The Azure Standard Option

Using Scale to Achieve Anti-Scale Ends

I waited in a narrow suburban street a few miles from home. The Drop Area. There was a mom standing close by, covered in tattoos, her kids playing on the grass. A few feet away was a Korean professional in full work garb waiting with her arms crossed. A couple of men in dirty work-wear stood impatiently, eager to leave quickly. The owners of the checkpoint, a nondescript husband-and-wife team, were busy checking items off a clipboard. I’d seen none of them before, but there were a couple of small circles forming with those who had been through this routine before.

We all congregated in this stranger’s driveway, with sheets of paper bearing last names on the ground, each weighed down by a rock to ensure that none blew away. The setup was deliciously primitive. We had all taken time out of our day and were waiting for food supplies from a niche supplier. What was a grocery store stop for most was more of a logistical issue here, yet that was part of its strange charm. It wasn't convenient. The drop-off happened within a one-hour window, usually only once a month. You had to plan your food needs ahead of time, assess your schedule, and make sure you had enough storage for bulk supplies.

Right on time, 4:30 p.m., a semi made its slow, meandering turn into the street, carefully weaving around the parked cars to its destination. Its brakes screeched next to the house, and silence descended as the gaggle of strangers prepared to get to work. The driver opened the trailer door, pulled out the ramp, and grabbed the pallet jack to transport the heavy, six-foot-tall deliveries to the street. He carefully rolled the pallets down as the parents held on to their kids. This was routine to the driver, and one of many deliveries he would make today. For those waiting, it was an event.

The wife, with her round, unimposing face and short, heavy-set frame, suddenly took on an air of dictatorial authority.

“Make sure you put the items with the correct name. The FRONT of the names! We had a few people walk away with other people’s food last time and don’t want that to happen again!”

The driver finished setting down the first pallet and everyone got to work, young and old, ripping away the protective plastic and reading the names on the packages. The men hauled fifty-pound bags of unmilled grain, barley, and rice. The smaller kids took small bags of mangoes, dried fruits, vanilla, and cheeses and found their proper place in front of the matching last names. Everyone took the packages, sorted the last names out and put them in their proper place. Some had a couple of small boxes; some had grain bags a couple of feet high. After the pallets were in their proper places, the customers hauled their items to the car. Some helped older customers carry their supplies to their cars, while some regulars were still chatting as I drove off.

Such an eclectic group congregated for various reasons. Some people liked the rags-to-riches story and wanted to support a business owned by a kind Christian couple who followed their dreams. Others preferred the bulk, organic fare. Some enjoyed difficult-to-find heirloom produce, and many wanted to support independent farmers who make up the company’s suppliers. Few would agree on politics or general lifestyle, with everyone operating in different cultural spheres, but they agreed about the problem of the food supply being consolidated among a handful of big players. They understood that current agricultural practices are destroying the soil, treating livestock inhumanely, and unraveling the social threads small farmers used to give heartland Americana.

A Rural/Urban Symbiosis

There is an understanding along the political spectrum that putting pigs in pens their entire lives where they cannot even turn around is cruel, that depleting the soil of nutrients for this year’s gain will have long-term consequences, and the ubiquitous use of pesticides, which is killing the insect population, will be devastating down the road. Both left and right see a looming ecological disaster and want to fix things. Regenerative farming has much promise, and new technologies that protect crops without pesticides are making new breakthroughs.

Twenty years ago, I went to the nearest grocery store and grabbed standard bachelor chow fare. I didn’t know people actually bought unmilled grain, did not know of heirloom vegetables, or how to can produce. I’m not an expert but can navigate this world now. The change stemmed from learning to cook properly and a growing awareness of the brutality of much of the agricultural sector, especially regarding meat. I have seen firsthand the change in food chains as colleagues have had to get bigger and bigger as they battle against the encroaching tide of mega-farms. While I’ve seen enough small farm operations to know they aren’t as wholesome as many like to believe, they are a bulwark against modernity, an independent and respectable way of life that is being pushed out.

And one of the main pulls of Azure is supporting independent farmers. According to their mission statement:

Everyone understands that when you build or create something, you value it more than anyone else, whether it’s a beautiful needlework, a handcrafted piece of furniture, or a business you started. When you value something more, you also take care of it better than anyone else. This principle has become obvious in the business world. Independent and family-owned businesses mostly still have the original members whose passion, hard work and dedication continue to lead the company’s vision. This sense of ownership translates into higher quality products and better customer service.

