so we can serve a much larger population base. Here is a map of the delivery area:

Sign up here:
https://www.harvie.farm/signup/harvie-stockman-share

Thank you for your support of our “Harvie farms” in these strange times. I continue to believe that buying and eating local food is one of the most concrete acts you can take to make a difference in the world and in your own life. Every dollar that you spend in the local food economy is a vote for this kind of agriculture.

-Simon Huntley
CEO, Harvie

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Harvie is Hiring a Senior Symfony Developer

Harvie is seeking a talented and driven PHP/Symfony lead who enjoys working collaboratively to deliver useful solutions to complex problems. We are looking for a candidate with vision, but also somebody who rolls up their sleeves and becomes a can-do executor, driving features to success and routing around roadblocks in a pinch.  You will take on a leadership role in our group’s efforts to improve the performance, maintainability and code quality of our applications.  You have equal parts interest in coding standards, execution and testing, with the background to prove it.

Responsibilities

  • Develop new features and assist in their design
  • Work with all teams and senior management  on product strategy, design and user experience
  • Maintain high code quality standards
  • Implement best practice automated testing systems and continuous improvement processes for development

Requirements

  • A strong point of view who can communicate their opinions to the team, as well as senior management
  • Expert in PHP7 with strong knowledge of Object Oriented concepts
  • Experience in Symfony, or another PHP framework (Zend, Laravel, etc.)
  • Excellent relational database skills with MySQL
  • Experience with building restful JSON web services
  • Experience writing automated tests with PHPUNIT, Codeception, or another testing framework
  • Passionate about code optimization

Why Work at Harvie?

  • Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation
  • Office in Pittsburgh, but remote work is fine 
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company
  • Flexible, relaxed, but fast moving environment

About Harvie

Harvie, founded as Small Farm Central in 2006, is a Pittsburgh-based company that helps local farmers sell to local consumers and compete in a changing food-buying marketplace by making it simple and customer-friendly to buy local food from local farms. We are a small team of 20 smart, dedicated individuals. We are an innovative, fast-moving, and fast-growing company.

How to Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to kyle@harvie.farm with subject line “Symfony at Harvie”.

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Front End Web Developer, ReactJS / React Native

Harvie is seeking a talented and driven ReactJS lead who enjoys working collaboratively to deliver useful solutions to complex problems. We are looking for a candidate with vision, but also somebody who rolls up their sleeves and becomes a can-do executor, driving features to success and routing around roadblocks in a pinch.  You will take on a leadership role in our group’s efforts to improve the user experience and code quality of our applications.  You have equal parts interest in coding standards and user experience, with the background to prove it.

Responsibilities

  • Develop new features and assist in their design
  • Work with all teams and senior management  on product strategy, design and user experience
  • Maintain high code quality standards
  • Implement best practice automated testing systems and continuous improvement processes for front end development

Requirements

  • Design oriented developer with a passion for elegant code. 
  • Understand of object oriented CSS, LESS and/or SASS
  • A strong point of view who can communicate their opinions to the team, as well as senior management
  • Expert in React
  • Typescript
  • React Native and experience developing native mobile apps is a plus
  • UI/Component Library (blueprintjs.com, bulma.io)

Why Work at Harvie?

  • Health benefits, retirement plan, and paid vacation
  • Office in Pittsburgh, but remote work is fine 
  • Harvie farm share paid for by the company
  • Flexible, relaxed, but fast moving environment

About Harvie

Harvie, founded as Small Farm Central in 2006, is a Pittsburgh-based company that helps local farmers sell to local consumers and compete in a changing food-buying marketplace by making it simple and customer-friendly to buy local food from local farms. We are a small team of 15 smart, dedicated individuals. We are an innovative, fast-moving, and fast-growing company.

Apply

Send resume and cover letter in PDF format to kyle@harvie.farm with subject line “ReactJS at Harvie”.

 

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Harvie Farms Local: An open-sourced model for online, home-delivered farm distribution in the age of COVID-19, and beyond

In January, I launched a partnership with a Pittsburgh based farmer and local foods distributor, Neil Stauffer, called Harvie Farms Pittsburgh.

The concept, that I call “Harvie Farms Local”, is about more than just Pittsburgh and is rather simple. It is a multi-farm local food distributor using the customer-friendly power of the Harvie platform and delivers direct to the consumer’s door.

The model has been very successful from a sales point of view. We have far surpassed our yearly goals already with very little marketing spend. In fact, we are working hard to just keep up with the demand for the program.

We have already started delivering, though the main season will start in late May. We are using Harvie’s “pop up farm stand” tools to run sales right now. The demand is huge. Last week, we sold out of farm boxes in 45 minutes.

