June 12, 2020

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Hi, this is Meaghan Mullally-Gorr, and this is “Sullivan 180 Presents… Take Five.!” Today, our guest is Sam from Fare Haven in Livingston Manor. Sam, thanks so much for joining me today. Can you take a minute to introduce yourself and your organizations?

Sam Kovalyov:
Sure. Yeah. Great to be here, Meaghan. Fare Haven Farmacy… Is “Farmacy” spelled F A R M-acy, in Livingston Manor is our newest learning center that we just opened up. It’s a ‘healthy food learning center’ trying to basically provide education and learning opportunities in the realm of healthy food and how to make ‘healthier buying options’ for people. While it takes the shape of a specialty grocery store that has a lot of healthy food and lifestyle options to choose from. It’s main function is to act as an education center, where we were planning on starting up our Community Healthy Talks and more community events to discuss what it is we’re doing, and why we offer these products and things like that.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
If people want to find out more about anything that you talk about today, where will they go?

Sam Kovalyov:
‘Haven for Humanity.org’ is kind of our base website. Www.farehaven.org, will bring you to Fare Haven page where we try to keep that updated with what’s going on just at Fare Haven, our Instagram and Facebook, also trying to be kept up to date. So we created a pre-ordering platform, so you can go onto our website, farehaven.org, and look at the list of produce that’s all organic, local produce options when it’s in season, and choose what you would like place in your order and we box it up for you and bring it out to your vehicle, so that people don’t have to come into the shop necessarily.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
What does the store look like when we’re not in a pandemic?

Sam Kovalyov:
Normally we don’t offer a pre-ordering service. We are just a full grocery store. Basically we try to offer as many, lifestyle products that are eco-friendly and non-toxic as possible. But food is really the main thing that we specialize in. We have a lot of different dried fruit options. We have a full walk-in refrigerator with fruit and vegetable options that we try to keep stocked with the freshest stuff that we can possibly find. So, like I said, in season, it’s a lot of local produce options, because they are the freshest and the healthiest for us. But even when it’s not in season, we have a full grocery store selection of imported produce that’s all organic and the highest quality we can find. We try to get deliveries as often as possible to keep everything as fresh as possible. We have everything from root cellar: potatoes and onions and things like that to oranges and apples. Sometimes we get some exotic produce as well, but we’re, we’re kind of trying to keep it as local as possible when we can. So, all our produce options are sold at wholesale costs. So we don’t actually make money on the produce at all, where we buy it, we set the price, , we divide by how many pounds we get and we set the price that way. So the prices do fluctuate throughout the year. So another way we’re trying to increase access to the healthiest foods possible, the healthiest choices for people to make.
Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
I’ve seen on your your Facebook feed that you’ve had some prepared food. Is that still happening? That’s really exciting.

Sam Kovalyov:
Yes! I’m a nutritionist, and that was kind of the reason why we decided to create this project as a nonprofit. We started with hot food options since it was winter. We wanted to start with salads and juice bar and stuff like that, but that we kind of put that on hold since it was winter time. We figured we’d start with soups and different hot prepared food options. And as we go more into the summertime, our juice bar is going to open up, the smoothie bar. I’m going to be doing more salads and more raw food options. As we get more assistance and volunteers helping out in the kitchen and stuff like that, we can provide a lot more desserts and things like that that are all low salt, gluten-free. Our whole facility is ‘wheat free’. We try to stay away from the top seven allergens out there. So we’re actually a wheat-free facility. We’re a plant-based facility. We don’t offer soy products. Everything that I make is low salt. We don’t use sugar as a sweetener in anything. We use fruit based sweeteners. And right now I’m doing gluten-free quesadilla and also vegan and different pizzas, personal pizzas and stuff like that: less salt, less indigestible stuff, easier to process. So yeah that’s what the kitchen is all about!

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Tell us about your wall. I mean, people aren’t really able to see it if you’re bringing groceries out to the cars, but you have a wall of… How you describe it?

Sam Kovalyov:
Sure. We call it “the giving tree”. I’ll try to get it in the screen. So that’s the giving tree, and we’ve been working on it. It’s been up for about six months now. I’d say maybe a little bit less than that, but basically the idea is to, again, increase the access for people, to the healthiest products and foods that they can get. And essentially, we noticed that a lot of our customers, a lot of the people in the community, want to be able to buy more. They wish that they had the money to support their health better, and to buy more produce options and things like that. So people can buy a $5 gift card and it’s in the shape of an Apple, and they hang it on the tree. And you can see, we have a lot of apples up on the tree right now. So people are really digging this idea and you know, those who can donate to another person’s health and wellbeing, they buy a $5 Apple, and they hang it up on the tree and people that are in need, can use this to sort of supplement their food costs.

Meaghan Mullally-Gorr:
Thank you so much, Sam. I really appreciate it.

Sam Kovalyov:
Thank you, Meaghan. Take care.