Charlottesville Food Read Online Free Page B

staunchest in-person market-goer. Similar to Horse & Buggy, Relay customers can have their groceries delivered to their home for a fee or can pick them up from a variety of centrally located stops in Charlottesville and Albemarle County five days out of the week.
    Zach Buckner’s design of the business belies his engineer roots. A self-proclaimed empiricist, Buckner’s goal for the business is to be a one-stop shop for everything a big-box store could offer. A knowledge of freight costs, business efficiency and gas prices makes Relay not only convenient to customers but ultimately a more cost-effective option for both business and consumer. Though groceries are a trillion-dollar industry with an almost limitless customer base, Buckner admits that Relay customers are particularly well-educated people interested in food quality and origin. “It just so happens that the people who are quickest to understand what we’re doing are people that have college degrees,” Buckner states. Even Relay’s more than forty-five employees have an unusually high level of education, matching their enthusiasm for business with individualized savviness that contributes to a tightknit team. College graduates with four languages under their belts have driven grocery trucks, while MBAs man the desks.
    Though CSAs and gourmet grocery stores have a niche local appeal, Relay has its eyes on a larger piece of the grocery industry pie. With bases in Richmond, Charlottesville, Williamsburg, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the company is the largest online food marketplace in the mid-Atlantic region. 89 Buckner’s goal for the company is not an overblown monopoly; it’s something far more idealistic. “I would love to see a Charlottesville that had no strip malls and no big-box stores,” Buckner muses. He looks forward to creating “the day when good food is flowing to houses around Charlottesville at something more like that ten cents per ton per mile instead of that forty-five dollars per ton per mile.” “The traffic in Charlottesville is decimated,” he continues rhapsodically, “and there’s farming and baking and making chocolate.” It’s not too challenging to imagine that his Pleasantville reverie could actually impact the landscape of the area, with more and more grocery items being listed every day that consumers can purchase in a more efficient, convenient matter.
    G OING TO M ARKET

    Entrance to the Saturday City Market in downtown Charlottesville. Photo by Kevin Haney .
    But convenience isn’t the deciding factor in grocery store selection for many people who prefer a more communicative, collaborative market environment. The traditional marketplace image, filled with people, fragrances, noises and tastes, appears on a converted parking lot every Saturday from April to December. The farmers’ market can be as simple as a couple vendors intermingling in a small space behind a college building or as large and complex as the four-day bonanza at Union Square Market. In Charlottesville, farmers’ markets have been in full swing since at least 1972, when a man named George Cason ran for the Charlottesville City Council. His platform included a plan for a new, accessible farmers’ market, “a place where the public could purchase locally grown foods sold by the growers themselves.” 90 The city’s assistant manager quickly latched onto Cason’s concept, despite his defeat in the election, and soon began hatching a plan for the market’s design.
    Agriculture and food production was, for Cason as well as many others, a family affair from the beginning. “I’ve been in the produce business all my life—my daddy was too,” Cason noted. In 1973, he and his three brothers began the market, initially the only vendors selling. Cason and two of his brothers still sell at the farmers’ market, though a Cason nephew has been banned due to