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KCFC Holiday Gift Guide

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Would you like some ideas for unique and delicious gifts to give to the food fanatic in your life? Let us help! You can find something to surprise and delight your loved ones while also supporting local farmers, artisans and businesses - these are gifts we can all feel good about! #eatlocalkc

 

KC Food Circle Membership - 2016

Give the gift of KCFC Membership - it's the ticket to fun with good food in the new year. Our members enjoy farm-to-table dinners, discounts on classes and workshops, unique pop up events that feature local, organic food from our member farmers - oh, and farm tours, too! This is the gift that keeps giving all year long and provides your friends and family with a chance to learn about and enjoy local, organic, and free-range food.

 

BADSEED Holiday Fiesta Farmers Market - December 18

1909 McGee St, KCMO 64109 • 4:00-9:00 pm

Party with your favorite farmers at Badseed's holiday market fiesta! "Holiday Cheer" will include (on the house) Irish Whiskey and freshly whipped organic cream - perfect for spiking your locally roasted coffee from Red Headed Philosopher & Cafe Noble! The annual FARM BASKET RAFFLE will take place promptly at 6 PM. The winner receives a mouth-watering Farm Basket full of goodies from ALL the vendors including meats, cheese, eggs, organic produce, rustic bread, baked goods, and more.

Featured Products: Grass-Fed Beef & Lamb, All-Natural Pork, Free-Range Eggs, Gourmet Mushrooms, Artisan Sheep's Milk Cheese, Aged Goat & Cow's Milk Cheese, Rustic Breads, Wholesome Baked Goods, Winter Vegetables & Roots, Sweet Potatoes, Mean Greens, Jams & Jellies, Freshly-Milled Flour, Missouri Pecans & Black Walnuts, Micro-roasted Coffee, Luscious Soaps & Body Products, Hand-made Crafts and more.

Cultivate KC will be on hand selling their new, limited edition Charlie Hustle t-shirts, too; those would make a great gift as well! You can also buy them online here.

Special Offers from KCFC Member Farmers

Green Dirt Farm is offering Cheese of the Season subscriptions - Give the Gift of the Seasons with Four Shipments of Local Cheese all year long. 15% discount until Dec 31 - code available via Facebook.

Schenker Family Farms offers delicious meats, jams, and salsas all year long - and unique gift bundles as well - Summer Sausage Snack Box or the Nature’s Kiss Gift Box (vegetarian).

From Our Featured Retailers

Heirloom Bakery & Hearth

401 E 63rd St, KCMO 64113 • 816-492-7259 • www.heirloomkc.com

The holidays are in full swing at Heirloom where all of their baked goods are made fresh daily, using local and seasonal ingredients whenever possible. They have a holiday menu online and will be open right up until Christmas Eve morning. They have all the goodies you need for gifts, parties and dinners.

 

Local Pig

2618 Guinotte Ave, KCMO 64120 • 816-200-1639 • www.thelocalpig.com

In addition to the full array of local and free-range meats, Local Pig also offers great gift ideas including t-shirts, honey, butter, other accompaniments as well as classes like Whole Hog Butchering, Sausage Making, etc. Purchase gift certificates online at www.thelocalpig.com.

 

The Sundry

1706 Baltimore Ave, KCMO 64108 • 816-527-0459 • www.thesundry.com

The Sundry Market & Kitchen is a neighborhood market with a restaurant quality kitchen that offers a complete selection of grocery essentials including high-quality produce and meats grown by local farmers, handcrafted items made in-house, and many other unique, made in Kansas City products. Here you can get food for your feast as well as treats for gift giving. Ask them about their custom gift baskets! PS: Their cheese making class on Dec 20 would make a great gift!

In fact, here’s a fantastic list of cheese-themed gifts - this holiday go beyond the store-bought cheese basket and give a gift of local sheep cheese, a cheese-making class or a how-to book to make your own. From our friends at Greenability.

Our Restaurants

A great gift idea is a gift certificate to one of the amazing local restaurants that sources from our farmers. Check out our full list here. And don't forget - Affäre will be open on Christmas Day and the Eden Alley cookbook would make a great gift, too!

Here We Grow! 2014 Year in Review

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For the KC Food Circle, 2014 was a year of growth as we saw an increase in eater members, farmer members, expo attendees, and coordinating committee members.

We hosted our first annual Volunteer Open House and invited new volunteers to learn more about the Food Circle. It was also a way to show existing volunteers gratitude for their hard work. About 50 people attended the Open House and we benefited greatly from the generosity of Jane Zieha at blue bird bistro who supplied the food and the location for the event.

The coordinating committee nearly doubled in size this year as we took on 8 new or returning volunteers. We have already begun to reap the rewards of a more robust planning committee and fresh perspectives. We believe that our larger committee will better enable us to serve both our member farmers and our eater constituents. We topped out at the end of 2014 with 102 farmer members (our record high) and 104 eater members.

At the 2014 Expo we were delighted to break our previous attendance record with a whopping 1,700 people in attendance at the Kansas Expo at Johnson County Community College. Not only did we see great attendance numbers and enjoy the great location at the college, we believe it also gave us a chance to form a more solid partnership with JCCC and their efforts on sustainability.

Our Missouri Expo at Penn Valley Community College brought in about 900 people making for a total of Expo attendance for 2014 a record-breaking 2600 people.

We also continue to steadily increase our fans and followers on social media with 4,750 followers on Facebook, 1,250 on Twitter, and - new this year - we have joined Instagram and have already gained 474 followers.

2014 also brought us several great fundraising partnerships. We worked closely with the organizers of the new KC metro chapter of Green Wish, an organization that funds local, green organizations through customers' small donations at local retailers. KCFC was one of the first non profits to receive funding from Green Wish KC.

In the fall we enjoyed being the beneficiaries of Kansas City's exclusive craft butchery event, Knife and Pork, hosted by Alex Pope of Local Pig and Jonathan Bender of Recommended Daily. We are also grateful to Eden Alley for supporting us with one of their fundraising weeks.

2014 brought us the support of our second volunteer graphic designer - Josh Fultz, who redesigned our ads and our trifold brochures - in addition to the continued support of our first volunteer designer, Rachel Allen, who has supported us by designing the annual Directory.

At the end of the year we launched our new website featuring a searchable database of farmers, helpful resources for farmers and eaters, and ease of use to encourage and facilitate our eater and farmer memberships. We are very grateful to Pam Hausner of BASE KC for her web development expertise and her generosity.

The best thing about the growth we've seen this year is that we are well poised to enter 2015 with lots of plans for improvement already underway. This will be a great year of eating local, organic and free-range.