My goal is not to compete with farms or existing distributors: what I want to do is build a successful farm product distribution system on top of Harvie that can then be used by farmers and other local entrepreneurs anywhere. In my view, figuring out this problem is what will truly change the game for local food economies. If we can perfect a distribution model that pays farmers to be farmers, rewards the costs of distribution, and serves the consumer well, local food can compete against national and international distribution.

In short, we need a viable business model for local foods distribution and I believe Harvie Farms Local can become that model. It is a business model, a spreadsheet, and a way of thinking that invites you to build a scaleable local foods distribution business from your farm or as a distribution business.

I conceived of this model before the threat of COVID-19 became apparent. In the meantime, this model has become even more relevant as demand for local food has surged, restaurants have closed, and online sales with home delivery is the preferred method for distribution.

Some key aspects of the “Harvie Farms Local” concept:

  • Multi-farm to fulfill a larger percentage of food for a household: a farm or small-scale distributor could fulfill this.
  • Goal of $1 million+ sales per farm distributor, because that is where the economies of scale start to get interesting
  • Thinking about distribution from a cost-of-goods-sold model — whether this is run by a farm or a distributor. 50-60% of the retail dollar goes to farm production, the rest needs to be allocated to the costs of distribution because it is costly and complex to run distribution as a stand-alone distributor or as part of a farm operation (ie packing materials, warehouse space, marketing, software, delivery, manager salaries etc). If a farm is running this program, there are essentially two distinct businesses: a production business and a distribution business.
  • Marketing is built into the model: 10% of revenue is ear-marked for marketing spend. This is very important for long term competitiveness in the marketplace.
  • Home delivery via a courier service
  • Simple for consumers to understand: One single large “farm box” with add-ons and a separate butcher box
  • Fully customizable to consumer via Harvie
  • Subscription + farm stand sales for one time boxes (with upgrade path and upsells for customers)
  • The free trial version of the program is that the potential customer simply puts in their email address, we give them a coupon code off their first delivery, then they get emails when a box is available for purchase. Harvie takes this raw traffic to the website and turns them into customers.
  • A packaging system using cardboard boxes with ice packs, liner bags, and insulating liners.

I want to “open source” the model to encourage you to build your own business in your local area. I want to share what we have learned so far, but understand that the Harvie Team will learn a lot more over the next 6-12 months. We want to learn beside you while we continue to develop the Harvie Farms Local concept and continue to develop the underlying Harvie software to further support the business model.

Let’s grow this model together. We can connect virtually and share a set of slides describing the business model, and a toolkit you can work with to adapt this to where you live.

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It’s a tough time for the world, but an exciting time for local food

In over 15 years working on farms and around farms, I’ve never seen anything like the last few weeks in the local food market. As restaurants close and cities shut down, the local food market is booming.

Our farmer’s sales at Harvie are up almost 200% in the pandemic crisis. If you are in the business of selling local food to consumers, you know how in-demand your products are right now!

It seems like a convergence of factors: people want to be closer to their food producers for perceived safety; they realized that maybe the grocery stores won’t always be full of food; they want to support their immune systems to fight this virus; they are cooking at home a lot more so they want great ingredients to cook with.

It all has resulted in a surge of demand for our food.

To be fair, this is also a difficult time of change. For farms that relied on restaurant or wholesale sales, there is a lot of pain ahead. Some farmers market are shutting down or requiring online pre-orders — many farmers are using Harvie for this. Many farmers are starting to do home delivery, which comes with many challenges — and Harvie is also built for this.

I have put everything on the line — financially, emotionally, and professionally — to build Harvie over the last 5 years. So to have worked on this problem of direct-to-consumer farm sales for years and now to have Harvie be part of the solution, it is gratifying to me. In times like these, it feels good to be useful.

One question I have: how long will this surge of demand last? Once we get beyond the crux of this crisis, will the demand continue? I think to an extent it will continue, but it is important to build systems on your farm that are habit-forming for these new customers, like building a subscription/membership program into your business like Harvie is built on. I think this is really important for long term business sustainability.

I wrote up a press release about the surge in demand which I will paste to the bottom of this email or grab it here:
https://www.harvie.farm/blog/press-release-demand-for-local-food-skyrockets-in-pandemic-crisis/

Please share this story with anyone you know in the media so we can get some press about what is going on in our industry.

I also want to put a huge shout-out to the team here at Harvie that has been working long hours since the beginning of this crisis to on-board new farmers, support new consumer members, set up pop-up farm stand sales, and build new tools into the Harvie platform. They have shown their commitment to this work and I couldn’t do it without them.

I’m interested in your stories. Are you seeing demand spike in your neck of the woods? What factors do you think are contributing to this increase in interest?