Is the CSA cheaper than the grocery store?

Yes! In a CSA, all of the middlemen are cut out. The farmer can charge you less, because he gets all of your food dollars as opposed to the huge portion that generally goes to shipping, packaging and advertising at the grocery store.

In 2006, we shopped around! Every week we took note of and weighed the weekly “share” and went to 4 stores to find out how much the same quality & quantity would cost elsewhere.

Most of the stores did not carry all organic produce. For example, MET Foods had 0% organic produce and didn’t carry 30 of the vegetables included in the CSA share; Foodtown had 1% organic produce and didn’t carry 17 of the items included. (Please see graphs below for more information). To deal with these discrepancies, we often had to compare the price of non-organic food and “substitute” items.

In 2006, the TOTAL share would have cost these prices at other food retailers:

Bed-Stuy CSA..............................$400.00
Union Square Green Market.........$755.35
Whole Foods................................$650.22
MET Foods on Marcus Garvey....$314.74
Foodtown on Fulton St.................$426.56