Azure Standard is a unique business model. The founder, Dave Stelzer, was a sickly child whose family desperately looked for a solution, eventually turning to organic farming. Stelzer started Azure Standard in his early twenties, using the same organic farming techniques, expanding his personal farm, and selling boutique produce to customers in the area. As his farm and customer base expanded, he removed middlemen and delivered outside local areas through his own transport network, keeping it all in a family that swelled to eleven children.

It’s not like having brick-and-mortar stores all over the country. They chose a different path, transporting their wares across the country through set drop points. People were more than happy to help for a small financial incentive. Hosts sign up to run drop points for their wares. Customers select their items, the drop-off point and the date, and arrive at the designated time. The drop point model, while inconvenient, is versatile and requires few up-front costs like storefronts.

One concern shared by people of every political stripe is the consolidation of production by faceless corporations who can push out smaller suppliers through efficiency and scale, but often wreck the intangible social networks that one can’t price out. While a few decades ago, farmers’ markets, food co-ops, and organic foods were a bourgeois rich hippie luxury, even traditional conservatives have seen corporations buy out staples of Americana like the family farm.

Azure Standard finds many people who don’t mind the expense. While the organic fare is cheaper than Whole Foods and you can get deals, it’s not beating out standard grocery store fare. They want a different level of quality and want to support smaller producers. Azure Standard stands tall because while it has a vast array of suppliers to work with, it feels cozy and local, a little more personal. It serves as a trust network.

This sort of distribution hub that can facilitate business for small producers isn’t an overly optimistic fancy or a one-off. Another success story is Organic Valley, a dairy co-op that has succeeded in creating stability and a shared ecological vision among its members. The USDA has taken an interest in how regional hubs can be a force multiplier for farmers:

The good news is that this engagement is already occurring, as regional food hubs partner with produce distributors to offer such services as producer training and coordination, source verification, aggregation, and marketing that enable distributors and their customers greater access to the local and regional products.

What’s fascinating about these networks is their use of modern technological methods to be a force-multiplier for small businesses whose focus is not scaling, but maintaining a certain way of life. It’s a family operation that allows a multitude of other family operations to thrive, facilitated through a complicated logistics network and trust-based relationships. It’s a scaling model fulfilling anti-scale infrastructure.

Can Technology Reinvigorate Trad Life?

Many parts of their website are hokey, with parts definitely done by an amateur in WordPress, but it is functional. You don’t need a slick UI when loyalty is baked-in. Still, you deal with frustrations you don’t have with large, process-oriented conglomerates. Resolving disputes in delivery, quality, etc. is a more trust-based conversation as opposed to an automated contract. Not exactly streamlined.

While arguments are about political solidarity, how to get your views in the public square, how to win influence, and where to donate your money, far less bandwidth is spent on economic solidarity. Often, the solidarity is gimmicky, a pricey donation more than a mutual economic transaction. Do you really believe that buying popcorn from the Boy Scouts for twenty dollars is a reasonable donation? Or buying razors from internet pundits? Or coffee from people whose only purpose in the supply chain is to put on slick packaging for a cultural demographic and raise the price? Are these business models anything but a schtick? To have an actual business, one must do more than repackage the same thing everyone else sells or receive what amounts to a donation.

Buy your razors from a second-rate internet pundit.

While, thankfully, overtly political messaging from corporations has faded as the easy marketing and sales gains from virtue signaling have plummeted on both sides of the political spectrum, the business world has increasingly been ossified by private equity buying up small firms and subjecting them to the same restructuring for short-term gains. While you can lambast these small businesses for selling out, it’s hard to demand a business stay independent when most of their customers would gladly buy from a mega-corp undercutting them on price.

A community needs to have economic solidarity. Going to church is great. Having the same civic institutions is wonderful. The glue that’s always bound the community together has been a shared spiritual and economic future, and without one, the other fades away.

I will acknowledge the luxury belief aspect of this. One can’t blame families barely making it for choosing the cheapest option. While there are items that are decently priced, your local Aldi is always going to be more cost-effective. Those who can afford it have an obligation to use their wallets and patronage to build support for the slightly more expensive option and keep it “in the family”. While it might be boutique behavior now for those not drowning in debt and a sixty-hour work week, who knows what can happen ten years from now and the ways of life that can dramatically improve when small businesses have breathing room.

Local institutions often don’t help. Churches do little to nothing to promote economic solidarity in the congregation, and the most advertising you can get for your business is a slot in the church bulletin or maybe a business directory. While there is a justified concern about Mammon and God becoming intertwined, this separation only creates a psychological divide between one’s faith and where one spends money. Faith, after all, should inform using money as more than just avoiding vice. HOAs don’t encourage businesses owned by their residents. People will find a lawn-mowing service from a company miles away whose employees don’t speak English before hiring the guy who lives a few blocks away for two dollars more a week.

