Get fresh, locally grown produce delivered to your door.
Convenience has been a catchword in the food business for decades—remember TV dinners and Jiffy Pop? Today it’s reached a whole new level with drones delivering pretty much anything you desire right to your doorstep. When it comes to home-delivered food, however, especially fresh produce, quality can be an issue. Enter The Neighborhood Harvest, a Suffolk-based organic food delivery service that amps up the freshness factor.
“Our customers can taste the freshness,” says Thomas Vandiver, 30, one of the company’s three owners, as we stand amidst a sea of green in the 19,000-square-foot-hydroponic growing facility in rural Suffolk. Vandiver hands me a stalk of dark, leafy romaine, which tastes way better than supermarket lettuce. Waist-high tables in every direction overflow with healthy, green plants in various stages of growth—tiny sprouts of wasabi microgreens, scarlet stalks of Swiss chard, and bushy basil plants full of tender leaves, ready to jazz up your next Italian feast.
The company also delivers a variety of ready-to-heat, nutritionally balanced meals—even kid-friendly options. Think meatballs and Bolognese sauce, made from scratch in the Harvest Kitchen by trained chefs. Or vegetable curry, a vegan dish served with basmati rice. Pre-made meals are growing in popularity, notes Vandiver, and new choices are in the works.
The Neighborhood Harvest expanded into Richmond in 2020, and Vandiver anticipates bringing deliveries to the D.C. area in a year or two. In addition to its Suffolk-grown greens and prepared meals, the company partners with growers throughout the state to offer free-range chicken eggs, meats, baked goods, veggies, even craft beverages—all available with a click of a button on their website, with no subscription required!
Everything in our greenhouse is “beyond organic,” says Vandiver, grown from non-GMO seeds and never sprayed with pesticides. The company hand-selects their partner farms, making sure their growing practices are both ethical and sustainable. Connecting customers to delicious, high-quality food grown by people who care is The Neighborhood Harvest’s mission, says Vandiver. “It’s very old school,” he says. “We want to create a human connection.” TheNeighborhoodHarvest.com
This article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue.
