History of the Adventist Food Buying Club
The Adventist Food Buying Club (AFBC), founded in Crossville, TN, in 2006, was the brain-child of Loraine Sweetland. There were 16 founding members of AFBC, with nine families present at the first meeting in Aug. 2006. The club had no funds in the beginning, so it was a struggle to purchase a freezer, a food scale, and supplies. And, since few of the founding members had any prior experience in food buying clubs, it required a lot of hard work and dedication to get things started. Besides Loraine, founding members that are still active with AFBC include Phyllis Breyer, Trudy Guilfoil, Charlotte Rhodes, Beth and Leon Smith, and Ruth Unruh.
The idea of food buying clubs is not new to the Cumberland Plateau. The first food buying club in Cumberland County, Mayland Food Buying Club, began in 1983 in the Mayland community, near Crossville. The following year, its name was changed to Plateau Food Buying Club, (PFBC) and several years later it relocated to Pleasant Hill. Through its existence of nearly a quarter century, that club served hundreds of families in the Upper Cumberlands. Loraine and her late husband, Ronald, along with Phyllis and her late husband, Joe Breyer, and Nellie Shepherd (now Draper), were members of that club, and decided to form AFBC to provide convenient access to affordable, healthy groceries for members of a nutrition class that Loraine had been teaching at the 127 South Senior Center in Crossville. In 2007, PFBC dissolved, and several of its members subsequently joined AFBC, including Ruth Peeples, who was an early member of PFBC, having been with them 23 years. Other PFBC members who joined AFBC at that time include Steve and Toni Roberts, Judy and Roger Pearson, Beth and Bob Cunningham, Caroline and Fannie Miller, and Sue Georgen. The addition of several experienced food buying club members who were already highly trained in their jobs was a welcome relief to AFBC, which was really just beginning to get its feet off the ground when the “merging” took place.
Today, active membership of the AFBC is a combination of its original members from 2006, past members of PFBC who joined AFBC after its dissolution, and several other “new” members who either belonged to buying clubs in other areas before moving here or who are completely new to the concept of food buying clubs. AFBC purchases its groceries from United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), and the system that AFBC has been put into place is a combination of procedures used by PFBC and innovative ideas implemented by its coordinator, Loraine Sweetland, and other club members. It has evolved in four short years to a very smooth-running operation with more than 30 active members. You might say we are now just “one big happy family.”
Click HERE to learn more about the details of our operations.
Click HERE for information and location of facilities where orders are delivered and picked up.