We’re delighted to introduce you to our Community Partner in Lethbridge. . .

Urban Grocer is a small, independently owned and operated grocery store in Lethbridge offering natural staple goods as well as unique, hard-to-find items, sourced locally whenever possible and providing connections directly to food producers. We are honoured that Urban Grocer distributes CSF member shares in Lethbridge!

Skipper Otto’s CSF didn’t always deliver seafood to Lethbridge this way. From 2011-2014, my husband and fisherman, Shaun, would fish all summer, rent a freezer truck and drive across the Rockies to deliver CSF shares to our members in Lethbridge and other western cities, hoping to make it there and back before the snow hit too hard. He would set up shop in a member’s driveway and people would line up to get their fish. Members had to decide what they wanted on the spot, Shaun would weigh it all out and write it down, and members would head home with their seafood.

We really loved meeting everyone and there was something charming about the whole experience, but it also came with its challenges: it was hard on our family personally, and it came with a lot of additional costs, uncertainty, and headaches. We needed a better system.

In 2015, I had the idea that, if we could just find the right people who shared our vision and our beliefs to work as distribution partners in our member cities, we could hit upon a more flexible, more affordable distribution system that would make everyone happy. I reached out to members in Lethbridge and we were soon introduced to Julia Mitchell at Urban Grocer who was happy to help us connect our fishing families and our sustainable seafood catch directly to members in her city!

In October, 2015, we held our first, very successful Community Partner pick-up at Urban Grocer. Julia was incredibly helpful, even bringing in extra freezers for the day to handle our members’ orders! Everyone came to pick up their orders and many members told us how happy they were with the new arrangement, and to learn more about Urban Grocer! We were thrilled!

And I was even more thrilled when September came around and we avoided the annual scramble to rent a truck and coordinate the epic “prairie trip” as we’d come to call it. Shaun was even able to continue fishing when the salmon unexpectedly kept returning well into fall. Our kids had their dad around between fishing openings and our members didn’t have to line up for hours in the cold to pick up their fish. What a win-win this was proving to be!

We’re so honoured that Julia and the staff at Urban Grocer will continue to offer member pick-ups at their store each fall when our fishermen are home from fishing and we have the greatest variety of products available!

If you’re in Lethbridge,  drop by and say hello to our friends at Urban Grocer! Check our event calendar for details of all our Lethbridge pick-ups!