Gleaning the columns
In 2002, while working at CERES Grocery, I made a produce ordering spreadsheet in Excel; a simple list of fruit and veg with a few columns to work out what we were buying that week from farmers and the wholesalers down in Footscray.
It had a few tabs that generated lists I’d call through to our growers or fax to the wholesalers.
The spreadsheet grew a new column and an extra page when a few of us at CERES got together to begin a fruit and veg co-op.
Over the next 3 or 4 years I had to add a dozen new co-op columns and tabs as groups of neighbours got together wanting to buy and divvy up produce just like the CERES Staff Co-op was doing.
At the time I had no idea that divvying up fruit and veg into a few boxes each week would be the catalyst for starting Fair Food, but things would take a quantum leap after we copied our heroes, Brisbane’s Food Connect, by taking our neighbourhood fruit and veg co-ops online.
One of the first jobs at Fair Food was bolting Food Connect’s fruit and veg box-making spreadsheet onto our produce order spreadsheet.
There were so many new tabs, columns, formulas, as well as a What’s-in-the-Box Pivot Table that I made but still don’t quite understand, that the whole thing started to creak and groan under its own weight.
Many times I thought our webshop coders or some clever off-the-shelf app would come up with a new solution but somehow Excel’s low-tech, super-forgiving adaptability meant this rickety, sprawling spreadsheet was incredibly difficult to replicate.
And so it stayed. Its central role in Fair Food’s operations resulted in it simply becoming known as the Spreadsheet.
For years as a produce buyer the Spreadsheet’s contents inhabited my brain – I found it difficult to separate it from me.
When Joshua Arzt took over as Fair Food’s produce buyer he talked about the Spreadsheet taking up residence in his head.
Twice a week Joshua saves a new version of the Spreadsheet for his upcoming produce order.
Last Tuesday, which was Fair Food’s fifteenth birthday, I calculated that the Spreadsheet must have been copied and recopied over two thousand five hundred times – this has created glitches in its DNA resulting in inexplicable and odd behaviours that need occasional repair.
Yet still, week after week Joshua and the Spreadsheet organise the buying of hundreds of tons of produce from dozens of farmers each year.
Hema Gurung and Mo Nabaie and their packing crew use the Spreadsheet’s lists to divide these tons of fruit and veg between thousands and thousands of households.
Looking back over its versions, the Spreadsheet’s a document that’s as much historical as it is operational.
Over the years there’s much to glean;
- The Spreadsheet tells us how we’ve changed from a veg-box scheme to a grocery, from a weekly thing to a daily drop, from pick-up points to home delivery.
- It tells us the names of the new farmers who appear in the columns and the old farmers who retire and disappear.
- It tells how many seasons we have bought and sold from each other and the prices we have decided on together.
- It tells us how much and how well we have all eaten and how much we all have to be thankful for.
Happy fifteenth birthday
Chris
