SauerNation stands for the growing number of people who demand high quality, locally-sourced, nutritious and affordable live-culture foods. It includes the artisans who produce such foods, and the farmers who supply them, as well as everyone who eats them.
Navigation
- Rights of the Citizens of SauerNation
- The Live-Culture Community Vision
- Building Live-Culture Community
- SauerKnowledge
- SauerForums
- SauerKnowledge
- Saueressen Membership
Rights of the Citizens of SauerNation
- The right to access nutritious live-culture foods made with locally-sourced ingredients
- The right to know your live-culture food along the entirety of its supply chain
- The right to meet the people involved in producing your live-culture food
- The right to learn how to make and use live-culture foods
The Live-Culture Community Vision
Together, our collective work of SauerNation will build a live-culture community supporting
- Access to nutritious, locally-sourced live-culture foods
- Local organic farms, farmers and farming practices
- Local artisan producers
- SauerKnowledge to help you
- make your favorite live-culture foods
- use live-culture foods in your diet
- Neighborhood food security hubs that
- provide economic and professional opportunities for individuals
- build community food preservation capacity
- produce, store and distribute emergency nutrition supplies
- prevent food spoilage and waste at all points in the local food system
- develop the community’s capacity to feed itself during “long emergencies”
Building Live-Culture Community
Contact us to get involved. We need artisan-producers, consumers and farm-suppliers (including urban small-plot intensive farmers)!
SauerKnowledge
The Saueressen Knowledge Base — needs your input: submit recipes, how-to, tips and tricks, or other information, or help take on an leadership role in building our local capacity for live-culture foods.
SauerForums
Saueressen will host two forums to help facilitate community discussion on the two main subjects of SauerKnowledge:
- How to make your favorite live-culture foods
- How to use live-culture foods in your diet
Saueressen Membership
Anyone may buy from Saueressen at the standard prices.
Annual Membership Fee: $40 to become a Saueressen member, which includes 5 pints of Sauerchi or equivalent value products. Members may purchase additional Sauerchi or other products at member discount for the year of their membership.
Low-income customers on SNAP: $20 to become a Saueressen member, which includes 3 pints of Sauerchi or equivalent-value products. Saueressen will accept SNAP/EBT in the future. Low-income members may purchase additional Sauerchi or other products at member discount for the year of their membership.
Saueressen exists as a worker cooperative collectively-owned by its fermentation artisans.
Future Considerations
Saueressen will offer a membership for food service / institutional customers that includes an upfront purchase fee for quarts of Sauerchi.
Saueressen will offer a lifetime membership option to all customers, including low-income customers. The lifetime membership fee for low-income customers will consist of an upfront payment of part of the total membership fee, with a flexible payment plan for the rest of the fee.
Membership will include access to a shared benefits network with other local cooperatives or other locally-owned businesses.
The Saueressen strategic plan includes the establishment of neighborhood food security hubs that use and promote traditional low-energy methods of preservation. This concern over the distribution of food and food technologies may require changing the structure of Saueressen from a worker-owned cooperative to a community cooperative owned by workers and customers both. Saueressen must also actively build consumer capacity to locally source and prepare their own live-culture foods, which will blur the line between artisan producers and consumers, changing its business model from a “community-supported enterprise” to a “community-generated enterprise.”
