foodclub.org FAQ - frequently asked questions
These are frequently asked questions about foodclub.org. Please read this before sending me e-mail. Thanks.
It is a site designed to facilitate running an organic food-buying club.
A group of people who order food directly from a wholesale distributor.
It is currently designed only to accomodate existing food-buying clubs. This means you already have an account with a food distribution company, a group of people ordering food periodically, product catalogs from the company, an existing system to get orders placed, food distributed to people, and a way of figuring out how much everyone owes. Your existing system is probably paper- or spreadsheet- based.
If this sounds familiar, this site is for you.
It is a collaborative forum for posting food orders, requesting splits, combining everyone's order into one to be sent to the distributor, and calculating how much everyone owes once the order comes in.
No. It only costs a minimal time investment to set up accounts for users in your food-buying club, and the normal cost of internet access. If everyone in your club already has internet access, it is totally free.
I originally wrote the foodclub software for my buying club in Alsea in the Fall of 1999. It was up just for our club from late 1999 until Fall 2000. In the Fall of 2000 I rewrote the software for use by multiple buying-clubs simultaneously, and more suitable for open source development. I bought the foodclub.org domain sometime around Sept, 2000 and the site has been up ever since.
There is no catch. I was once in a food-buying club and I loved it. I think more people should get their food this way. I hope this site will make food-buying clubs more widespread and organic foods more affordable and accessible to more people.
The only thing I would caution against is getting lazy. This site will make your chores much easier, but you are doing them now the hard way, so obviously you are dedicated. Technology tends to make people lose dedication (aka. get lazy... you know the tune). On the bright side, it will save you lots of time, so just try to do something productive with all that extra time!
No. You need to get a group of people together who are interested in ordering cheap, bulk food, and then contact a distribution company to get an account with them. A list of the major organic / natural foods distributors across the U.S. is included on my links page:
http://foodclub.org/links.shtml
Once you have these two things, this site will make starting your food-buying club easy.
You need to find people around where you live who have one running, and join them. If you tell them about this site I'm sure they'll like you enough to let you join!
If anyone knows of a list of food-buying clubs around the country and/or world, please pass it along and I will add it here.
Tell them about it!
http://foodclub.org/
First you need to setup an administrator account. Go to:
http://foodclub.org/admin
and enter the requested information. Once you complete this, you will have your own URL (e.g. http://foodclub.org/my-club/) that you can give out as your world headquarters! You need to make people accounts before they can access it though. See next question.
Go to your administration page (which was given to you after you completed the setup for your club). There are two types of accounts: group accounts and individual accounts. Group accounts are meant to be shared by more than one person. People using a group account are asked for their name when they place an order or request splits. Individual accounts remember all of the person's information so they don't have to keep typing it in every time.
Sorry, they need to. You don't want just anybody going in and futzing with your orders, do you?
However, if you don't want everyone to have to remember their own username/password, you can just set up one single group account with an easy-to-remember password and have everyone use that. In this situation you will just have one administrator account and one group account for everyone else.
As of version 0.32, you can login as the account admin and change any user's password, except for other admin users.
FoodClub uses HTTP Basic Authentication, which means your browser will keep your user and password information for each domain URL as long as your browser is open. To logout and login as a different user, you can do one of two things:
1. quit your browser completely, and restart it
2. "trick" your browser by opening a new window and using an alternate
but equivalent domain URL (e.g. for foodclub.org, alternate equivalent
domains are www.foodclub.org, aurora.foodclub.org)
You're going to have to send me e-mail. If it's really urgent, put ``URGENT:'' in the subject line and I will try to get back to you sooner.
The user suspend feature is meant for disabling an account temporarily without altering their password or other user information. So unsuspending it brings it back with all the same information it had, unlike deleting it (where you'd have to add it back again with a new password).
This feature is not necessarily very often used by buying clubs. But maybe you'd have a situation where one of your members is ``on vacation'' or ``out-of-the-country'' for an extended period of time, and you wanted to increase security by making sure nobody else used their account while they were gone. When they get back their password and everything would be the same. Not deleting their account also preserves their username so other people can't take it, which is an issue on foodclub.org, because there are new clubs signing up all the time to test out the system.
