FARE Idaho

There’s been a lot of buzz around Boise and Idaho at large concerning Idaho’s independent restaurants, family farms, retailers, food and beverage producers. FARE Idaho advocates for various groups as you will hear from the FARE Executive Director Katie Baker.Speaker1: Fair. Speaker2: Idaho is a non-profit trade association that represents independent food and beverage businesses across Idaho. Our organization was born out of the pandemic. It was a lot of independent restaurants and other establishments that were uncertain how they were going to navigate through a pandemic if they were going to lose their businesses, when they would be able to fully operate again. And so at that point, we realized there was no trade association that really represented that particular group, which was really structured around the food system. So Fair Idaho represents farmers, ranchers, food and beverage producers. So it could be a winery all the way to a salsa maker, livestock processors, independent restaurants, bars and retailers. Really the retailers being your farmers markets and your independent grocers. From our understanding and we've done some research on this but haven't really been able to identify another trade association that really is structured like ours right around the food system. So what we do is really try to connect Idaho producers to Idaho retail buyers and build a more resilient food system. Speaker1: And according to Katie, it is doing gangbusters.