Love and trust
On Friday Georgia and Roni from the Community Grocer, a not-for-profit that runs six super affordable weekly produce markets across Melbourne came for a visit to the Fair Food warehouse.
I’m about to take them around when Hema and Mo, Fair Food’s Operations Manager and Warehouse Supervisor, pop their heads out of the office. While they’re waiting for a replacement driver to turn up they show Georgia and Roni how the Fair Food packing floor works.
Community Grocer do amazing work with very little – a single refrigerated van, a borrowed coolroom, baskets, signs, trestle tables and many volunteers.
I watch Georgia and Roni’s eyes widen as they clock the size of the Fair Food warehouse.
We go into coolrooms full of produce and shiver, we wander over to the pre-pack areas with stainless steel benches and scales, past the red forklift and the tall orange pallet-racks full of cardboard boxes, down the long packing line conveyor, through drygood shelves and freezers loaded with pizza, pierogi and arancini balls.
Questions flow – How do the ordering systems work? How do you control waste? How do orders get downloaded? How do packers know what to pack? How are cool items kept cool, bulk goods broken down, quality kept high and on and on.
Jesse Hull, Fair Food’s logistics manager, arrives and the questions continue – How many trucks and vans? Do you use an optimisation delivery app? How are drivers trained and packaging collected?
It’s easy to see Fair Food as its infrastructure, equipment, systems and software but these are just its clothes.
Underneath is what we call human infrastructure; a workplace for people designed around love and trust.
People don’t tend to stay long in warehouse jobs but people do stay at Fair Food.
Hema speaks about how almost all of her packing crew come from overseas and how Fair Food is a place of welcome, staffed by supervisors and managers who have come in similar circumstances.
It’s a place to find friendship and family when yours are not here.
It’s a place where the barrier of speaking English is flipped into simple tools that create super clear communication.
It’s a place that provides work with purpose and asks you to bring yourself to it.
It’s a place that promotes workers from within and helps them become citizens, trades people, professionals and small business owners.
It’s a place full of art and music, shared meals, silly Halloween dress-ups and out-of-work adventures.
Fair Food’s human infrastructure design crosses over into the marketing, customer service, logistics and buying teams, who likewise stay longer than expected.
And inevitably it all flows through to our customers.
We hear it come back in emails about feeling cared for and connected to CERES and the Earth.
We see it in the beautiful drawings and messages you send back on your cardboard boxes.
We feel in the support you gave the CERES’ Annual Appeal – when we really, really needed it.
Our one hour tour with Georgie and Roni turns into two hours, but no matter where the topic wanders it always comes back to two things – love and trust.
Have a great week
Chris
