For the past decade, Brooklyn Packers has been connecting food-insecure residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant and nearby areas by providing affordable, fresh food. Now, the Black-owned food cooperative, founded in 2016 by Steph Wiley and Shawn Santana, is looking to expand to help even more New Yorkers for the next 10 years.
The idea to create Brooklyn Packers came after Wiley worked with another community-driven food hub.
“I was running their hub, and it was two young non-Black people who had funding and created this food delivery business based on community-supported agriculture,” Wiley said. “They were buying produce and products from local makers and local farms, mostly in Hudson Valley, Pennsylvania and New Jersey."
But the company started to lose money because it had accepted investor funding and became over-leveraged. They weren't able to pay their bills and staff, he said.
“As the business started to die, I was taking these worker-owned cooperative classes, and I was like: ‘This business would be really good as a worker cooperative,'" Wiley said.
Running a co-op, however, also comes with a lot of labor, sourcing, packing, and delivering, he said.
“We began to deliver CSA (Community Shared Agriculture) shares to different locations in Brooklyn. At one time, it was 700 people a week ordering," Wiley said.
Brooklyn Packers was formed with the help of a nonprofit Working World, and for the first four years, its focus was on sourcing, packing, delivering, and managing food delivery logistics. It would later evolve into having its own digital farm share and retail space.
Brooklyn Packers is unique because they source their products and produce from mostly Black-owned and queer-owned farms in the Northeast region, Wiley said.
The co-op is currently housed at 224 Marcus Garvey Blvd. in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “This space is what we call our micro food hub,” Wiley explained. “In it, we have a big fridge that holds a lot of palettes, and right next to it, we are developing our retail store, so we are experimenting and testing to see how those things work together towards food sovereignty and also food affordability.”
When it comes to affordability, the standard is that residents choose their own price point, Wiley said. There are three sliding-scale tiers, where customers can buy food according to what they can afford.
“Affordability is big in our airwaves, and everybody doesn’t make the same amount of money,” Wiley said. “Everybody still needs food, and everybody still needs healthy food, so how do we make food accessible? How do we get food to people in all the ways that they get food? It has to be accessible for all.”
Customers can come to the co-op's hub, purchase food on the website and then pick it up, or shop at the market on the weekend.