It doesn’t help that many people don’t even know which small businesses exist, all of them fighting for attention in the same space on social media and search engines. Finding a good local co-op largely happens through word of mouth, and farmers are notoriously bad at bringing attention to their operations and often lack the social tact for direct sales.

Where Azure thrives is giving a local producer a wide market of people aligned with its general mission, and there’s no reason this can’t be used in other economic contexts. Another surprising example of this sort of co-op is the ACE Hardware brand:

The company’s co-op business model means its store owners are its only shareholders. It’s the opposite of a franchise system: Thousands of entrepreneurs like the Melnicks band together to boost their collective buying power and reduce costs.

The corporate structure, with Venhuizen at the helm since 2013, exists only to do their bidding, overseeing 14 regional distribution centers that supply each store with the right mix of $800 Weber grills and $15 hammers.

When an Ace store opens (or an existing hardware outlet converts to Ace), the owner buys $5,000 in shares. He or she can purchase any of the 80,000-odd products from the co-op’s warehouses, make use of the well-known red-and-white logo and branding (”The helpful place,” its motto promises) and receive dividends based on purchases rather than equity.

While none of these are faith-based or organized around another shared ethical framework, there is no reason they can’t. Imagine if an evangelical nonprofit created a network of trusted fellow travellers in every type of business. There could be a site to find the local butcher who goes to your church to process the cow you purchased from a local farmer. You hire the repair guy who coaches the local little-league to update your bathroom. Your yard guy is part of a Pentecostal congregation a couple miles away. Your insurance guy runs the rotary club. A trusted supplier can do wonders in supporting independent suppliers selling everything from foodstuffs to repairs to insurance policies.

What Azure Standard supplies is a trust layer, with properly vetted small enterprises that are continually managed for quality control. Instead of needing to seek the small business directly, they are available within the same system, with a name behind them and a real reputation. An Evangelical synod is going to ensure they don’t get egg on their face from corrupt businessmen, and an environmental organization is going to ensure their suppliers aren’t dumping pesticides in the lake.

The trust layer will help seamlessly facilitate labor, refined products, and skilled trades in an easily navigable interface that takes the stress of front-loaded sales off suppliers. It can be a liability cover, a sort of ethical Uber that acts as a non-profit to serve rather than extract. There will still be competition, but the networks will have to maintain it by valuing loyalty instead of just price.

Multitudes of people complain about how impersonal everything feels, how they want community, how they want to talk to a person instead of an automated system. Sure, a lot of them just complain and won’t put forth the work, but a large cohort only needs an easy way to plug into a new way of doing business. Many just need to know other options exist. The Emilia Romagna region in Italy shows the transformative ability and scale such a cooperative model can achieve.

According to the Cooperative Registry of the Ministry of Italian Economic Development, the region currently hosts 5,681 active co-ops, constituting 5.7% of the country's cooperatives (Albo Cooperativo, 2024). The sector accounts for approximately a third of the region’s GDP

Much energy has been spent discussing the best way forward: how to build coalitions, how to build community, and how to escape the suffocating partisanship of modern politics and the drabness of dealing with corporate monstrosities. Yet few address how to build a resilient network of goods and skills to oppose growing economic consolidation. To build intentional communities, one must have intentional economics, the ability to mesh both the economic and the spiritual. It isn't enough just to be around people with the same ideology. You also have to be around people with the same economic prospects, who spend their money in similar ways.

None of this is simple and will require a change in mindset both with customers and business owners. Businesses will encounter greater challenges because they must coordinate with entities and demonstrate moral character. It will mean losing a little independence to interact with the larger community, one that has its own expectations. Yet they would still own their business and have access to a larger, more loyal pool of customers that can help them survive in trying times. Customers will have to accept not simply going to the nearest store, pushing a button on Amazon, or getting quotes from strangers and picking the cheapest option. It will be more onerous for business owners, less convenient for customers, but social capital lost over the past few decades will return.

To be intentional, you must support fellow travellers. You must try to source locally. You must spend a bit more if it's going towards the right pockets. There's no separation between your spiritual being and how you spend your money. There needs to be a way to facilitate this sort of cooperation, a trusted institution that can elevate these businesses, keep them honest, and make them knowable. Trust networks like Azure Standard solve the problem of infinite scaling, a method that takes the best of modern wonders and facilitates independence without everyone needing to become Amish. We don’t have to run for the hills, nor eschew the modern landscape entirely. The same technology that allows megacorporations to proliferate can be used to make something smaller, more personal. Scale is not the enemy when coordinated for beneficial effect.

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