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We live in the Napa Valley of the navel orange! Remarkably, we live in the single spot in the world that grows the world's best tasting orange. And yet, it's practically impossible to buy a local orange in the big chain supermarkets and our local growers are losing money on their groves. The IOC was founded in the Fall of 2004 out of the sheer exasperation that our local citrus groves were slipping away through our community's fingers.
 The central idea of the IOC is "eat2keep" - to save our local orange, all we have to do is eat our local orange. After all, we now have 4 million people here in the Inland Empire. That's enough to eat every single local orange and support every single local grove if we all just eat local oranges instead of chain supermarket oranges.
IOC connects
these local eaters with local growers. Community-spirited people (or just
plain orange lovers) join the IOC, a 501c3 non-profit project, and get a
share of the local orange crop as a freebie give-away for joining. IOC
procures this pesticide-free, organically-packed fruit from local growers,
paying them a huge premium over what they get paid by the global chains.
IOC eaters pick up their fruit (two five-lb bags/wk) at one of IOC's 25
pick-up spots from Claremont to Beaumont. These pickup spots are all
community-oriented grocery-stores, coffeehouses, and eateries owned and run
by people who care about preserving our local groves. The biggest, most
popular pickup spot of them all, of course, is our Gerrard's market. |
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