Go to your order form. It saves everything when you submit, so you can go back and change it later.
Go to the split request page. You can post requests for partial orders and if enough other people order it will be added to the final merged order that should be sent to the distributor.
Click delete. Delete only shows up for splits that you originally requested.
Click order and then type the amount that you want.
Only the administrator can change splits. Login as the admin (there is only one; it is the person who setup the club in the first place) and go to the split page. You should see a ``change'' link next to every split request. Click this and then make the necessary changes.
Go to the final merged order page. This merges every individual's order plus all the splits that were filled up. It shows your group addresses at the top of the page, and no individual identifying information, perfect for faxing or e-mail'ing to the distributor.
On occasion, users report that the merged order they sent to the distributor had an incorrect Qty for one or more items - usually that it is too high - resulting in some of the order needing to be returned to the distributor.
This is usually a result of not understanding how orders get merged together. The single most important thing to understand is that orders are merged together based on the single, uniquely identifying Code value for each item.
Other fields are ignored when merging, so two items with the same Code should be the same product - otherwise you will get an undesired result.
A specific example of this is that the Associated Buyers distributor allows ordering ``repack'' items. Repacks are not the same as normal items, so they should not have the same Code value. Buying clubs ordering from Associated Buyers should append an 'R' to the item code for repacks (e.g. 01234R).
Go to the bookkeeping page. It lists every item that was ordered and an input field for you to type in the product's actual cost. Go through the distributor's shipping list and type in the price they charged you for each item. When you click calculate, it will add up each person's total and the entire order total. You can keep making changes until everything looks right.
Only the administrator can do this; login as admin and click ``Archive books.''
When you delete a user, it won't actually delete all of the data they've entered, it just deletes their account so they can't login and enter any more. If this causes a problem for you, you can simply clear all the items from the deleted user's order by adding them back again, editing their order, and then deleting them again.
Yes. Each buying-club account on foodclub.org only supports one distributor, but you can create several accounts via the admin interface http://foodclub.org/admin and link them together. Linking accounts allows any user in any of these accounts to login to all of the accounts, and shows a dropdown menu of all the linked accounts for easy navigation between them.
You can choose to store your product data in a database on the foodclub.org server. If you have a database set up, you can choose to add item data to it each time you archive your order. You can also add item data from all past orders.
Once you have item data in your database, you can quickly search the database from the order form and splits pages. You can search on the item's description, manufacturer, code and various other properties. When you find the item you want, you can just click Add to add it to your order or split requests.
Each product's item code, case size, manufacturer, description, and price are stored. Also, the database keeps track of how many times each product was ordered, and when it was last ordered.
No. Only information about the products themselves is stored, not anything about who ordered it. As noted above, it keeps the date each product was last ordered, but not who ordered it then.
Login as the administrator account, and go to the Administration page. At the botom, you will see settings which allow you to choose how to set up your product database. Once you choose to use either a private or shared database, a list of your past orders appears below the database setup options, and a button allowing you to add product data from all your past orders.
A private database can only be seen and updated by your buying-club. A shared database can be seen and updated by any buying-club on foodclub.org.
Update it on your order form, and the newer information will be saved to the database when this order is archived.
Because currently prices are only set based on what is typed in on the order form or splits page. Many people don't enter anything in the price column, since it isn't required.
There are plans to update prices from the accurate prices entered on the bookkeeping page, but it hasn't been done yet.
Adi Fairbank <adi at foodclub.org>
(Note: this list has been taken down - if you are interested in using a mailing list to discuss the software, please e-mail me. The following is the former location of the discussion list.)
We have set up a mailman list server for discussion of the FoodClub software. You can send a message directly to the list at
foodclub-talk@foodclub.org
or subscribe to the list at
http://foodclub.org/mailman/listinfo/foodclub-talk
It is very low volume and spam-filtered, so ``my mailbox is too small'' is not a valid excuse!
Send me e-mail. I will give you access to modify the source and publish content on the web site.